German School of Geographical Thought

• The German school is the body of ideas, methods and institutions through which German-speaking scholars turned geography from a descriptive art into a systematic academic discipline between the 16th and the mid-20th century.
  • Germany gave the subject its philosophical base (Kant), its classical founders (Humboldt and Ritter), its first professional chairs (from the 1870s) and most of its founding concepts: chorology, anthropogeography, Lebensraum, Landschaft, cultural landscape, central places and landscape ecology.
• The school grew in three broad periods: a pre-classical phase of cosmographers and philosophers, a classical phase dominated by Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, and a post-classical phase of professional geographers after 1859.
  • The inter-war years added landscape science, geopolitics and location theory. After 1945 the school split between East and West Germany and was later remade by social geography and the 1969 Kiel critique.
• Its central legacy is methodological. The German debates on systematic vs regional, physical vs human and idiographic vs nomothetic geography set the agenda that the French, British and American schools later worked through.

Context and Periods

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Why Germany Led the Discipline

• Philosophical tradition: German universities joined geography to philosophy. Kant’s classification of knowledge gave the subject a logical place among the sciences, and later scholars kept returning to it.
• University reform: the reformed universities of the 19th century, led by Berlin (founded 1810), stressed research and specialisation.
  • By mid-century courses in the physical, biological and social sciences were being standardised, and students could choose geography as an optional subject.
  • Until the 1870s, however, few universities taught geography. Most teachers were historians, geologists, mathematicians or engineers, many of them pupils of Ritter with no training in the subject itself.
• Geographical societies: the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (1828), with Ritter among its founders, and similar societies published travel reports and maps of distant lands.
• State demand: political turmoil, wars and the drive for colonies created a heavy demand for maps and charts from army officers, administrators and merchants.
  • For a time, anything that could be mapped was counted as geography.
• Unification and empire: after unification in 1871, the Prussian state saw geography as useful for administration, colonial expansion and national education.
  • In 1874 Prussia decided to create chairs of geography in all its universities, and about ten existed by 1880. Geography became a permanent, independent discipline.
• Conceptual expansion: German scholars offered new definitions and scopes of the subject. Their work laid the methodological base of systematic and regional geography, chorology, man–environment study, cartography and physical geography.

Periodisation

Pre-Classical and Classical Foundations

The Cosmographers (16th–17th Century)

• The scientific revolution of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton pushed many German scholars to treat geography as a branch of mixed mathematics. Purely regional description was often looked down on.
• Compendia of world geography revived both the Ptolemaic (mathematical) and the Strabonian (descriptive) traditions.
  • Peter Apian (1495–1552), astronomer and cartographer, wrote the Cosmographicus liber (1524). He drew a heart-shaped (cordiform) world map in 1530 with curved parallels and meridians. He still held the geocentric view and Aristotle’s idea of the oikoumene.
  • Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) wrote the Cosmographia (1544), the first description of the world in German. It ran through about 24 editions and was the standard world geography for a century.
  • Philipp Clüver (1580–1622) wrote Germania antiqua (1616) and the Introductio in universam geographiam (published 1624, after his death). He was among the first to write a universal geography and is often called a founder of historical geography.
• Map-makers: Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507 first used the name America, and his Carta Marina followed in 1516.
  • Gerardus Mercator, a Fleming who settled at Duisburg, drew a double heart-shaped world map in 1538. His 1569 projection became the standard chart for navigation.
• These compendia faded in the 17th century as new data from the voyages outran them. Their work is part of the wider Renaissance revival of geography.

Bernhard Varenius (1622–1650)

• Bernhard Varenius shaped geographical scholarship for more than a century. His Descriptio Regni Japoniae (1649) described Japan and Siam, their religions and their governments.
• His Geographia Generalis (1650) divided the subject into general (universal) geography, the laws of the whole earth, and special geography, the description of particular countries.
  • It had three parts: the absolute (shape, size and physical features of the earth), the relative (the earth’s relation to the sun and stars and its effect on climate) and the comparative (location of places and the principles of navigation).
  • For special geography he listed celestial (climate), terrestrial (relief, soil, vegetation, animals) and human conditions (population, settlement, trade, government).
• He held that natural phenomena allow precise laws, while human affairs are matters of probability, valid only for a particular time and place. This seeded the later general–special and physical–human dualisms, although he saw the two branches as interdependent.
• He explained why the hottest places are the tropical deserts, not the equator, and linked the planetary winds to heated equatorial air being replaced by cooler air from higher latitudes.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

