Overshadowed by a new age
 
Around 1900 historians pronounced a "silence over Wörlitz"
(Hirsch 1965, 213f.).
The Garden Realm was struggling for survival and had fallen into oblivion.

There was only a touch of self-pitying hope when it was regretted that "it [is] indeed a mystery why today we hear more about remote valleys in Norway than about this unique creation of the greatest cultural-historical significance and high artistic value" (ibid, 213f.). At the same time, industrialization was setting new directions not far from Wörlitz. The pottery and sugar-refining industries developed rapidly in the Bitterfeld Dessau area as did the chemicals industry and electrical power production later. The electro-chemical era began around 1900. Construction of the Dessau Wörlitz railway in 1898 marked the event of this new form of transportation in the Garden Realm.  

In 1915, the power line extending from Zschornewitz Power Station to Wittenberg Piesteritz was built and cut through the eastern part of the Garden Realm near Gohrau, a move which was not questioned either at the time or later on.
Hesitant acceptance of the historical Garden Realm began parallel to dynamic industrial development: it was not until the nineteen-twenties that the Garden Realm again became relatively well-known - as an event of cultural and historical significance summed up in the name "Dessau Wörlitz Cultural Circle" (Hirsch 1987, 7).  

 
It seemed that the continuous development of the Garden Realm as a landscape belonged to the past. Its appropriation as a cultural-historical heritage site began. Yet the Garden Realm of the Enlightenment was not perceived as a point of reference or source of industrial modernism. The location of the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1926 was a clear indication of a shift in the sources of inspiration for the development of this industrial region: away from the Garden Realm, which had become history, to the forerunner of industrial modernism. And while the landscape of the Garden Realm was a popular retreat for many of the Bauhaus masters and students, it remained secondary for their work. (Cf. Thöner 1993, 27ff.)
 
The planning atlas published in 1931 by the state planning association for this Central German industrial district includes the Garden Realm in the planning categories "nature conservation and protected woodland areas" as well as "green areas: woodlands, meadows, parks, permanent gardens". As a consequence, some parts of the Garden Realm were, indeed, protected as part of the - not yet binding - land use plan. Yet its dissection by roads and transmission lines as well as by newly designated industrial areas was pre-programmed. The Garden Realm was reduced to functional dimensions: namely, as compensation for urban and industrial development and as a recreational area.
This was a status which was not changed by the plans of the National Socialists, by those of the GDR or of the present-day Federal Republic of Germany. On the one hand, these plans reveal a marked continuity of a modern, functional conception of planning and, on the other hand, a remarkable inability to enter into discourse in terms of art history and preservation of historical monuments in the face of modern developments. (Cf. Hofmann 1992, 12f. and Dietl 1979, 415) Only the context of the educated classes and the contemplative quality in particular of the grounds in Wörlitz played a role in the regional planning of this century.
 
The first conflict arose in the first half of the twentieth century. The forced pace of industrialization in Central Germany brought about by the war economy spread to the area of the Garden Realm, which was already largely confined to garden islands such as Wörlitz or Georgium Park. The highway built between Berlin and Nuremberg in 1938 marked the beginning of further deterioration of the Garden Realm. The building of a housing settlement and power station in Vockerode, the extension of agricultural areas and the development of traffic infrastructure as well as the emergence of tourism led to a comprehensive change - functionalization and industrialization of the entire landscape, leaving only rudiments of the Garden Realm behind.
 
With the reconstruction and extension of the Vockerode power station - located in the middle of the Garden Realm - in the fifties and further large-scale development of brown-coal mining areas in close proximity to what remained of the Garden Realm, the aesthetic contradictions and also ecological damage and conflicts of use intensified. During the forced industrialization in the GDR in the fifties and sixties, which was particularly concentrated on the industrial areas of Central Germany, not only specific spatial elements of the Garden Realm were lost, but entire conceptual worlds on which it was based were buried.