December 14, 2021 • 29 mins
Like everyone in post-World War I Europe, Herman Sörgel was horrified by the devastation of a continent-wide conflict. He saw raging poverty, crippling unemployment, overpopulation and burgeoning geopolitical tensions, all of which led him to believe new conflicts were on the horizon. His solution? To drain the Mediterranean and create a new supercontinent. Tune in to learn more in the first part of this two-part episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. I am Ben. That's our
one and only super producer. Mr Max Williams joined as
always with the Man the midfl Legend, Mr Noel Brown.
I don't know why I did. For some reason, your
energy today is very like like like I'm prepping for
(00:49):
a fight, and then if you guys k guess can't
see me because we're podcasting what I'm wearing. I got
a hood on, I got my dukes up when I
joined the call already in progress with you and Max.
You were talking about training some sort of dog or
something for a dog fight. But then I realized you
were just talking about Google Drive. M It was very
misleading conversation to come into kind of halfway, but I
(01:09):
gotta get robust. He say something about robust and more
drive and I was like, yeah, he's talking about like
training a fighting dog or some Yeah. It was also
giving me some up, some personal counseling. That's what we
do sometimes off air. I appreciate it, but just to
be clear, to get in front of the emails, we
(01:29):
are ridiculous history. Do not condone dog fighting, Oh absolutely so.
So we we are talking about something shocking though today
this is this is a crazy story man. Okay. So
we are recording on the same continents, uh, North America.
(01:51):
That's where the three of us routinely hang out, and
we have listeners on continents across the world except for Antarctica.
If you're listening to this podcast in Antarctica, who who buddy,
We can't wait to hear from you. But today we're
talking about continents, right, We're talking about ambition, I would
say audacity, and just to be honest, a little bit
(02:13):
of racism. M hmm, yeah, just us battering a sort
of assault bay sprinkling of racism because we're talking about
the idea of creating a super continent. Uh. In the
nineteen thirties, a German architect engineer Polly Math pretty genius
fellow named Herman Sergal. He came up with quite the
(02:35):
plan that he thought would unite post World War One Europe,
which was in desperate need of uniting. In order to
do this, he wanted to accomplish a feat of engineering
mad scientistry um by draining the Mediterranean Sea not fully
but like a good a good amount. Let's not go crazy,
(02:56):
he said, exactly. Yeah, no, that would be insane draining
it fully. But he want to lower it as much,
lower the water level by as much as six hundred
and fifty feet in order to create a brand new
super continent called m hm atlant Tropa. He can tell
a reverb or something on that. I hope, I hope
(03:17):
that was just like understood Max. We got the thumbs
and then we got the surf sign from Max, or
the devil horns we got. Oh, Max, you were killing
it with the gestures today. Okay, all right, well Southern
Italian speaking with your hands there, I appreciate it. So yes,
Herman talks about this idea. You can tell it's been
on his mind for a while. He first goes public
(03:38):
with it in print in a book in nineteen twenty
nine called The Project. And this plan is also pitched
as having numerous advantages. He says it won't just culturally
kind of unify the disparate cultures of World War one Europe.
(03:59):
It will also generate a lot of hydro electricity. It
will create some primo new coastline that is arable, so
you can grow stuff on it, and you can create
new communities. There's more opportunity for farming, for colonization. This
like this idea depended on a couple of things, including
(04:21):
some very ambitious dams, like the twenty one mile long
damn at the Strait of Gibraltar that would be able
to power at least eight point two million homes from
hydro electricity. And this would also link Europe in Africa,
but maybe not in a way that was super advantageous
to the African continent, as we're gonna find. He didn't
(04:43):
worry too much about that. Uh. In his work. He
was focused more in Europe and the Mediterranean. But I've
got to ask at this point, like if someone just
said that, if you just encountered someone randomly and you
were trying to solve a problem together and this person
said maybe we should just make a new continent, how
would you react? I would assume they were joking, you
(05:06):
know what I mean? Like if I heard the current
president of the US say, all right, and these are
divisive times, a lot of people are falling into tribalism,
and that's why we're gonna make a a new North America.
It's we're just gonna We're gonna damn up everything from
here to Greenland. How would you react? It's sort of
(05:27):
like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That's not
even the right um metaphor. It's like going around you're
asked to get to your elbow. It just seems like
a really big swing solution, um that that could potentially
create more problems. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of
and we're all big, big fans of music here on
(05:47):
the show, folks, It reminds me of some really technically impressive,
but long guitar solos I've heard that get to the
point where they're just their own things, separate from the
song they're supposed to be part of. There's a moment
with some of those guitar solos where it sounds like
the musician just said, I wonder if I can do
(06:08):
this not is it good for the song? Right? Yeah,
we're gonna see. We're gonna see with Sorg with whether
he um was this like his long guitar solo. Was
this like a thing where he thought, well, I bet
we could do it, so why not? You know what
I mean? Yeah, I mean the guy was like, um,
you know, he came from the bout House School of Architecture.