• Immanuel Kant lectured on physical geography at Königsberg from 1756 to 1796; the lectures were published in 1802. His early works on the heavens (1755) and on earthquakes were speculative natural science rather than geography.
• Classification of knowledge:
  • Logical classification groups things by kind and gives the systematic sciences (zoology, geology, sociology).
  • Physical classification groups things by time or space. History studies things that follow one another (nacheinander); geography studies things that lie beside one another in space (nebeneinander).
  • History is narrative and geography descriptive; together they cover the whole of empirical knowledge.
• He saw space not as a substance but as a framework of the mind within which things perceived by the outer senses are ordered.
• He freed geography from theology and teleology: explanations were to be sought in prior causes, not in divine purpose.
• Branches he proposed: mathematical (shape, size and motions of the earth), moral (customs of peoples), political (states and their physical setting), commercial (why countries have surpluses and deficits, hence trade) and theological geography.
• Legacy: Kant is often called the father of exceptionalism: history and geography study the unique and so differ in method from the law-making sciences.
  • In the 1890s the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband named the contrast nomothetic (law-seeking) and idiographic (describing the particular), the terms of a later dualism.
  • Hettner and Hartshorne built their chorological view on Kant. French possibilism and later humanistic geography also owe something to his stress on human understanding.

The Classical Period: Humboldt and Ritter

• Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Carl Ritter (1779–1859) are the founders of modern geography. Their deaths in 1859, the year of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, close the classical period.
• Humboldt travelled through Spanish America (1799–1804) with Aimé Bonpland and through Russia and Siberia (1829).
  • He measured the cold current off Peru (the Humboldt Current), drew the first isotherms (1817) and described altitudinal zones of vegetation in the Andes.
  • His Kosmos (5 volumes, 1845–62) presented nature as a harmonious, interconnected whole. His method was empirical, inductive and comparative, and he held that all human races share one origin.
  • He recommended the Schlagintweit brothers to the East India Company. Their survey of India and High Asia (1854–57) carried his methods of measurement into the Himalaya.
• Ritter held Berlin’s first chair of geography (1820) and wrote Die Erdkunde (19 volumes, 1817–59).
  • He treated the earth as the home of man, studied regions comparatively and stressed unity in diversity. His geography was teleological: the arrangement of continents served a divine plan.
• Humboldt is taken as the founder of systematic geography and Ritter of regional geography. Their followers exaggerated the contrast, and the post-classical period inherited it.

The Post-Classical Period (1859–1918)

The Crisis of Identity after 1859

• The rise of specialised systematic sciences (geology, meteorology, botany, ethnology) took over most of what had been general geography. Each worked by isolating processes, the opposite of geography’s holistic method.
• Ritter’s Berlin chair stayed vacant for years. Geography was reduced to regional description and map-making for soldiers, officials and merchants.
• Darwinism reshaped the questions. Change through time, the struggle for existence, adaptation to environment and the end of teleology all entered geography. The impact of Darwinism shows in Ratzel, Penck and Davis alike.
• The prevailing view of science held that human and non-human phenomena need different methods. Physical and human geography began to part ways.
• From the 1880s two scholars, Ratzel and Richthofen, worked to reunite the field. Hettner later completed the task.

The Rise of Dualism: Peschel and Gerland

Oscar Peschel (1826–1875)

• Oscar Peschel edited the weekly Das Ausland (1854–71) and became the first holder of the new chair of geography at Leipzig in 1871.
• Works: Geschichte der Erdkunde (1865), a history of geography; Neue Probleme der vergleichenden Erdkunde (1870); Völkerkunde (1874); and Physische Erdkunde, published after his death.
• Comparative method: he rejected Ritter’s comparison of whole continents, which are too varied internally to compare. Comparison should be between like features (homologies), such as one landform type in different places, to infer its origin.
  • Using large-scale maps, he showed that fjord coasts recur on the western sides of continents in higher middle latitudes and explained them as valleys deepened by glaciers.
• He criticised Ritter’s teleology and his subordination of geography to history, and faulted Humboldt for not classifying landforms scientifically.
• He held that physical and human geography were separate domains and is called the originator of the physical–human dualism. Yet he also studied the races and cultures of mankind.
• His genetic classification of landforms gave a starting point for geomorphology. His death at 49 cut short the “new geography” just as his chair could have made it productive.

