Die Geschichtserzählung von GeographInnen über Kiel 1969 interpretiert aus der Perspektive der Theorie der sozialen Identität

Abstract

The German geographers‘ meeting 1969 gave the signal to the opening of the discipline to a new paradigm. This effort eventually resulted in the working-off-the-past of geographers’ history in the time of National Socialism. However, independent of the chances offered by the emergence of a ‘new’ geography, it was hard for the young generation of geographers to get mixed-up in the study of this past. Appealing to political memory arguments, the discipline’s novel paradigm also came along with the questioning of geographers’ behaviour under National Socialism, threatening thus the social identity of the actors involved. This, in turn, forced the construction of a new social identity. The paper deals with the long-term effects of a criminal collective past on the present from a social-identity perspective. For that purpose, it contributes to sketch the development of the cultural memory of the ‘new’ geography emergent from the 1970s onwards, while at the same time pointing out the consequences of the fissures with the ‘old’ discipline. The knowledge about what happened before 1945 causes ruptures in both the individual as well as the social identity of geographers, and is, therefore, of relevance for the following generations too. Science, and not only Geography, should hence deal more with what is left of the past. Social identity theory, in this regard, provides us with an explanation of why the working-off such a past is like trying to square the circle.