(06:30):
He was born in eighteen eighty five. He was a
very well known dude. And to him, I mean, this
almost was like an opportunity to really flex and show
his stuff and get like state sponsorship, right. Um, I
have a feeling that, you know, on the one hand,
he was probably looking at it from a benevolent standpoint,
from like a nationalistic standpoint. But on the other hand,
he was just looking at as an opportunity to do
(06:52):
a big art project, you know what I mean. And
he had a assertitude about the future or he was
pretty convinced that given his learning on culture and space
and geopolitics, uh, there was going to be an inevitable
course of action internationally. He believed that three global superpowers
(07:15):
would arise, kind of like the world of nine eight
four honestly, where there would be one superpower that's the
North and South American continents, another that would be what
he called a pan Asian block, and then there would
be Europe, the third superpower. And he thought this would
be a problem because Europe would be the weakest of
these three powers. He ended up being all yeah, yeah, exactly,
(07:38):
And so he lived through World War One, he saw
the chaos of the nineteen twenties, he witnessed the rise
of the Nazi movement, and he said, you know what,
the only way we can avoid a second World War
is if we find a radical solution fast two problems
like chronic unemployment and over population and an impending energy crisis.
(08:04):
And he also said he was a technocrat at heart.
He said, you know, forget politics, that's for the birds
and the badgers and the buzzards. Technology is going to
save us. So why did you pick the Mediterranean? Though, Yeah,
(08:24):
it's a good question. Um. I mean, I think it's because, well,
first of all, like you said, he kind of based
a lot of his thinking around this on the notion
that energy was going to be the most important commodity around,
you know, in the future. I mean, obviously this is
something that we now understand incredibly palpably along with things
(08:45):
like water, but this was not really a time where
that was quite as much part of the conversation. I mean,
this is even before uh, Saudi oil was a thing,
I think um as as an article in the Conversation,
dot Com reports in their article Atlantropa the Colossal nineteen
twenties planned to damn the Mediterranean. Um. This was like
(09:06):
decades before m Saudi oil kind of came into the picture.
But uh, this guy was pretty prescient in his thinking.
The article, by the way, is by RICARDA. Vidal, highly
recommend giving that one a look. But back to water right,
not necessarily water as a perceived scarcity issue, but water
as a means of generating power, which was also very
(09:29):
forward thinking. He saw that the significant flow of water
into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, of course
coming in from the Atlantic um and the Dardan Nells
which was coming in from the Black Sea, was potentially
a source for generating massive amounts of hydro electric power. Uh.
Not to mention that it was consistent the water level
(09:52):
of the Mediterranean always stayed the same because of evaporation.
So his whole idea to damn the Mediterranean on both
ends and using this reduced inflow of water. This would
create to generate up to a hundred and ten thousand
megawatts of hydro electric energy in total through these various
(10:14):
damning locations. And in the process of doing this this
is kind of be like the the end game would
create a new piece of land a new supercontinent. And
then he believed this could be used for future colonization,
but also would connect Europe to Africa, making it a
super continent, kind of like a feat of human engineering,
(10:37):
a marvel to behold. Um. Initially the project or the
you know, the supercontinent was going to be called pan Ropa. Um.
It was later changed to at Land Tropa. I imagine
because of the I'm assuming maybe in some small ways
devoted to the idea of this very advanced society of atlantis,
you know, like under the sea or the Atlantic Ocean.
(10:59):
And let me make a quick clarification here. So he
he had two books. Uh. And originally I had said
that the Atlantropa Project is his nine book, but that
came out three years later in nineteen nine. The book
he wrote was the pan Ropa Project, with that original
(11:22):
name you mentioned. The full title is the pan Ropa Project,
Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara and uh. And so
we went with the Lantropa because of branding. It was
very much a branding decision. He was trying to sell
this to people, you know. Um. He also started he
added stuff to this over the course of his lifetime.
(11:42):
You can see revised versions of the proposal that include
things like a plan to create a bunch of giant
lakes in Central Africa. And he believed in hydro electricity
because his father had pioneered it in Bavaria. Also shout
out to big think damning the Mediterranean the atlant tropa
(12:04):
project by Frank Jacobs. So if you just look at
the problems, he's trying to address energy independence from more
energy at least from the hydro electric dams, more land,
to address over population and grow food, uh and more
jobs because you've got people building these massive dams. Then
(12:24):
it seems like, you know, his heart's in the right place.
Put diplomatically, it's an out of the box creative solution. Now,
a lot of astute, ridiculous historians in the crowd today
are saying, hang on, I've been to the Mediterranean. There's
still a lot of water there. Yes. Yeah, But before
(12:45):
we tell you how all this went down, maybe no,
we've talked a little bit more detail about what the
plan actually entails, because you you described it so beautifully,
this kind of book ending with dams one across straight
at Gibraltar, and he said that Dardanells and then eventually
he would have a dam between Sicily and Tunisia, and
(13:05):
all of these would have these hydro electric power plants
and that would be the basis of this new continent, right,
and it's a super continent because it's just adding more
to Europe. Correct, Yeah, exactly. And he had like tons
of drawings and schematics and you know, planning for all
of this that is preserved in a museum in Munich. Um.
(13:28):
We'll get to the name in a little bit. Escapes
me at the moment, but his plan was super elaborate.
I mean, the idea was to create a thirty five
kilometer long dam in these straits of Gibraltar, uh and
cut off the water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. UM.
