ABSTRACT
Germany was at the forefront of transnational debates, as social scientists there scrutinized and described a range of local projects implemented under the 1919 Reich Settlement Law. Their observations documented new strategies and practices of rural governance and presented new points of departure for European policymaking. This chapter discloses alternative meanings in the setbacks that bedeviled Weimar internal colonization, beyond serving as additional evidence of the state's ineptitude. Germany's postwar upheavals were more extreme, and had more devastating political consequences. But all European rural policymakers battled inefficient bureaucracies, political conflicts over the acquisition of land, technical hurdles of improving "bad" soil, inexperienced would-be settlers, rapidly rising costs and financing constraints and accelerating rural flight. The Weimar program's weaknesses, just like the moderate policies embodied in the Settlement Law, typified the broader struggle of European democracies to find lasting remedies for the fresh scars of war that overlaid lingering ones inflicted by the rocky transition from agrarian to industrial societies.
