Auf der Suche nach verlorenen Paradiesen

With the increase of general knowledge about the world, nature, the cosmos and with the development of technology, the urge grew – quite heretically – to kill old, fairy-tale religious stories as lies. Every scientific knowledge increased our level of knowledge, thus our education, but led to a renewed expulsion. First people regarded the earth as the centre of the universe, then they had to learn that we, together with our planet, orbit the sun and are only a tiny round sphere among billions of other spheres in the Milky Way and the entire cosmos.

The fact that the entire history of culture and technology could represent a single, continuous expulsion of mankind from the original, paradiese state of nature was already described visionarilyin the Bible and predicted with all its positive and negative consequences. Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve, of their 'Fall' and their 'Expulsion from Paradise'. Even as a non-Christian it is worth taking a look at the fairytale-like-mythic text of the Old Testament, although the picture and the process completely contradict our current scientific findings. One would almost be inclined to assume that the idea of a primeval paradise is innate in all human beings and that every human being with his becoming, his birth, his childhood and his adulthood experiences something like a Genesis. He is born innocent and helpless, wakes up, looks around, believes to be free, gets to know his time, his surroundings, his life. The final expulsion of every human being from life is his death. He is a sentenced to death. Despite all religious promises, man has always been aware of this fact, also of the fact that he has only this one life and that he ultimately cannot count on the hope that beyond this life there is something that could be called 'salvation', a happy return to the Garden of Eden. As the book shows with numerous, primarily European examples, the history of man is therefore full of efforts to regain here and now the lost paradise, no matter how precarious the result may be. In search of the lost paradises: a somewhat unusual history of man in his relationship to nature, followed by a description of the current state of landscape planning and garden design. In the third, concluding part of the book, the author develops new, strangely surreal and poetic concepts of the treatment of nature, inspired by literature, film, theatre and tourism.Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape architect, stage designer and exhibition designer. His works, the majority of which have been published by the Axel MengesEdition, have meanwhile reached an audience far beyond his in my homeland. The author lives and works in a village near Biberach an der Riss.