Cabinet magazine dot org has a great kind of blow
by blow um of how this whole thing was done,
(13:50):
and it it immediately compares it to something from Gene
Roddenberry's nineteen seventy nine book version of Star Trek of
the motion picture. UM. So you know, you're you're already
getting these kind of utopian kind of like you know,
future civilization kind of vibes. This dude definitely had that
sort of imagination. So, uh, he would cut off the
water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and uh,
(14:12):
conceptually or theoretically, the sea would dry up. Uh not
completely like we said, but the water level would be
reduced by around two hundred meters and this in theory
would open up around six hundred thousand square kilometers of
new land and enable them to harness uh, this body
of water and its movement for hydroelectric power. And you know,
(14:34):
it's funny been again, this wasn't necessarily Yes, they needed energy,
of course, and they were in a post war situation,
But I don't think the energy crisis was what we
would maybe think of it as today, right, like the
in terms of like how I occupied the zeitgeis this
is more him just kind of like trying to dig
themselves out of the things that come along with the
(14:54):
post war kind of rebuilding. But it certainly wouldn't have
been something on the minds of like the world like,
oh no, we're not gonna have enough energy. I think
it's fair to say that while people were aware of it,
a lot of people who were just living at the
ground level of society, like your normal everyday sadis and
spins or whatever. They were worried about having power in
(15:17):
their community, and they maybe weren't thinking about the global
bigger picture, but he certainly was. And there's something interesting
about the timing here too, because infrastructure had just been wrecked.
You know, maybe this is the right time his reasoning
went to build something new instead of just rebuilding the
old stuff. Now we have to take a turn for
(15:38):
a bit of a darker explanation as we look at
at what his plan is doing in North Africa and
southern Spain. You can, by the way, if you're listening
along at home, pull up some of those articles we've mentioned,
or just type at land trop a project map and
you can see some great maps that will help outline
(16:00):
where he sees these damns going. Here's the problem, here's
the dark side. So Sorgel was a man of his time,
even though he felt like he was a man ahead
of his time, and that might be true. In some ways.
He was very much a European colonialist, and he didn't
particularly think of what the people living in Africa would
(16:24):
think of this plan. As a matter of fact, one
of the things he spun as a benefit to people
when he's trying to get him on board. Is he said, look,
we can also have two dams across the Congo River,
creating a Chad and Congo see. And this will have
a good influence on the African climate. It will be
(16:45):
more pleasant for European settlers. He didn't exactly hold meetings
with people who lived in those areas at all. He
just sort of thought this will help us continue our
resource extraction. Heist and uh and he did, oh he
did notice something cool and Max thought of you with
this part. Uh. He wanted to build a continuous train
(17:09):
connection between Africa and Europe, which would be cool. All right,
we got the Max. Not thank you. Uh I, I
love it. We all love traveling by train. His advantage.
And this is nasty. These are not This is not
us speaking, folks. This is a verbatim quote from him.
He especially just talking about turning the Congo Basin into
(17:30):
an enormous dammed up see. He said, we go to
the smattering of racism here. Is that the Uh yeah,
we've been there for a few minutes. Yeah. He said
Africa would be turned into quote a territory actually useful
for Europe boo. Indeed, do I make a foggina. I
(17:54):
think it means you asked me a question and I
did not answer. But when they say it the way
they aid and that song, it just sounds so intense,
but the lyrics are actually pretty vanilla. Uh. Now, it's true.
He there was a sentiment I think, you know, of
Africa as being a useless continent and its inhabitants being
sort of like, you know, unlearned and dare we say
(18:19):
again speaking to the sentiment of the time subhuman in
some way. It was pretty widely held. So the idea
was that he would uh use some kind of you know,
form twisted form of Darwinism, social Darwinism UM and colonialism
to connect Europe to that territory in the hopes that
(18:42):
maybe they would be able to um convert the inhabitants
of that land to their way of thinking and thus
rendering them useful in some way. Who doesn't love a
white savior, right, bros. That's that's where he's going with this.
(19:04):
He did say something that a lot of other um,
a lot of other luminaries in geopolitics have said before,
which is he said the fight for survival is a
fight for territory. And that's something that we see play
out in the world today. As a matter of fact,
we also see the damages that large scale dams could
(19:24):
have on the world today, like the three gorgeous dam
in China displaced a ton of people who were not
really allowed to object, you know. And I recently heard
a kind of depressing report on BBC World Service or
World News podcast where they talked about how hydroelectric dams
maybe spelling the end for jaguars and wild tigers. So
(19:48):
hydro electric dams, yeah, they're better than a coal mine,
but they still they still have their drawbacks. He's not
worried about any of this. He's not asking the populations
of in the parts of Africa that will be affected
by this because he doesn't care. Uh. Instead, he thinks
this will be a new kind of counterweight to the
(20:10):
future power of United North and South American continent and
United Asian continent. And so this is his way of
kind of putting some gas into Europe's future standing. So
let's pause for sick though, because there are a lot
of ifs they're right, Like he's he's already he's basing
his idea on his theory about these three great superpowers,
(20:34):
which has not been proven and didn't come to pass. Right, So,
so I mean I started off to describing Sorgal as
being this like concept over function kind of guy. I mean,
I think I may be mischaracterizing a little bit. He
was incredibly ideological and and and this move you know,
was as much a show of his like engineering and
(20:56):
kind of artistic genius and and um, you know, as
it was is a way too in his mind, moved
some pretty serious geopolitical pieces, right and and set uh
Europe up for success post World War One. He wrote
down all of his thoughts, um and and these drawings
(21:16):
uh in what became around a thousand individualized publications that
comprised four Atlantropa books. Um. And there's actually an entire
special collection in the archive of the Deutsche Museum in Munich.
That's what I was alluding to earlier, So you can
actually check this out for yourself. And he was a
big fan of the work of another, uh kind of
(21:40):
dour European gentleman by the name of Spangler, right, but
not Egan, which which Spangler we're talking about, That Oswald Spangler,
the guy who's famously fun at parties for things like
his two volume work, The Decline of zevest Uh The Vest.
(22:00):
He didn't like vest, and he also didn't like the West.
