Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to explain how agricultural and food regulations of post-war East Germany
were formed in the face of serious food shortages after 1945 by focusing on the reorganization of agricultural
associations. In addition, we showed the landscape images of socialist "model villages" drawn by rural planners in order to discuss the construction concept of rural socialism in East Germany.
We found so-called "self-sufficiency reaction" of people to the post-war food crisis, as was observed in
the cultivation of small personal gardens. Even land reform after 1945 had a feature of the settlement policy for
refugee farmers from former German territories, which was one of the factors that caused farm management
difficulties by the Neubauern (new farmers) afterward.
At the beginning of the occupation, Soviet Military Government revived former German agricultural
cooperative "Raiffeisen" as an instrument of agricultural food control. But it was soon consolidated with VdgB (Peasants Mutual Aid Association) into VdgB-BHG (Peasant Trade Cooperative) in 1950 and controlled under
the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Simultaneously, we found that other centralized agriculture-related
organizations such as MAS (machine rental station), DBB (German farmers bank), and VEAB (state-owned
purchase organization) were founded around 1949. This meant that the socialist agricultural control system had
been established before agricultural collectivization.
On the construction concept of rural socialism by rural planners in the 1950s -who had been often engaged
in the operation of Nazi rural settlement policy in the occupied region- we found that the subject of rural planning
had changed from the design of new farm houses in land reform to the design of the "central village" in the model village project. In the case of the "Mestlin" project in Mecklenburg, rural planners put importance on the "Kulturhaus" and MAS/MTS as symbols of new age rural socialism, while the peasant elements of land reform disappeared
in planning. It seems to resemble a “rural city concept” based on the separation of work and life.