Georg Gerland (1833–1919)

• Georg Gerland, professor at Strasbourg from 1875, pushed Peschel’s line further. In an essay of 1887 he argued that man cannot be studied by exact laws and should be excluded from geography.
  • Geography was to be the science of the earth as a physical body (Erdkunde in its literal sense), a complex of materials bound by forces.
• He became a founder of geophysics and seismology: he edited Beiträge zur Geophysik from 1887 and organised the first international seismological conference at Strasbourg (1901).
• By the 1880s geography seemed split into a natural science and a social science, joined only by a regional geography that hardly looked scientific.

Reintegration through Man–Land Relations: Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904)

• Friedrich Ratzel studied zoology, geology and comparative anatomy (Heidelberg, Jena, Berlin) and wrote on Darwin in 1869. He was influenced by Ernst Haeckel and by Moritz Wagner’s theory of migration.
  • He served in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), then travelled as a reporter among German communities in Eastern Europe, in Italy (1872) and in the United States and Mexico (1874–75). The American journey turned him to geography.
  • He taught at the Technische Hochschule in Munich (professor 1880) and at Leipzig from 1886 until his death.
• Anthropogeographie (vol. I, 1882; vol. II, 1891) showed that human phenomena can be studied as systematically as physical ones. This makes Ratzel the founder of modern human geography.
  • Volume I, subtitled as an application of geography to history, traced the influence of physical features and location on human life. It drew on the Darwinian idea of environmental adjustment and became the basis of environmental determinism.
  • Volume II, on the geographical distribution of mankind, reversed the approach. It began with human groups and studied population, settlement, migration and the diffusion of culture, following Alfred Kirchhoff’s lead.
    • Migrants carry memories, skills and technology, so every cultural landscape reflects both the local environment and inherited culture.
  • The French sociologist Émile Durkheim objected that Ratzel mixed two aims: describing the settlement forms of societies (which Durkheim claimed for his own social morphology) and tracing the effects of physical features on political life. The exchange opened a long contest between sociology and geography over who should study the spatial forms of society.
  • He contrasted the Vosges (France) and the Black Forest (Germany): similar uplands on either side of the Rhine used differently by two cultures.
• Determinism, misread: his followers, above all Ellen Churchill Semple, spread the first volume’s determinism. The second volume gave history and culture a large role, and Ratzel saw the environment as a partner, not a master, of human activity.
• Political geography: Politische Geographie (1897) treated the state as an organism rooted in the soil. A state must grow or decline; it cannot stand still.
  • His seven laws of the spatial growth of states (1896) and his essay “Der Lebensraum” (1901) developed the concept of living space: strong states expand at the expense of weak neighbours.
  • The analogy came from Herbert Spencer’s organic view of society and from Social Darwinism, and it matched imperial Germany’s colonial and naval ambitions.
  • After his death it was turned into Geopolitik and Nazi expansionism, which damaged his reputation abroad. He is still called the father of political geography.
• Other contributions: Völkerkunde (1885–88), a major ethnography; the idea of the cultural (historical) landscape as a record of successive occupation; and Deutschland (1898), a classic regional text.
  • He rejected the fixed stages of economic development handed down since antiquity. Eduard Hahn’s map of world economic forms (1892) followed this lead.
• Assessment: Ratzel moved human geography from inventory to explanation and reintegrated the human element that Peschel and Gerland had expelled. His stress on systematic study, however, left regional geography neglected.