The first volume is about the first volume is about
vest that you would wear in suits, and the second
volume takes that analogy to geopolitics. It makes a kind
of sense if you read it. It's also all entirely
an iambic pentameter rhyming verse. Folks, you're gonna have to
(22:22):
read the book to see which part of this is true.
Not not all of it is. But the point of
Spengler is that he believed that all cultures were super
organisms and they had a cyclical, predictable lifespan. We talked
about stuff like this a little bit on stuff they
don't want you to know. Do empires have an expiration date?
(22:43):
And he had predicted way back in like nineteen twenty two,
nineteen eighteen or so, that Western civilization would enter its
death throws in the year two thousand and then by
twenty two hundred, Western civilization as he knew it would collapse.
So that's where that's kind of a bleak outlook, right,
(23:05):
And that really informs a lot of where Sorcal is
coming from. We've got to save the European culture basically
that point, that's what he's thinking of. Well, and we've
been talking about this all along, but I mean against
about digging Europe out of this post war malaise, which
included things like massive unemployment levels, poverty, and the treatment
(23:28):
of Europe as sort of a pariah by other world superpowers, right,
I mean understandably so, yeah, yeah, because you know, Europe
was looking rough after World War One, and that's a
very polite way to put it, Like the chaos was widespread,
massive casualties, all the problems you just mentioned. Uh, the
(23:50):
shadow of poverty looming ever larger on the horizon. And
one interesting note about Sorcle, despite his racist attitudes, the
dude was a pacifist and he thought that building would
guide the European continent toward a brighter, a brighter kind
(24:13):
of post scarcity future. That Star Trek analogy is not
too far off, because in the original Star Trek, poverty
has been to a great degree eliminated in the Federation
space at least, and people aren't going hungry. He wanted
to build this kind of thing, which is a noble thought.
(24:33):
But the big deal with him was not just helping
people get jobs, helping people get food, giving people energy.
He wanted to make the countries of Europe increasingly interdependent
upon one another, so you wouldn't be like, if you're
Austria Hungary, you would be so much less likely to
start a war with France because you are trading partners.
(24:57):
Now you're indeed with each other. So what hurts them
hurts you. And there is a logic to that, but
maybe not as sound a logic as he assumed. It's
similar to maybe where we are with China, say right now,
only maybe it almost seems like the pendulum has swung
a little more in China's favor than even ours. Right, yeah,
right now. It's uh right, right now, they're heated debates
(25:18):
going on in the world of the military and in
the world of academia about which which country will become
the quote unquote global superpower. But there are a lot
of that's maybe uh an episode for the future, But
there are a lot of factors I would argue people
aren't considering. You know, the one child policy left an
(25:39):
intergenerational consequence, and population rates are actually going down in
a lot of overall in the world. For the first
time in a while. So that's not the worst thing
in the world, all right, specially given that what we're
talking about today, which is the idea of scarcity and
not having enough resources to feed everybody and you know,
(25:59):
poverty and starvation. Again, I'm I'm don't don't want to
cast myself as some kind of eugenicist or something, but
you know, there is something to be said about maybe
times of strife and uncertainty maybe not the best times
to have, you know, a Brady Bunch kind of situation. Yeah, no,
I you know me, man, you know me. Well, I
agree with that. This also, this is attractive to him
(26:24):
to Sorgal because he doesn't need to go through the
realm of politics and diplomacy. And these governments that he's
trying to unite are very different culturally, procedurally in many ways,
they don't get along. But if he can solve it
with technology, then, first off, think of all the meetings
(26:44):
you get out of You don't have to like kiss
the dukes behind anymore. You just have to do it
once to get the green light. And now you know,
there's this there's this attitude that I find inspiring despite
all the problems with Sorgals believe as a person, I
love the idea that science can save us. I don't
know if that's always accurate, but but it's beautiful. And
(27:09):
this this concept sort of turning the entirety of Europe
and this new supercontinent into one gigantic unified electric grid.
I think that would do a lot to mitigate the
problems of war. And you know, not for nothing. He
(27:30):
wasn't wrong. War was going to happen. It's it's crazy
that they were. They were calling it the World War
at this point, but he was already thinking in terms
of World War One and the sequel. Wait, won't wait,
hold up, We've got to drain the Mediterranean of this podcast.
This has to be a two parter. There's too much.
(27:54):
There's too much. We thought we could, We thought we
could shove it all into one, but it was just
far too grandiose and ambitious of an idea, much like
the subject of today's part one of a two part episode. Yes,
so tune in on Thursday to learn what became of
the atlant Tropa project. Thanks as always to the one
(28:15):
and only Mr Max Williams, as well as his sibling
Alex Williams. Who kindly composed this banging soundtrack. It's a
very kind sounding track to it really speaks to Alex's
inner goodness. Huge thanks to Jonathan Strickland, the quister. We're
gonna be seeing him dark in our doorstep one of
these days pretty soon. I'm nearly certain, Gay Bluegier Research
Associate extraordinaire. Who else? Who else am I missing? Oh yeah,
(28:40):
Christopher Rociotis and Eves Jeff Cotes here in spirit? M yes,
And thanks to all the tireless geologists working around the world.
Thanks to everybody who decided not to drain the Mediterranean
see and thanks to you ridiculous historians in advance for
joining us on the social meds. You can find our
(29:03):
Facebook community page Ridiculous Historians, but you can also find
us not just as a show but individuals. I am
at Ben Bowling on Instagram and that Been Bowling hsw
on Twitter. If you want to get a behind the
scenes look at my various strange, ill informed misadventures the
devil you say, Ben, You can find me having misadventures
(29:24):
of a kind as well, exclusively on Instagram, where I
am at how now Noel Brown, We'll see you next time. Folks.
