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In this essay we will discuss about the modern geography of Germany.
The post-Ritterian period in Germany felt the need of a professionally accepted paradigm to serve as a guide to the study of geography. There was no clear-cut definition to account for the purpose of geography, which could be universally accepted.
Those who taught geography were trained in history, geology, botany, zoology, mathematics, engineering or journalism. None of them were professional geographers, as a result of which each of them defined geography in different ways.
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There was no unanimity among the scholars with regard to the definition, purpose and methodology of geography, and the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany witnessed this major problem. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the materialistic scientific philosophy in other branches of knowledge, which emphasised natural laws and causality, as well as mechanical explanation.
This made ‘professionalism’ an academic necessity. In the light of this development, geography could not remain isolated. The need was professionalism in geography which required a new dimension for the purpose of geography.
In the absence of any guidelines regarding the field of geography, each new professor felt the need to set forth his own ideas concerning the scope of the field. Each tried to provide a definition of geography that would give it unity and would establish its position among other academic disciplines.
All around the world in the late nineteenth century, the question raised was – what is geography? The growth of professionalism in geography provided the answer. It was no longer confined to the plotting of information on maps and to the publication of clearer maps of finer design. Geography acquired an academic status and became a permanent independent discipline.
The Post-Ritterian period, however, proved to be a brief interlude before the last quarter or third of the century brought a rapid development in academic geography in Germany. In many respects, this period may be regarded as the critical period in the development of the field. The foundation which Humboldt and Ritter had established for geography did not provide, in appearance certainly, a clearly unified field.
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To the extent to which their followers exaggerated certain aspects of the views of each of the founders, or attempted to introduce new concepts of the nature of the field, geography was for a time split in several directions and its position as a branch of knowledge thereby was brought into serious question.
After the death of Ritter there was no professor of geography in any German university and the rapid subsequent growth was largely the work not of the historical geographers. Those who followed Ritter were trained as geologists and tended to specialise in the study of non-human features of the Earth, i.e. physical geography as the term stands for. With the rise in academic status of geography and the productive work of this period, especially in the development of geographic thought, its major problem was to overcome the apparent disunity in the methodology of the field and thus definitely establish its position as a single field of science.
The new viewpoint of a materialistic scientific philosophy in science which came to dominate the contemporary scientific thought appeared to have been marked by the increasing specialisation of sciences, by an increasing emphasis on the development of ‘scientific laws’ and ‘causality’, and by a conscious isolation of science (and specially of geography) from any particular Weltanschauung.
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It should be emphasised that Darwinism did not represent a complete break with the major ideas upon which geography was found. The study of development over time continued to be regarded as very important and, although it is not clear whether Darwin supported it or not, a deterministic explanatory framework was retained.
The development was especially characteristic of the natural sciences which were making major advances. Research workers, beginning from inductive arrangements of their observations or from intuitive insights, attempted to devise for themselves a priori models of the structure of reality.
These were used to postulate a set of hypotheses which could be confirmed, corroborated or rejected by testing empirical data through experiment. A large number of confirmations led to a verification of the hypothesis, which was then, for the time being, established as a law.
Germany became the leading nation for the development of academic geography. Although there had been a number of chairs in geography before 1874, a decision by the Prussian government in that year to set up permanent chairs in geography at all Prussian universities was an event of major importance. It is reasonable to assume that Prussia took this step in the belief that geographical knowledge could be used to further its political expansion.
At any rate, this decision meant that geography was firmly established as an academic discipline in one of the leading European nations, and by 1880 there were professors in Geography in 10 of the Prussian Universities. However, the lead in the new direction in the field of academic geography was taken by Oscar Peschel and Ferdinand Von Richthofen, and the direction showed by them seemed to have been followed by the subsequent academicians.
Chorology and landscape morphology developed side by side in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. It was Alfred Hettner who revived the Kantian philosophy of chorology, while Otto Schluter that of landscape morphology.
Among the other geographers we study Passarge, Koppen, Philippson, Gradmann, Schmieder and Carl Trole.
Seigfried Passarge (1866-1958) was a medical doctor and geologist turned into a geographer. He was a contemporary of Hettner and a pupil of Richthofen, but his geographic ideas were often complex and contradictory. Despite this, he was one of the makers of modern geography.
He succeeded Partsch when the latter left the University of Breslau in 1905, but in 1908 he was appointed professor of geography in the newly established Kolonial Institute in Hamburg where he remained until his retirement in 1936. He attempted to blend together the ideas of Penck, Hettner, Schluter and Vidal la Blache, but he rejected the view of Richthofen that regional geography was an orderly presentation of a large variety of spatial distribution.
