‘Retroactive effects’: Ratzel's spatial dynamics and the expansionist imperative in interwar Germany

Abstract

This intervention examines the effects of spatial distribution on animal and human life forms as depicted in Ratzel’s Der Lebensraum, and interrogates the reception of Ratzel’s understanding of spatial dynamics in Germany between 1919 and 1939. Primary attention is given not to the often-studied reception of Ratzel by the German Geopolitiker, but to the impact of Ratzel’s emphasis on large spaces in non-academic settings – Herman Sörgel’s visions of Atlantropa, Colin Ross’s aesthetic theorizing, Arthur Dix’s colonialist nostalgia – and in particular to the relationship between Lebensraum and the rise of popular, pseudo-scientific demographic alarmism. The imprecise and often allusive nature of Ratzel’s depiction of the relationship between large spaces and biological well-being, it is argued, endowed his ideas with utility across the interwar German political spectrum.