Integration through Chorology: Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905)

• Ferdinand von Richthofen, a geologist from Silesia, worked in the Alps and Carpathians and joined a Prussian expedition to East Asia (1860).
  • He spent six years in California (1862–68), then surveyed China (1868–72), mapping its coalfields and identifying the loess of the north as wind-blown dust from the steppes.
  • His China (5 volumes and atlas, 1877–1912) followed the Humboldtian method of field observation. In it he coined the term Seidenstraße (Silk Road) in 1877.
• Career: Bonn, then Leipzig (1883) and Berlin (1886–1905). He led the Berlin Geographical Society, and his seminar trained Sven Hedin, Alfred Philippson and many others.
• Führer für Forschungsreisende (1886), a guide for scientific travellers, classified landforms genetically by the processes that shape them.
  • Its parts covered field observation, the processes shaping the surface, and rocks, soils and mountain structure. It separated mountain ridges, with long axes, from mountain masses without them, and classified lakes, coasts and islands by origin.
• The Leipzig inaugural address (1883), “Aufgaben und Methoden der heutigen Geographie”, became the programme of modern German geography.
  • Geography is the science of the earth’s surface and of the things causally interrelated with it. Its method is observation and measurement in the field.
  • A study should begin with the physical framework and then examine how other features, including human works, relate to it. Its highest goal is the relation of man to the physical and biotic earth.
• General and special geography: Richthofen was the first German scholar to set the two in a clear relationship.
  • General geography is analytical. It studies phenomena from four viewpoints (form, material, forces and movement) and seeks general principles.
  • Special (regional) geography is synthetic and descriptive, but must go beyond description to seek regularities and hypotheses.
  • Chorography is the first step: description that supplies material to systematic geography. Chorology is the final step: explanatory regional study using principles from systematic geography.
  • He set out a hierarchy of study areas: Erdteile (major world divisions), Länder (major regions), Landschaften (small regions) and Örtlichkeiten (localities).
• He also proposed a dynamic anthropogeography: the influence of lands on people and of people on the transformation of lands, studied genetically.
• He saw no duality between physical and human. He restored the Humboldtian link with the natural sciences, kept the Ritterian concern with man and fulfilled Peschel’s method.

Physical Geography: Albrecht Penck (1858–1945) and His Circle

• Albrecht Penck trained in geology and taught at Vienna (1885–1906) and Berlin (from 1906), succeeding Richthofen. He worked alongside Eduard Suess in Vienna.
• Ice-Age studies: with Eduard Brückner he wrote Die Alpen im Eiszeitalter (1901–09), which identified four Alpine glaciations, Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm, named after Alpine valleys.
  • This sequence became the classic framework of Quaternary geology and of human prehistory. Helmut de Terra and T. T. Paterson (1939) used it to reconstruct the glacial and interglacial stages of the Kashmir Valley.
• Morphologie der Erdoberfläche (1894) systematised the study of landforms and helped establish geomorphology as a field. His method was genetic and deductive: landforms evolve through time under process.
• Climate from landscape (1910): he classified climates as arid, humid and nival from the evidence of landforms and drainage, even where instruments were lacking. Effective rainfall is the balance of rainfall, run-off and evaporation, and evaporation rises with temperature.
• Cartography: at the International Geographical Congress, Bern (1891), he proposed the International Map of the World on a scale of 1:1,000,000, built by cooperating nations on common symbols and projection.
• Human and political geography: he studied the earth’s population-carrying capacity and saw geography as a bridge between the natural and social sciences.
  • His concepts of Volksboden and Kulturboden (lands of German people and culture) and his idea of natural frontiers as those meeting a nation’s economic needs fed later Geopolitik.
• His circle:
  • Walther Penck (1888–1923), his son, challenged Davis’s cycle of erosion; Die morphologische Analyse was published in 1924.
  • Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940), the Russian-born German climatologist, built on Penck’s idea of rainfall effectiveness. His classification first appeared in 1900 and was revised in 1918 and 1936. It remains the basis of most world climate maps, and India’s climatic regions are commonly drawn on it.
  • Gerhard Schott founded German oceanography with a world map of ocean regions and a generalised ocean, a counterpart to Köppen’s generalised continent.
• In his later “new geography”, Penck based the unity of the subject on the spatial arrangement of physical and human phenomena insofar as they give character to particular areas. He defined the smallest region as an area with unity of form and function.
• Penck’s own students, such as Jovan Cvijić, carried his geomorphology across Europe. Many German geographers who began as geomorphologists later turned to human geography.