For more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. I am Ben. That's our
one and only super producer. Mr Max Williams joined as
always with the Man the midfl Legend, Mr Noel Brown.
I don't know why I did. For some reason, your
energy today is very like like like I'm prepping for
(00:49):
a fight, and then if you guys k guess can't
see me because we're podcasting what I'm wearing. I got
a hood on, I got my dukes up when I
joined the call already in progress with you and Max.
You were talking about training some sort of dog or
something for a dog fight. But then I realized you
were just talking about Google Drive. M It was very
misleading conversation to come into kind of halfway, but I
(01:09):
gotta get robust. He say something about robust and more
drive and I was like, yeah, he's talking about like
training a fighting dog or some Yeah. It was also
giving me some up, some personal counseling. That's what we
do sometimes off air. I appreciate it, but just to
be clear, to get in front of the emails, we
(01:29):
are ridiculous history. Do not condone dog fighting, Oh absolutely so.
So we we are talking about something shocking though today
this is this is a crazy story man. Okay. So
we are recording on the same continents, uh, North America.
(01:51):
That's where the three of us routinely hang out, and
we have listeners on continents across the world except for Antarctica.
If you're listening to this podcast in Antarctica, who who buddy,
We can't wait to hear from you. But today we're
talking about continents, right, We're talking about ambition, I would
say audacity, and just to be honest, a little bit
(02:13):
of racism. M hmm, yeah, just us battering a sort
of assault bay sprinkling of racism because we're talking about
the idea of creating a super continent. Uh. In the
nineteen thirties, a German architect engineer Polly Math pretty genius
fellow named Herman Sergal. He came up with quite the
(02:35):
plan that he thought would unite post World War One Europe,
which was in desperate need of uniting. In order to
do this, he wanted to accomplish a feat of engineering
mad scientistry um by draining the Mediterranean Sea not fully
but like a good a good amount. Let's not go crazy,
(02:56):
he said, exactly. Yeah, no, that would be insane draining
it fully. But he want to lower it as much,
lower the water level by as much as six hundred
and fifty feet in order to create a brand new
super continent called m hm atlant Tropa. He can tell
a reverb or something on that. I hope, I hope
(03:17):
that was just like understood Max. We got the thumbs
and then we got the surf sign from Max, or
the devil horns we got. Oh, Max, you were killing
it with the gestures today. Okay, all right, well Southern
Italian speaking with your hands there, I appreciate it. So yes,
Herman talks about this idea. You can tell it's been
on his mind for a while. He first goes public
(03:38):
with it in print in a book in nineteen twenty
nine called The Project. And this plan is also pitched
as having numerous advantages. He says it won't just culturally
kind of unify the disparate cultures of World War one Europe.
(03:59):
It will also generate a lot of hydro electricity. It
will create some primo new coastline that is arable, so
you can grow stuff on it, and you can create
new communities. There's more opportunity for farming, for colonization. This
like this idea depended on a couple of things, including
(04:21):
some very ambitious dams, like the twenty one mile long
damn at the Strait of Gibraltar that would be able
to power at least eight point two million homes from
hydro electricity. And this would also link Europe in Africa,
but maybe not in a way that was super advantageous
to the African continent, as we're gonna find. He didn't
(04:43):
worry too much about that. Uh. In his work. He
was focused more in Europe and the Mediterranean. But I've
got to ask at this point, like if someone just
said that, if you just encountered someone randomly and you
were trying to solve a problem together and this person
said maybe we should just make a new continent, how
would you react? I would assume they were joking, you
(05:06):
know what I mean? Like if I heard the current
president of the US say, all right, and these are
divisive times, a lot of people are falling into tribalism,
and that's why we're gonna make a a new North America.
It's we're just gonna We're gonna damn up everything from
here to Greenland. How would you react? It's sort of
(05:27):
like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That's not
even the right um metaphor. It's like going around you're
asked to get to your elbow. It just seems like
a really big swing solution, um that that could potentially
create more problems. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of
and we're all big, big fans of music here on
(05:47):
the show, folks, It reminds me of some really technically impressive,
but long guitar solos I've heard that get to the
point where they're just their own things, separate from the
song they're supposed to be part of. There's a moment
with some of those guitar solos where it sounds like
the musician just said, I wonder if I can do
(06:08):
this not is it good for the song? Right? Yeah,
we're gonna see. We're gonna see with Sorg with whether
he um was this like his long guitar solo. Was
this like a thing where he thought, well, I bet
we could do it, so why not? You know what
I mean? Yeah, I mean the guy was like, um,
you know, he came from the bout House School of Architecture.
(06:30):
He was born in eighteen eighty five. He was a
very well known dude. And to him, I mean, this
almost was like an opportunity to really flex and show
his stuff and get like state sponsorship, right. Um, I
have a feeling that, you know, on the one hand,
he was probably looking at it from a benevolent standpoint,
from like a nationalistic standpoint. But on the other hand,
he was just looking at as an opportunity to do
(06:52):
a big art project, you know what I mean. And
he had a assertitude about the future or he was
pretty convinced that given his learning on culture and space
and geopolitics, uh, there was going to be an inevitable
course of action internationally. He believed that three global superpowers
(07:15):
would arise, kind of like the world of nine eight
four honestly, where there would be one superpower that's the
North and South American continents, another that would be what
he called a pan Asian block, and then there would
be Europe, the third superpower. And he thought this would
be a problem because Europe would be the weakest of
these three powers. He ended up being all yeah, yeah, exactly,
(07:38):
And so he lived through World War One, he saw
the chaos of the nineteen twenties, he witnessed the rise
of the Nazi movement, and he said, you know what,
the only way we can avoid a second World War
is if we find a radical solution fast two problems
like chronic unemployment and over population and an impending energy crisis.
