Werner Hegemann

Werner Hegemann (June 15, 1881, Mannheim – April 12, 1936, New York City) was an internationally known city planner, architecture critic, and author. A leading German intellectual during the Weimar Republic, his criticism of Hitler and the Nazi party required him to leave Germany with his family in 1933. He died prematurely in New York City in 1936.

Hegemann was the son of Ottmar Hegemann (1839-1900), a manufacturer in Mannheim, and Elise Caroline Friedrich Vorster (1846-1911), daughter of Julius Vorster, a founder of Chemische Fabrik Kalk in Cologne. He graduated from Gymnasium Schloss Plön in 1901. Hegemann began college studies in Berlin, studied art history and economics in Paris, economics at the University of Pennsylvania and in Strasbourg, and completed his doctorate in Munich in 1908. In the United States in 1909, he worked for the "Boston 1915" Exposition, a five-year plan to develop and improve the Boston area.

Back in Berlin the following year Hegemann was General Secretary of the 1910 Universal City Planning Exhibition held in Berlin in May and June. The exhibition aroused great interest and was reprised in refocused form in Düsseldorf; Hegemann wrote an article about it for a general audience and a two-volume official book. These city planning exhibitions were the first of their kind: Hegemann was in the right place at the right time to play a formative role in the early development of city planning as a profession.

In 1912 he accepted an invitation from the People's Institute in New York to give lectures on city planning in over 20 American cities. Hegemann concluded his cross country speaking tour in San Francisco, where he wrote and published the "Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland & Berkeley," his study of the Californian cities of Oakland and Berkeley. In early 1914 he embarked by ship on a return voyage to Germany via the Pacific, in order to visit the Far East. That July he boarded a German flagged ship in Australia for the final leg of the journey home. World War I broke out as the ship reached the coast of Africa, and it dodged English warships for several weeks before being sequestered for months off the coast of Mozambique. In April, 1915, he stowed-away on a Norwegian vessel bound for the United States, where he spent the duration of the war.

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