Regional Geography: Joseph Partsch (1851–1925)

• Joseph Partsch of Breslau revived the Ritterian regional tradition. He wrote a regional geography of Silesia (completed 1911) and of Central Europe, the latter written for a series edited by Halford Mackinder (English edition 1903).
• He also studied the glacial landforms of the Riesengebirge. He succeeded Ratzel at Leipzig (1905) but kept a physical emphasis, a sign that the dualism persisted.

Chorology Completed: Alfred Hettner (1859–1941)

• Alfred Hettner was the first of his generation to enter university intending to become a geographer. He studied under Kirchhoff at Halle and took his doctorate at Strasbourg under Gerland on the climate of Chile.
  • He worked in the Colombian Andes (1882–84), joined Richthofen’s seminar and qualified under Ratzel at Leipzig. He taught at Tübingen and from 1899 at Heidelberg until 1928.
• Works: Reisen in den columbianischen Anden (1888); regional geographies of Europe (1907) and of the extra-European lands (1924); Vergleichende Länderkunde (4 volumes, 1933–35); and works on Russia, surface forms of the continents and the spread of culture.
  • He founded the Geographische Zeitschrift (1895) and edited it until 1935.
  • His methodological essays were collected as Die Geographie: ihre Geschichte, ihr Wesen und ihre Methoden (1927).
• Geography as chorology: reality can be viewed from three standpoints. Systematic sciences study similar things, historical sciences study development in time, and chorological sciences study arrangement in space.
  • There are two chorological sciences: astronomy for the universe and geography for the earth’s surface.
  • Geography’s unity lies in its method, not its material. It studies the areal differences of the earth’s surface (continents, regions, districts, localities) as they are causally interrelated.
  • Geography is not a “science of distributions”. A single distribution matters only where it helps give character to an area.
    • He borrowed Alfred Russel Wallace’s distinction: geographical zoology maps the range of each species, while zoological geography describes the fauna of each land. Geography takes the second view, of areas and their content.
• Time recedes: geography takes a cross-section at a point in time and uses history only to explain the present situation.
• Neither natural nor human, but both: geography studies the distinctive character of lands, so physical and human elements are equally necessary. He criticised Peschel and Gerland for excluding man and Ritter for making man the centre.
• Against determinism: a synthesis is distorted if nature is treated as dominant. Things in an area are coordinated, not subordinated, which places Hettner close to possibilism. He also urged study from man to nature rather than from nature to man.
• Both idiographic and nomothetic: geography, like every science, studies the unique and the general. Regional study needs general concepts, and every unique case challenges theory.
• Regional scheme: location, geology, relief, climate, natural resources, population, settlement, economy, trade, transport and political divisions. Through Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939) this became the standard outline of regional geography in the English-speaking world.
• Criticism:
  • The scheme tied everything back to physical features and ignored links such as population density and economy, or routes and political units.
  • Defining geography by method, not subject matter, left many uneasy. Chorology also neglected time and process.
  • David Harvey (1969) argued that the Kantian chorology rested on absolute, Euclidean space, a notion physics had abandoned.
  • Hettner’s editorial on the Treaty of Versailles (1919) voiced the nationalist grievance that Geopolitik exploited, although the Nazis later attacked him as a “positivist”.

Landscape, Geopolitics and Location (1900–1945)

Landscape Science (Landschaftskunde): Otto Schlüter (1872–1959)