(08:04):
And he also said he was a technocrat at heart.
He said, you know, forget politics, that's for the birds
and the badgers and the buzzards. Technology is going to
save us. So why did you pick the Mediterranean? Though, Yeah,
(08:24):
it's a good question. Um. I mean, I think it's because, well,
first of all, like you said, he kind of based
a lot of his thinking around this on the notion
that energy was going to be the most important commodity around,
you know, in the future. I mean, obviously this is
something that we now understand incredibly palpably along with things
(08:45):
like water, but this was not really a time where
that was quite as much part of the conversation. I mean,
this is even before uh, Saudi oil was a thing,
I think um as as an article in the Conversation,
dot Com reports in their article Atlantropa the Colossal nineteen
twenties planned to damn the Mediterranean. Um. This was like
(09:06):
decades before m Saudi oil kind of came into the picture.
But uh, this guy was pretty prescient in his thinking.
The article, by the way, is by RICARDA. Vidal, highly
recommend giving that one a look. But back to water right,
not necessarily water as a perceived scarcity issue, but water
as a means of generating power, which was also very
(09:29):
forward thinking. He saw that the significant flow of water
into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, of course
coming in from the Atlantic um and the Dardan Nells
which was coming in from the Black Sea, was potentially
a source for generating massive amounts of hydro electric power. Uh.
Not to mention that it was consistent the water level
(09:52):
of the Mediterranean always stayed the same because of evaporation.
So his whole idea to damn the Mediterranean on both
ends and using this reduced inflow of water. This would
create to generate up to a hundred and ten thousand
megawatts of hydro electric energy in total through these various
(10:14):
damning locations. And in the process of doing this this
is kind of be like the the end game would
create a new piece of land a new supercontinent. And
then he believed this could be used for future colonization,
but also would connect Europe to Africa, making it a
super continent, kind of like a feat of human engineering,
(10:37):
a marvel to behold. Um. Initially the project or the
you know, the supercontinent was going to be called pan Ropa. Um.
It was later changed to at Land Tropa. I imagine
because of the I'm assuming maybe in some small ways
devoted to the idea of this very advanced society of atlantis,
you know, like under the sea or the Atlantic Ocean.
(10:59):
And let me make a quick clarification here. So he
he had two books. Uh. And originally I had said
that the Atlantropa Project is his nine book, but that
came out three years later in nineteen nine. The book
he wrote was the pan Ropa Project, with that original
(11:22):
name you mentioned. The full title is the pan Ropa Project,
Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara and uh. And so
we went with the Lantropa because of branding. It was
very much a branding decision. He was trying to sell
this to people, you know. Um. He also started he
added stuff to this over the course of his lifetime.
(11:42):
You can see revised versions of the proposal that include
things like a plan to create a bunch of giant
lakes in Central Africa. And he believed in hydro electricity
because his father had pioneered it in Bavaria. Also shout
out to big think damning the Mediterranean the atlant tropa
(12:04):
project by Frank Jacobs. So if you just look at
the problems, he's trying to address energy independence from more
energy at least from the hydro electric dams, more land,
to address over population and grow food, uh and more
jobs because you've got people building these massive dams. Then
(12:24):
it seems like, you know, his heart's in the right place.
Put diplomatically, it's an out of the box creative solution. Now,
a lot of astute, ridiculous historians in the crowd today
are saying, hang on, I've been to the Mediterranean. There's
still a lot of water there. Yes. Yeah, But before
(12:45):
we tell you how all this went down, maybe no,
we've talked a little bit more detail about what the
plan actually entails, because you you described it so beautifully,
this kind of book ending with dams one across straight
at Gibraltar, and he said that Dardanells and then eventually
he would have a dam between Sicily and Tunisia, and
(13:05):
all of these would have these hydro electric power plants
and that would be the basis of this new continent, right,
and it's a super continent because it's just adding more
to Europe. Correct, Yeah, exactly. And he had like tons
of drawings and schematics and you know, planning for all
of this that is preserved in a museum in Munich. Um.
(13:28):
We'll get to the name in a little bit. Escapes
me at the moment, but his plan was super elaborate.
I mean, the idea was to create a thirty five
kilometer long dam in these straits of Gibraltar, uh and
cut off the water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. UM.
Cabinet magazine dot org has a great kind of blow
by blow um of how this whole thing was done,
(13:50):
and it it immediately compares it to something from Gene
Roddenberry's nineteen seventy nine book version of Star Trek of
the motion picture. UM. So you know, you're you're already
getting these kind of utopian kind of like you know,
future civilization kind of vibes. This dude definitely had that
sort of imagination. So, uh, he would cut off the
water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and uh,
(14:12):
conceptually or theoretically, the sea would dry up. Uh not
completely like we said, but the water level would be
reduced by around two hundred meters and this in theory
would open up around six hundred thousand square kilometers of
new land and enable them to harness uh, this body
of water and its movement for hydroelectric power. And you know,
(14:34):
it's funny been again, this wasn't necessarily Yes, they needed energy,
of course, and they were in a post war situation,
But I don't think the energy crisis was what we
would maybe think of it as today, right, like the
in terms of like how I occupied the zeitgeis this
is more him just kind of like trying to dig
themselves out of the things that come along with the
(14:54):
post war kind of rebuilding. But it certainly wouldn't have
been something on the minds of like the world like,
oh no, we're not gonna have enough energy. I think
it's fair to say that while people were aware of it,
a lot of people who were just living at the
ground level of society, like your normal everyday sadis and
spins or whatever. They were worried about having power in
(15:17):
their community, and they maybe weren't thinking about the global
bigger picture, but he certainly was. And there's something interesting
about the timing here too, because infrastructure had just been wrecked.
