Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE NAZI DISTORTION
As heirs to land power, Germans and Russians have over the centuries thought more in terms
of geography than Americans and Britons, heirs to sea power. For Russians, mindful of the
devastation wrought by the Golden Horde of the Mongols, geography means simply that
without expansion there is the danger of being overrun. Enough territory is never enough.
Russia's need for an empire of Eastern European satellites during the Cold War, and its use
of military power, subversion, and the configuration of its energy pipeline routes all de-
signed to gain back its near-abroad, and thus reconstitute in effect the former Soviet Union,
are the wages of a deep insecurity. But Germans, at least through the middle of the twentieth
century, were more conscious of geography still. The shape of German-speaking territories
on the map of Europe changed constantly from the Dark Ages through modern times, with
the unification of a German state occurring only in the 1860s under Otto von Bismarck. Ger-
many stood at the very heart of Europe, a land and sea power both, and thus fully conscious
of its ties to maritime Western Europe and to the Heartland of Russia-Eastern Europe. Ger-
many's victories against Denmark, Habsburg Austria, and France were ultimately the result
of Bismarck's strategic brilliance, anchored in his acute sense of geography, which was ac-
tually the recognition of limits: namely, those Slavic regions to the east and southeast where
Germany dare not go. Germany's abjuration of Bismarck's caution led to its loss in World
War I, which gave Germans a keener sense of their geographic vulnerability—and possib-
ilities. Historically changeable on the map, lying between sea to the north and Alps to the
south, with the plains to the west and east open to invasion and expansion both, Germans
have literally lived geography. It was they who developed and elaborated upon geopolitics,
or
Geopolitik
in German, which is the concept of politically and militarily dominated space.
And it was such geographical theories, which in the first half of the twentieth century owed
much to Mackinder, that was to lead to the Germans' undoing—discrediting geography and
geopolitics for generations of Germans since World War II.
The rise and fall of
Geopolitik
, in which one theoretician after another both built on and mis-
used the work of his predecessor, began in earnest with Friedrich Ratzel, a late-nineteenth-
century German geographer and ethnographer, who coined the idea of
Lebensraum
, or “liv-
ing space.” The concept actually owes its origin to a German immigrant in early-nineteenth-
century America, Friedrich List, a journalist, political science professor, business speculator,
and friend of Henry Clay, who drew inspiration from the Monroe Doctrine, with its notion
of a vast and virtually sovereign geographical area. As for Ratzel, he was also much influen-
ced by the writings of Charles Darwin, and thus developed an organic, somewhat biological
sense of geography in which borders were constantly evolving depending upon the size and