• The idea of geography as a science of landscape appeared in J. Wimmer’s Historische Landschaftskunde (1885) and gained ground after Otto Schlüter’s lecture “Die Ziele der Geographie des Menschen” (1906).
  • Schlüter came to geography from German language and history through Kirchhoff at Halle and studied under Richthofen in Berlin. He held the chair at Halle from 1911.
• Core argument: geography needs a distinct object, not merely a method. That object is the landscape: the totality of what can be perceived by the senses on the earth’s surface.
  • Non-material features (social, economic, political, religious) are not ends in themselves. They enter only so far as they explain the visible landscape, which mirrors a culture like an archaeological deposit.
• Genetic vs causal analysis: Schlüter separated the study of how forms change (genetic) from the study of why they change (causal or dynamic). Geography’s first task was the former.
• Morphological method: human geography studies the form and arrangement of earthbound phenomena, just as geomorphology studies landforms. It examines expression rather than mechanism.
  • The cultural landscape has immobile forms (fields, settlements, routes) and mobile forms (people, goods and traffic).
• Urlandschaft and Kulturlandschaft: the original landscape before major human change and the cultural landscape made by human culture.
  • Using place names and classical accounts, he reconstructed the woodland and open land of Central Europe around 500 CE, then traced the settlement that created the cultural landscape. His Siedlungsräume Mitteleuropas in frühgeschichtlicher Zeit appeared in the 1950s.
• Influence: Schlüter is regarded as a founder of modern cultural geography. His morphology marked a clear break from Darwinian environmentalism.
  • The idea reached Jean Brunhes in France and Carl Sauer’s The Morphology of Landscape (1925) and the Berkeley school, but made little impact in Britain.
• Confusion over “Landschaft”: the German word means both a uniform region and the scene as viewed.
  • Some included invisible elements (wind, temperature), some only the visible, and others everything, including law and religion. Hartshorne complained of a “mystical significance” attached to the term.

The Hettner–Schlüter Controversy

• Both studied areal differentiation, and both saw regions as parts of the earth that stand out from their surroundings with definable boundaries.
  • Hettner stressed how a region reflects the physical framework. Schlüter stressed the interrelations that give it a distinctive appearance.
• Leo Waibel (1933) judged that the landscape concept gave human geography a physical substance studied by the same methods as physical geography, so that the gap between the two closed.
• By the 1950s most German geographers treated landscape as the central object of the subject, seen as a dynamic, open system.

Other Landscape and Regional Geographers

• Siegfried Passarge (1866–1958), a doctor and geologist who explored the Kalahari, taught at the Hamburg Colonial Institute (1908–1936).
  • In Physiologische Morphologie (1912) he replaced the Davisian structure, process, stage with region, local forces and form, and divided forms into monodynamic and polydynamic types.
  • Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde (1919–20) and Vergleichende Landschaftskunde (1921–30) built a hierarchy of landscape units, from elements such as a slope or pond up to world landscape belts controlled by climate. He also coined Stadtlandschaft (urban landscape).
  • His later racial theories were taken up by the Nazis, and his landscape work is now read with that taint.
• Alfred Philippson (1864–1953), a pupil of Richthofen, wrote on general geography and the Mediterranean. As a Jew he was deported to the Theresienstadt camp (1942) but survived and completed Die griechischen Landschaften in the 1950s.
• Robert Gradmann wrote the regional classic Süddeutschland (1931) in the idiographic Länderkunde tradition.
• The years 1905–1914 are often called the golden age of German geography: new journals and field studies multiplied, and German methods spread across the world.

Geopolitik

• Geopolitics grew between the wars as an applied, politicised offshoot of political geography.
  • The Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) coined the term (1899). His Staten som livsform (1916) treated the state as a living form that must expand or die.
• Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), a general turned Munich lecturer, co-founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (1924).
  • He fused Ratzel’s organic state and Lebensraum, Kjellén’s state as organism and Halford Mackinder’s heartland thesis into a programme for German expansion and pan-regions.
  • Through his assistant Rudolf Hess his ideas reached Hitler. After the war he was interrogated but not indicted at Nuremberg, and he took his own life in 1946.
• Penck’s Volks- und Kulturboden maps supplied a pseudo-scientific basis for claims to land in Eastern Europe.
• Outcome: Geopolitik collapsed with the Third Reich and long discredited political geography in Germany. Its methods survive in applied political geography and strategic studies, now without the organic-state doctrine.