You know, maybe this is the right time his reasoning
went to build something new instead of just rebuilding the
old stuff. Now we have to take a turn for
(15:38):
a bit of a darker explanation as we look at
at what his plan is doing in North Africa and
southern Spain. You can, by the way, if you're listening
along at home, pull up some of those articles we've mentioned,
or just type at land trop a project map and
you can see some great maps that will help outline
(16:00):
where he sees these damns going. Here's the problem, here's
the dark side. So Sorgel was a man of his time,
even though he felt like he was a man ahead
of his time, and that might be true. In some ways.
He was very much a European colonialist, and he didn't
particularly think of what the people living in Africa would
(16:24):
think of this plan. As a matter of fact, one
of the things he spun as a benefit to people
when he's trying to get him on board. Is he said, look,
we can also have two dams across the Congo River,
creating a Chad and Congo see. And this will have
a good influence on the African climate. It will be
(16:45):
more pleasant for European settlers. He didn't exactly hold meetings
with people who lived in those areas at all. He
just sort of thought this will help us continue our
resource extraction. Heist and uh and he did, oh he
did notice something cool and Max thought of you with
this part. Uh. He wanted to build a continuous train
(17:09):
connection between Africa and Europe, which would be cool. All right,
we got the Max. Not thank you. Uh I, I
love it. We all love traveling by train. His advantage.
And this is nasty. These are not This is not
us speaking, folks. This is a verbatim quote from him.
He especially just talking about turning the Congo Basin into
(17:30):
an enormous dammed up see. He said, we go to
the smattering of racism here. Is that the Uh yeah,
we've been there for a few minutes. Yeah. He said
Africa would be turned into quote a territory actually useful
for Europe boo. Indeed, do I make a foggina. I
(17:54):
think it means you asked me a question and I
did not answer. But when they say it the way
they aid and that song, it just sounds so intense,
but the lyrics are actually pretty vanilla. Uh. Now, it's true.
He there was a sentiment I think, you know, of
Africa as being a useless continent and its inhabitants being
sort of like, you know, unlearned and dare we say
(18:19):
again speaking to the sentiment of the time subhuman in
some way. It was pretty widely held. So the idea
was that he would uh use some kind of you know,
form twisted form of Darwinism, social Darwinism UM and colonialism
to connect Europe to that territory in the hopes that
(18:42):
maybe they would be able to um convert the inhabitants
of that land to their way of thinking and thus
rendering them useful in some way. Who doesn't love a
white savior, right, bros. That's that's where he's going with this.
(19:04):
He did say something that a lot of other um,
a lot of other luminaries in geopolitics have said before,
which is he said the fight for survival is a
fight for territory. And that's something that we see play
out in the world today. As a matter of fact,
we also see the damages that large scale dams could
(19:24):
have on the world today, like the three gorgeous dam
in China displaced a ton of people who were not
really allowed to object, you know. And I recently heard
a kind of depressing report on BBC World Service or
World News podcast where they talked about how hydroelectric dams
maybe spelling the end for jaguars and wild tigers. So
(19:48):
hydro electric dams, yeah, they're better than a coal mine,
but they still they still have their drawbacks. He's not
worried about any of this. He's not asking the populations
of in the parts of Africa that will be affected
by this because he doesn't care. Uh. Instead, he thinks
this will be a new kind of counterweight to the
(20:10):
future power of United North and South American continent and
United Asian continent. And so this is his way of
kind of putting some gas into Europe's future standing. So
let's pause for sick though, because there are a lot
of ifs they're right, Like he's he's already he's basing
his idea on his theory about these three great superpowers,
(20:34):
which has not been proven and didn't come to pass. Right, So,
so I mean I started off to describing Sorgal as
being this like concept over function kind of guy. I mean,
I think I may be mischaracterizing a little bit. He
was incredibly ideological and and and this move you know,
was as much a show of his like engineering and
(20:56):
kind of artistic genius and and um, you know, as
it was is a way too in his mind, moved
some pretty serious geopolitical pieces, right and and set uh
Europe up for success post World War One. He wrote
down all of his thoughts, um and and these drawings
(21:16):
uh in what became around a thousand individualized publications that
comprised four Atlantropa books. Um. And there's actually an entire
special collection in the archive of the Deutsche Museum in Munich.
That's what I was alluding to earlier, So you can
actually check this out for yourself. And he was a
big fan of the work of another, uh kind of
(21:40):
dour European gentleman by the name of Spangler, right, but
not Egan, which which Spangler we're talking about, That Oswald Spangler,
the guy who's famously fun at parties for things like
his two volume work, The Decline of zevest Uh The Vest.
(22:00):
He didn't like vest, and he also didn't like the West.
The first volume is about the first volume is about
vest that you would wear in suits, and the second
volume takes that analogy to geopolitics. It makes a kind
of sense if you read it. It's also all entirely
an iambic pentameter rhyming verse. Folks, you're gonna have to
(22:22):
read the book to see which part of this is true.
