Elsevier

Journal of Historical Geography

Volume 47, January 2015, Pages 11-15
Journal of Historical Geography

Feature: European Geographers and World War II
Continental European geographers and World War II

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.12.003Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Examines the relations between continental European geographers and World War II.

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    Examines the relations between continental European geography and World War II.

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    Illuminates the connections between geography and geopolitics.

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    Presents new material on geographers' biographies (lives and work) during World War II.

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    Demonstrates new varieties of wartime experience among geographers.

Abstract

This special issue considers the lives and work of Continental European Geographers during World War II. There is a range of work on the complicity of American and British geographers in this global conflict, but barely any consideration of geographers in mainland Europe. The six essays collected here provide detailed biographical and regionally specific case studies of the entanglements between geography and war in France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Romania and The Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945. This introduction delineates this important gap in the literature on the liaison between geography, geographers and World War II, and flags a number of ways in which it might be conceptualised and contextualised.

Section snippets

Geographers' wars and war's geographies

Jackson's reflections on his wartime experience point to many of the issues pursued in this special issue. Like Jackson, the authors here are also concerned with the intimate, complex and often fraught wartime intertwining of a life (a biography and specific personal circumstances) with geographical ideas and knowledges (both as disciplinary concepts, practices and conventions, and wider geographical perceptions and discourses). Also like Jackson, the authors think it important to locate World

Continental Europe

The focus of this special issue is World War II and continental Europe. This global conflict enrolled large numbers of geographers. Some enlisted as ordinary soldiers, like Jackson, and were posted overseas; others were recruited into intelligence activities by the state and the military, like Sándor Rádo and discussed in Heffernan's paper; or yet others helped to promote state wartime propaganda like Karl Haushofer in Barnes and Abrahamsson's paper, or Gudmund Hatt in Larsen's paper.14

Varieties of wartime experience

The various continental European geographers featured in this special issue experienced World War II in different ways in different theatres and phases of the conflict, and through different kinds of activities. Their lives and work were shaped by various forms and degrees of complicity in the destructive and deadly upheavals of conflict. That included for some nonparticipation and enforced silence; for others deportation and extermination; for yet others clandestine and open resistance to

Moral geographies

Each paper shows that war is both an abstract and corporeal undertaking. Violence and killing are perpetrated both at a distance (say, as maps and spatial schemes) and at close quarters. Furthermore, all the geographers discussed here felt morally impelled to think about and to justify their actions and representations. As the different cases of de Martonne, Hatt, the Haushofers and Rado (in particular) suggest, some of those moral justifications were blunt and assured, whereas others were

‘Major’ and ‘minor’ historical geographies

World War II begs important questions not just about the purpose of studying the historical geography of the discipline's relations with war, but also about the position(s) from which such relations are viewed. The importance of looking beyond American and British experience formed our initial motivation for this special issue. But in the process of compiling it another significant – and twofold – locational issue came into view: the dominance of, and need to supplement, German and Soviet

Conclusion

It may be argued that geography was made for war. Matt Farish writes that geography is ‘primarily a military idea and tool, a strategic form of knowledge about the world’.27 Consequently, to wage war is to practice geography. It is part and parcel of the very project of war. Given this disciplinary and operational congruence, it is surprising that there have not been more studies of geography within war settings,

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