Eugen Schwiedland, Landflucht und Besiedlung (1912)

Schwiedland’s lecture treats rural exodus as a structural agrarian problem, not simply as a moral failing or an inevitable effect of modernity. He begins with nineteenth-century population growth and the simultaneous redistribution of population toward cities, industrial districts, and metropolitan peripheries. The German case is central: even while total population rose sharply, the population of small rural places declined, and the agricultural share of the workforce fell. The result is a division between “menschenproduzierenden” rural districts and “menschenkonsumierenden” urban-industrial ones.

His decisive causal move is to join attraction and expulsion. Cities offer wages, freedom, variety, and social mobility; the countryside, especially where large estates or dwarf holdings dominate, offers dependence, monotony, insecurity, and blocked access to land.

die Stadt zieht die Leute seelisch an, während zugleich das Land sie wirtschaftlich abstößt.

English translation: the city attracts people psychologically, while at the same time the countryside repels them economically.

The historical roots, for Schwiedland, reach back to peasant emancipation: personal freedom often produced a class of landless rural laborers rather than independent smallholders. The loss of commons, free land traffic, inheritance division, indebtedness, and the absorption of smaller farms by larger estates created a rural proletariat whose most energetic members had little reason to stay. He repeatedly frames migration as a response to the absence of a credible path from labor to ownership.

Schwiedland then distinguishes permanent migration to cities, overseas emigration, and seasonal labor migration. Seasonal migration is less destructive because it often keeps workers within agriculture and returns them home with savings and experience; permanent urban migration, by contrast, changes occupation and uproots families. Yet all forms reveal the same social fact: the rural worker’s question is ultimately a question of access to land.

Die ländliche Arbeiterfrage wäre somit eine Landfrage

English translation: The rural labor question would thus be a land question.

The consequences are economic, demographic, military, political, and cultural. Rural labor scarcity prevents more intensive cultivation precisely when population growth and world-market competition require it. The remaining countryside loses its young and capable elements, while cities receive workers who often remain unskilled and vulnerable. The urban majority also gains cultural leadership over the state. Schwiedland does not merely defend landlords’ labor supply; he argues that the health of the state depends on a balanced and rooted population.

Small remedies—cooperatives, insurance, schools, rural clubs, improved housing, home industries, credit institutions—are welcomed but subordinated to the central remedy: planned settlement. His key policy concept is “Besiedlung,” or inner colonization, through the creation of viable peasant farms and worker holdings integrated with village life.

das die Übel an der Wurzel fassende große Mittel der Agrarpolitik

English translation: the great instrument of agrarian policy that grasps the evils at their root

He rejects isolated labor colonies on large estates as socially thin and politically backward. Workers must not be held by dependency alone. The best settlement pattern combines a strong middle peasantry with smaller labor plots, so that laborers have wages, household production, social belonging, and the visible possibility of ascent.

die Lebensfähigkeit des landwirtschaftlichen Kleinbetriebes überall vor Augen sehen

English translation: to see everywhere before our eyes the viability of the small agricultural holding

The long comparative section surveys Prussia, England, Scandinavia, France, Russia, Austria, and others to show how states had begun to legislate inner colonization. Prussia provides the model of Rentengüter and Rentenbanken: holdings are acquired not through heavy capital debt but through long-term rent payments, often mediated by public-law institutions. This mechanism lowers the entry barrier for capable but poor settlers while protecting the holding from destructive speculation, partition, and reconsolidation.

The final technical discussion turns from principle to execution: soil quality, roads, drainage, buildings, livestock, village institutions, credit, inheritance rules, and the proper size of worker plots. Settlement must be economically realistic, socially integrative, and administratively planned. Its purpose is not charity, nor merely the provision of hands to landlords, but the creation of rooted citizens.

Vermöge dieser Aussicht aber wird er sich einwurzeln und dem Lande treu bleiben.

English translation: By virtue of this prospect, however, he will strike roots and remain loyal to the land.

The lecture’s relevance lies in its prewar synthesis of migration analysis, agrarian social policy, and state-building. Schwiedland converts “Landflucht” from a symptom into a test of property distribution. A countryside without prospects produces mobility; a countryside with attainable ownership produces attachment, production, and civic strength. His closing claim is accordingly national-economic as well as social: inner settlement releases productive energies and creates

ein stärkeres und reicheres Volk.

English translation: a stronger and richer people.