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In his Physiologische Morphologie published in 1912, he rejected the Davisian approach which attempted to explain the areal variables of landscape in terms of the genetic processes. As regards the Davisian formula of ‘structure, process and stage’, Passarge substituted ‘region, place and form’ which refer to the region, the local forces, and the resultant landforms. He thus proceeds to an analysis and classification of the form elements grouped in terms of their genetic determinants.
If one genetic force is dominant, the resultant form of the land is called a ‘monodynamic form’; and if two or more are dominant, it is called a ‘polydynamic form’. The Davisian approach provides an apparent explanation of landforms, based on abstraction, but it is often obscure and complicated and raises difficult problems of surface that the Davisian theory cannot properly explain.
His first major work ‘Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde’ (1919-20) published in four volumes deals with unit elements of landscape, the causes of the landscape phenomena, the origin of landforms, and the imprint of Human’s works on the landscape.
In another work, Vergleichende Landschaftskunde, published in five parts during 1921-1930, Passarge attempts a hierarchy of the unit area of landscape. ‘The smallest areas are the landscape elements such as slopes, meadows or valley bottoms, ponds, dunes, etc. A group of contiguous small areas together form a section and contiguous sections make up a region.
A group of contiguous regions leads to Landschaftsgebiete such as the North German plain, and a number of these make up a region such as the Central European forest. It is a constituent member of the world’s great regional belts which are essentially climatically determined.
His Landschaftsgurtel der Erde published in 1923, was based on major categories of vegetation, and here he suggested that it would be possible to identify certain regularities in the arrangement of the world’s major landscape zones in relation to latitude and position on the countries.
Passarge developed the idea of four spatial forms (raum, mensch, kultur, geschichte), and the idea that cultural geography is concerned with the influence of humankind and its works in the creation of the cultural landscape or the man-made landscape: This view is identical with Schluter’s idea of a cultural landscape of perceptible phenomena.
Passarge analysed the impact of the landscape on the psychology of the human occupants, and introduced the concept of Stadtlandschaft. He seemed to have held the view that the ideas of milieu and lebensraum as embracing the totality of the spatially operating forces contribute to the individuality of areas and along these lines, developed the distinctiveness of regional geography (Landerkunde).
Albrecht Penck’s suggestion about a classification of climates based on observable features of the landscape appeared to have made great impact on the Russian-born climatologist Wladimir Koppen. Between 1884 and 1918, Koppen made several attempts to provide a satisfactory classification of climates, using temperature distinctions only.
It was only after the publication of Penck’s ideas concerning the relation of rainfall effectiveness to temperature and seasonal changes that Koppen offered a new system of classification in which he made use of annual variations of temperature and rainfall. His new classification first appeared in 1918 and its final version came out in 1936.
With the help of these climatic parameters, Koppen attempted to explain the causes of deficiencies of moisture throughout the year on the west coast of continents between 20° and 30° latitudes in both the hemispheres, and the abundance of moisture on the west coast of continents about 40° and along all the east-coast. He demonstrated these regularities by drawing a geometric figure for a generalised continent and plotting on it the hypothetical position of his classification of climates.
It was largely due to the efforts of Gerhard Schott that a comprehensive world map of oceanic regions was prepared. This map revealed certain regularities of arrangement on the Earth. It was made possible to prepare a diagram of a generalised ocean similar to the generalised continent of Koppen. Gerhard Schott initiated a tradition of the geography of oceans in Germany, the heritage of which continued to dominate the realm of oceanography in Germany.
The period from 1905 to 1914 is described as the ‘Golden Age of German Geography’. This was a period of rapid growth and increasing productivity. The methodological discussion made working in this professional field more exciting; and each new proposal regarding the scope and method of geography resulted in new field studies to provide examples.
A number of new professional periodicals appeared as the influence of German geography spread throughout the world. This period witnessed the consolidation and nucleation of the Germanic heritage of modern geography, initially founded by Alexander Von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, but nourished and cultivated by Richthofen, Preschel, Ratzel, Hettner, Penck and Schluter.
However, the rise of Nazism in Germany made it difficult to proceed with further studies in objective scholarship. The Nazi interference with the academic works, often followed by intimidation of the geographers, resulted into what may be called the academic and professional recession in geographic tradition. Alfred Philippson was deported to the concentration camp by the Nazi Government in 1942.
He was a pupil of Richthofen at Leipzig. He published his work on general geography in three volumes in 1921, 1923 and 1924. He was the distinguished author of the study of the Mediterranean region. His monumental work Greichische Landschafter, published in the 1950s, stands as an exemplary scholarly exposition of the concept and procedure of regional geography (Landerkunde) in the light of the ideas and teachings of Richthofen.
