The Germania triumphans syndrome and passarge's erdkundliche weltanschauung: The roots and effects of German political geography beyond geopolitik

Abstract

To understand German National Socialism and its involvement with science including geography, we have to trace ideologies and doctrines back into the 19th century, including their continuity, their refraction by outstanding political events, and the interaction of conflicting and competing concepts. Germania triumphans, a study on the outcome of World War I published as early as 1895, demonstrates how far the integration of imperialist and racist, Lebensraum and Weltpolitik concepts had been developed. What is more important, these concepts were transformed into plans for concrete actions against people including forced Germanization and expulsion of the Jews long before the Nazi regime. Passarge's Erdkundliche Weltanschauung (1922) is an even better example for the integration of different ideologies, reflecting at the same time radical conservative responses to World War I and the instrumentalization of geography. Bringing up the problem of evaluation and judgement, we need to combine the notions of relevance and ethics with the underlying image of man and the treatment of spatial scale.