Not not all of it is. But the point of
Spengler is that he believed that all cultures were super
organisms and they had a cyclical, predictable lifespan. We talked
about stuff like this a little bit on stuff they
don't want you to know. Do empires have an expiration date?
(22:43):
And he had predicted way back in like nineteen twenty two,
nineteen eighteen or so, that Western civilization would enter its
death throws in the year two thousand and then by
twenty two hundred, Western civilization as he knew it would collapse.
So that's where that's kind of a bleak outlook, right,
(23:05):
And that really informs a lot of where Sorcal is
coming from. We've got to save the European culture basically
that point, that's what he's thinking of. Well, and we've
been talking about this all along, but I mean against
about digging Europe out of this post war malaise, which
included things like massive unemployment levels, poverty, and the treatment
(23:28):
of Europe as sort of a pariah by other world superpowers, right,
I mean understandably so, yeah, yeah, because you know, Europe
was looking rough after World War One, and that's a
very polite way to put it, Like the chaos was widespread,
massive casualties, all the problems you just mentioned. Uh, the
(23:50):
shadow of poverty looming ever larger on the horizon. And
one interesting note about Sorcle, despite his racist attitudes, the
dude was a pacifist and he thought that building would
guide the European continent toward a brighter, a brighter kind
(24:13):
of post scarcity future. That Star Trek analogy is not
too far off, because in the original Star Trek, poverty
has been to a great degree eliminated in the Federation
space at least, and people aren't going hungry. He wanted
to build this kind of thing, which is a noble thought.
(24:33):
But the big deal with him was not just helping
people get jobs, helping people get food, giving people energy.
He wanted to make the countries of Europe increasingly interdependent
upon one another, so you wouldn't be like, if you're
Austria Hungary, you would be so much less likely to
start a war with France because you are trading partners.
(24:57):
Now you're indeed with each other. So what hurts them
hurts you. And there is a logic to that, but
maybe not as sound a logic as he assumed. It's
similar to maybe where we are with China, say right now,
only maybe it almost seems like the pendulum has swung
a little more in China's favor than even ours. Right, yeah,
right now. It's uh right, right now, they're heated debates
(25:18):
going on in the world of the military and in
the world of academia about which which country will become
the quote unquote global superpower. But there are a lot
of that's maybe uh an episode for the future, But
there are a lot of factors I would argue people
aren't considering. You know, the one child policy left an
(25:39):
intergenerational consequence, and population rates are actually going down in
a lot of overall in the world. For the first
time in a while. So that's not the worst thing
in the world, all right, specially given that what we're
talking about today, which is the idea of scarcity and
not having enough resources to feed everybody and you know,
(25:59):
poverty and starvation. Again, I'm I'm don't don't want to
cast myself as some kind of eugenicist or something, but
you know, there is something to be said about maybe
times of strife and uncertainty maybe not the best times
to have, you know, a Brady Bunch kind of situation. Yeah, no,
I you know me, man, you know me. Well, I
agree with that. This also, this is attractive to him
(26:24):
to Sorgal because he doesn't need to go through the
realm of politics and diplomacy. And these governments that he's
trying to unite are very different culturally, procedurally in many ways,
they don't get along. But if he can solve it
with technology, then, first off, think of all the meetings
(26:44):
you get out of You don't have to like kiss
the dukes behind anymore. You just have to do it
once to get the green light. And now you know,
there's this there's this attitude that I find inspiring despite
all the problems with Sorgals believe as a person, I
love the idea that science can save us. I don't
know if that's always accurate, but but it's beautiful. And
(27:09):
this this concept sort of turning the entirety of Europe
and this new supercontinent into one gigantic unified electric grid.
I think that would do a lot to mitigate the
problems of war. And you know, not for nothing. He
(27:30):
wasn't wrong. War was going to happen. It's it's crazy
that they were. They were calling it the World War
at this point, but he was already thinking in terms
of World War One and the sequel. Wait, won't wait,
hold up, We've got to drain the Mediterranean of this podcast.
This has to be a two parter. There's too much.
(27:54):
There's too much. We thought we could, We thought we
could shove it all into one, but it was just
far too grandiose and ambitious of an idea, much like
the subject of today's part one of a two part episode. Yes,
so tune in on Thursday to learn what became of
the atlant Tropa project. Thanks as always to the one
(28:15):
and only Mr Max Williams, as well as his sibling
Alex Williams. Who kindly composed this banging soundtrack. It's a
very kind sounding track to it really speaks to Alex's
inner goodness. Huge thanks to Jonathan Strickland, the quister. We're
gonna be seeing him dark in our doorstep one of
these days pretty soon. I'm nearly certain, Gay Bluegier Research
Associate extraordinaire. Who else? Who else am I missing? Oh yeah,
(28:40):
Christopher Rociotis and Eves Jeff Cotes here in spirit? M yes,
And thanks to all the tireless geologists working around the world.
Thanks to everybody who decided not to drain the Mediterranean
see and thanks to you ridiculous historians in advance for
joining us on the social meds. You can find our
(29:03):
Facebook community page Ridiculous Historians, but you can also find
us not just as a show but individuals. I am
at Ben Bowling on Instagram and that Been Bowling hsw
on Twitter. If you want to get a behind the
scenes look at my various strange, ill informed misadventures the
devil you say, Ben, You can find me having misadventures
(29:24):
of a kind as well, exclusively on Instagram, where I
am at how now Noel Brown, We'll see you next time. Folks.
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