Robert Gradmann introduced the concept of the harmonic landscape into geography. He made outstanding regional study on southern Germany in two volumes (Suddeutschland) published in 1931. It closely followed the current idiographic tradition in German Landerkunde.
Gradmann was the supervisor of Walter Christalier, who was the first German geographer to make a major contribution to location theory in 1933. Christalier noted that the ‘crystallisation of mass about a nucleus is part of the elementary order of things, and human settlement obeys this principle as well as physical elements’.
The foci nodes around which settlement tends to cluster, he called central places, each surrounded by a complementary area with which the central place is functionally related. His attempt to explain the pattern and hierarchy of central places by a general theoretical model was not acceptable within the reigning paradigm.
Oskar Schmieder (1955) attempted to focus on the idea of a focal theme of geography as the transformation of the original landscape to the humanised habitat or the cultural landscape, a conceptual procedure that obviously calls for historical interpretation. Hermann Lautensach worked on both physical and cultural geography, and was encouraged to this end by his pursuit of regional geography.
He completed Kreb’s unfinished work on comparative regional geography whose third edition was published in 1966. His theoretical framework of geography was based on a sound knowledge and appraisal of the natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy and pedagogy. He arrived inductively at a hierarchy of world units comprised within a major framework of 40 unit areas.
Carl Troll, a leading world-geographer of the postwar decades, initially showed deep interest in glacial morphology. His view on glaciology was identical with that of Penck’s concept. Though he was not a pupil of Penck, but he was one of his sincere followers. He developed the concept of regional ecology in which geomorphology, soil science, climate and hydrology are all interrelated.
He was deeply concerned with the relations of vegetation to altitude and climate in the mountains of the Tropical Andes. As a professor of colonial geography at Berlin in the 1930s, Troll busied himself on the possibilities of white settlement in East Africa. He also contributed to the methodology of geography.
One of his distinct achievements was the foundation of the periodical Erdkunde in 1947. He made a comprehensive survey of the progress of German geography from 1933 to 1945.
Though Carl Troll’s survey does not mention about Christalier, but it certainly points to some other positive advances made by German geographers during the Nazi period. There was a conservation movement to which geographers contributed field studies as a basis for landscape planning. There were studies of the relation of people to living space that were not politically oriented.
Troll also reported in his survey that it was largely due to the effort of Max Eckert that German geographers founded the Deutsche Kartographische Gesellschaft in 1937 for the purpose of promoting cartography as a separate discipline. In the words of Dickinson, the works of Carl Trou clearly manifest the imprints of von Humboldt and Albrecht Penck, the two makers of modern geography.
Geopolitics:
Apart from the professional development of geography in Germany during the inter-war period, there developed a distinct discipline loosely connected with geography, called geopolitiks (Geopolitics) which focused on the application of geographic concepts to politics. It was different from political geography.
It was Rudolf Kjellen (1846—1926), a Swedish political scientist who is credited with having coined the word ‘Geopolitics’. Geopolitics was defined as ‘the study of the theory of the state as a geographic organism or a phenomenon in space’. Basic to geopolitik’s ideas were Ratzel’s organic state theory, its refinement by Kjellen and Sir Halford J. Mackinder.
It was largely due to the ideas of Ratzel and Kjellen on the one hand, and that of Mackinder on the other, that Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) founded the Institute for Geopolitics in Munich. He also founded a periodical which dealt with the problem of political strategy. Karl Haushofer was not a professional geographer. Although Geopolitik collapsed with the fall of the Third Reich, many of its associated notions survived in the general field of geopolitics or applied political geography.
Contemporary Trends:
The division of Germany after the Second World War had a significant impact on the contemporary German geographic scholarship and thinking. The geographers of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) continued with the traditional concept of geography as Landschaftskunde, but with the use of new and more precise methods of analysis.
The idiographic tradition in German Landerkunde continued to be the centre of interest of the great majority of FRG geographers in the 1960s. In the post-war period, the philosophy of possibilism in the form of ‘cultural determinism’ replaced the earlier physical determinism.
The geographers emphasised the need for the study of ‘culture’ which came to be defined as social geography. The purpose is to interpret the cultural landscape with the clear recognition that the major force for landscape change is the human group—’the attitudes, objectives, and technical skills’ that are part of human’s culture. This is a manifestation of the Schluterian tradition.
Geographers of the Democratic Republic of Germany (DRG), on the other hand, rejected the idiographic tradition in geography, but for some time sided with Schluter’s idea of a landscape unit of perceptible phenomena, natural and human, that together form a single association.
The East German geographers have made significant contribution to the field of landscape science and in their attempts they got help from the Soviet geographers. East German geographers attempted to distinguish between physical geography and economic geography as separate disciplines.