In 1908, the master carpenter and entrepreneur Karl Schmidt established the "Garden City" of Hellerau-bei-Dresden in the eastern German countryside. The creation of Hellerau as a combination of a company town for Schmidt's German Workshops for Handcrafted Art and a model reform settlement was the product of cooperation among different strains of the Wilhelmine reform movement. Under the Second Empire (1871–1918), and particularly during the "Wilhelmine period" between 1890 and World War I, a significant proportion of the German bourgeoisie embraced the idea of 'social reform" and channeled its civic energy into a variety of organizations and projects.¹ The idea of the Garden City, which came primarily from England, appealed in particular to a diverse group that saw reform of the built environment as crucial to answering the so-called 'social question" that had preoccupied state and civil-societal actors from the 1840s forward.²