Location Theory and Applied Geography

• German economists and geographers founded location theory, later revived by the quantitative revolution:
  • Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Der isolierte Staat (1826): concentric rings of agricultural land use around a market.
  • Alfred Weber (1909): the least-cost location of industry.
  • Walter Christaller, Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (1933), a doctorate under Gradmann. Settlements cluster as central places, each serving a complementary region, arranged in a hexagonal hierarchy.
  • August Lösch (1940): the economic landscape of overlapping market areas.
• Christaller’s general, deductive model did not fit the idiographic orthodoxy of his time. It was used in Nazi planning for occupied Poland and later reshaped municipal boundaries in West Germany.
  • In India, growth-centre planning drew on central place hierarchies, for example Sudhir Wanmali’s study of service centres in Miryalguda taluka, Andhra Pradesh (1983).
• There was also inter-war work on landscape planning and conservation. The German Cartographic Society was founded in 1937.

Post-War Developments and Disciplinary Trends

Divided Germany (1945–1990)

• After 1945 universities and libraries lay in ruins. Within about fifteen years German geography recovered.
• West Germany:
  • Carl Troll (1899–1975) founded the journal Erdkunde (1947) at Bonn and surveyed German geography under Nazism.
    • Using aerial photographs, he founded Landschaftsökologie (landscape ecology) in 1939, the study of interactions among rock, relief, soil, water, climate and vegetation.
    • His three-dimensional zonation of high mountains rested partly on fieldwork on Nanga Parbat in the western Himalaya (1937), where he survived the avalanche that killed sixteen members of the expedition. He was president of the International Geographical Union (1960–64).
  • Länderkunde remained dominant into the 1960s, now with new statistical methods. Variation by latitude, altitude, distance from the sea and continentality was studied with more precision.
• East Germany: geographers rejected the idiographic tradition, separated physical and economic geography and, with Soviet help, developed landscape science. Ernst Neef of Dresden led this work.

Social Geography and the Munich School

• After the war, emphasis moved from environmental to cultural explanation, sometimes called cultural determinism: the attitudes, aims and technical skills of human groups were seen as the main force shaping landscapes.
• Wolfgang Hartke (Munich chair 1952–75) treated landscape features as indicators of social processes; for example, fallow land signals a shift of farmers into urban jobs.
• Hans Bobek (Vienna) added a functional view of stages of social and economic development.
• The Munich school (Karl Ruppert, Franz Schaffer) built on both. It studied space through the basic functions of human existence: living, working, supply, education, recreation, transport and communication.

The Kiel Critique (1969) and After

• At the German Geographers’ Day in Kiel (1969) students attacked Länderkunde as untheoretical and socially irrelevant, and demanded theory, relevance and the separation of physical and human geography.
  • Dietrich Bartels’ Zur wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung einer Geographie des Menschen (1968) supplied a critical-rationalist, law-seeking basis for human geography, close to Fred K. Schaefer’s earlier attack on exceptionalism.
  • Quantitative methods and computing entered curricula, and German geography joined the international spatial-science mainstream.
• Later trends:
  • Benno Werlen’s action-centred social geography (Sozialgeographie alltäglicher Regionalisierungen, 1995–97) studies how people “make regions” through everyday actions.
  • A new cultural geography has emerged since the 2000s. Reunification (1990) merged two traditions, and the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig keeps the Länderkunde name alive in modern form.
  • Landscape ecology, Quaternary science and climate geography carry Troll’s and Penck’s legacy into environmental research.

Disciplinary Trends: What the German School Gave Each Branch

Evaluation

• Strengths:
  • It made geography a university discipline with a defined method, journals and a research culture, and other national schools copied this model.
  • It reconciled the systematic and regional and the physical and human through chorology. Hartshorne carried this synthesis to the English-speaking world.
  • It created lasting concepts and models: areal differentiation, the cultural landscape, central places, the Alpine glacial sequence, Köppen climates and landscape ecology.
• Weaknesses:
  • Environmental determinism drawn from Ratzel’s first volume, and the man–environment debate it provoked, coloured the subject for decades.
  • Organic-state theory and Geopolitik served aggression and racism, a warning about the political uses of geography.
  • The idiographic Länderkunde became descriptive and encyclopaedic, which provoked the 1969 revolt.
  • The landscape concept was vague, and its stress on the visible neglected social processes and power.
• Relevance to India: German concepts entered Indian geography through Köppen’s climatic regions, the Alpine sequence applied to Kashmir’s glacial history, central-place and growth-centre planning, and Troll’s high-mountain ecology of the Himalaya.