Walter Rossow

Walter Rossow (28 January 1910 - 2 January 1992) was a leading German Landscape architect and, during his later years, a university professor. After 1945, together with leading architects of the time such as Egon Eiermann and Paul Baumgarten, Walter Rossow played a key role in reconstructing Berlin. Life Provenance and early years Walter Rossow was born in the (subsequently renamed) Berlin inner-city district of Rixdorf. The boy's interest in garden design was awakened at an early age, and encouraged in particular by one of his teachers, Friedrich Haak. Haak himself later came to prominence as a pioneer of Berlin's city "Gartenarbeitsschulen" ("Gardening schools"), which retain a particular resonance in a city where the abundance of flat damp ground has enforced a large amount of green space in and around the city centre. In 1926, in defiance of the wishes of Richard Rossow, his father, Walter Rossow embarked on a two-year apprenticeship with the Berlin City Gardens Department. Between 1928 and 1930 he pursued an autodidactic course of further study by working as an assistant gardener at a succession of locations across Berlin Schleswig-Holstein and Frankfurt am Main. In 1930 he started a two-year course of study at the "Lehr- und Forschungsanstalt für Gartenbau (LuFA)", a long-established training institute for gardening and horticulture that had relocated in 1903 from a former royal park to Berlin-Dahlem. He emerged from his time at the "LuFA" with a qualification as a "gardens technician". It was also in 1932 that he began to attend lectures at the Berlin University of the Arts, not as a student of it but on an agreed "guest listener" basis, while also working as a landscape gardener at various locations in Berlin. The early 1930s saw intensifying political polarisation in Germany, which spilled increasingly onto the streets. Polarisation was reflected after 1930, and more acutely after 1932, in a deadlocked national parliament. Through contacts established through the "Wandervogel" (conservative youth group) Rossow became increasingly interested in literature and the arts. But in the context of those times it was hard to avoid becoming, in addition, politically aware: Rossow and his friends were critical of the rising tide of National Socialism.