Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/222/en

What might have become groundbreaking for the seventeenth century — those spiritual impulses from Rosicrucianism that grasped equally the effective spirit in nature and in social life — was made null and void by the enormous catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War and its consequences. This war devastated Central Europe by the strategy of scorched earth. Many villages were permanently turned into wastelands; 40% of the rural population and 33% of the urban population had fallen victim to the horrors of famine, plague, and military action. The seed and bread-grain stores were plundered or destroyed by fire on repeated occasions, the animals driven off by passing armies, the wells poisoned by the carcasses of animals thrown into them. Even up to the end of the century — fifty years after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 — famines prevailed in many places. The Thirty Years' War physically broke the backbone of the inherited agricultural culture of Central Europe. Much of the folk wisdom perished, and only laboriously could the organism principle be reawakened to new life in the villages and individual farms out of the remaining store of experiential knowledge. The Dottenfelderhof, for example — ten kilometres from the centre of Frankfurt am Main, a dairy farm belonging to the Premonstratensian monastery of Ilbenstadt — was completely razed. Only in 1707 did the rebuilding of the main house with living quarters and grain store take place, and in 1742, nearly a hundred years after the war, the complex of buildings was at last restored as a hermetically enclosed fortified farmstead.

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