Claudio Minca (editor) - Hitlers geographies the spatialities of the Third Reich

Edited by Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Paolo Giaccaria is assistant professor of political and economic geography at the University of Turin, Italy. Claudio Minca is professor and head of cultural geography at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27442-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27456-0 (e-book)

DOI : 10.7208/chicago/9780226274560.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Giaccaria, Paolo, editor. | Minca, Claudio, editor.

Title: Hitlers geographies : the spatialities of the Third Reich / edited by Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045702 | ISBN 9780226274423 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226274560 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH : National socialism. | GermanyHistory19931945. | GeographyPolitical aspects.

Classification: LCC DD 256.7 . H 58 2016 | DDC 943.086dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045702

, In Service of Empire: Geographers at Berlins University between Colonial Studies and Ostforschung (Eastern Research) by Jrgen Zimmerer, was originally published in German as Im Dienste des Imperiums: Die Geographen der Berliner Universitt zwischen Kolonialwissenschaften und Ostforschung, in Jahrbuch fr Universittsgeschichte 7 (2004): 73100.

, Race contra Space: The Conflict between German Geopolitik and National Socialism, by Mark Bassin, was originally published in Political Geography Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1987): 11534. Reprinted by permission.

, National Socialism and the Politics of Calculation, by Stuart Elden, was originally published in Social and Cultural Geography 7, no. 5 (2006): 75369. Reprinted by permission.

, Applied Geography and Area Research in Nazi Society: Central Place Theory and Planning, 1933 to 1945, by Mechtild Rssler, was originally published in Environment and Planning 7 (1989): 41931. Reprinted by permission.

, Nazi Biopolitics and the Dark Geographies of the Selva, by Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, was originally published in Journal of Genocide Research 13 (2011): 6784. Reprinted by permission.

. Reprinted by permission.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca

Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca

Dan Stone

Jrgen Zimmerer

Gerhard Wolf

Mark Bassin

Clemens Driessen and Jamie Lorimer

Stuart Elden

Mechtild Rssler

Trevor J. Barnes

Joshua Hagen

Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca

Tim Cole

Michael Fleming

Andrew Charlesworth

Richard Carter-White

Simone Gigliotti

Katherine Fleming

PAOLO GIACCARIA AND CLAUDIO MINCA

This book moves from the assumption that the Nazi project was, among other things, an eminently geographical project. Nazi ideology was in fact permeated by a broad spatial vision of the Reich and its territories, supported by a number of key geographical concepts, like those of Lebensraum, Groraum, Farther East, and Geopolitik, to name but a few. However, despite the popularity and widespread use of spatial concepts and metaphors in the Nazis imperial discourse, including in policy pronouncements, and despite the fact that geographers and spatial planners played an important role in the Nazi project, a comprehensive examination of the relationship between geography, spatial theory, and the Third Reich remains to be developed. It is thus our contention that a geographical perspective on the spatialities of the Third Reich is much needed. Indeed, Hitlers Geographies aims to respond to the growing interest in the current academic literature in Englishthat is, the literature available to international debatesfor a detailed investigation of the spatial imaginations of the Nazi regime and of the actual geographies it designed and implemented through its thirteen years of grand plans, colonization, exploitation, and genocide.

This volume provides a first overview of how recent research in English-speaking human geography and related disciplines has approached the spatialities of Hitlerism, and their relation to the geopolitical and, in some cases, biopolitical projections of the Nazi regime. While providing an analysis of the spatial in Nazi ideology from a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives, Hitlers Geographies also reflects on the entanglements between the Nazis grand spatial plans and spatial practices in place, something only marginally discussed in the key literature thus far. Furthermore, this collection is an in this volume).

More specifically, we believe that Hitlers Geographies can contribute to broader debates on the spatialities of the Third Reich in two distinct ways. First, by providing an unprecedented collection of papers directly engaging with the specific relationship between spatial theory, Nazi ideology, and its geopolitical and genocidal practices. This is a theme that has recently gained momentum among scholars of National Socialism and the Holocaust and among geographers as well. This book intends to consolidate such interest by offering an ambitious lineup of chapters penned by geographers, alongside key interventions by prominent scholars in the field of Holocaust studies and historians of the Third Reich who have considered questions of space and spatial theory in their work. In addition, it brings together some of the key contributions on this topic in geography, which had previously only been available scattered across different journal issues. Hitlers Geographies represents therefore a first attempt to map the state of the art of geographers and spatial thinkers contribution to the literature on the Third Reich and the Holocaust available in Englishthat is, again, the literature available to international debatesbut also an attempt to move the discussion a step further and propose this as a key area of future investigation for the field in the years to come.

The second objective of this project is more inherently theoretical, and it speaks to the increasing role geography and geographers play within interdisciplinary debates on the political and on the cultural histories of modernity. While this book clearly addresses the field of geography, its more general and significant ambition is to reflect on what the broader debate on Nazism and the Holocaust may learn from a deeper understanding of their spatialities and, more specifically, on how a geographical approach can contribute to such an analysis. But it is also an investigation of what geography may learn about the Third Reichand its own (direct and indirect) relationship with itby engaging with the work of other specialists preoccupied with the spatial dimension of Nazism and the Holocaust. Furthermore, we believe that this collection helps demonstrate how a closer look at the specificities of Hitlers geographies may draw attention to some undisclosed features of modernity and its spatialities. The growing interest in these issues in recent years on the part of non-geographers is a testament to the need for more interdisciplinary work on the geographical imaginations and on the implementation of the set of ideas, concepts, and practices that go under the label of Hitlerism (see, among others, Levinas 1990). The contributions from non-geographers are also key to the volume for this reason, and they confirm the wider purchase of our guiding argument. The entanglements between biopolitics and geopolitics, the pervasiveness of cartographic and calculative rationalities, and the endless search for new spatial orders and orderings are all geographical facets of modernity that can be fruitfully investigated with a closer interrogation of some of their manifestations in the regime, established by what Daniel Pick (2012) has called the Nazi mind.