Walter Christaller under the Versailles Regime

Between geometry and Landschaft

Abstract

This paper examines the circumstances under which Christaller got involved with Nazi Germany through the applied work of his central place theory. This research theme has not yet been fully elucidated in previous studies. After Christaller published his doctoral dissertation, Central Places in Southern Germany (Christaller 1933), he was employed by Walther Vogel in 1934, who taught State Science and Historical Geography at the University of Berlin, to work together and make a historical atlas of the German Reich. Vogel’s invitation could be attributed to central place theory’s potential to provide a theoretical basis to Weitzel’s (1931) territorial reorganization plan of Germany or the “Frankfurt Plan for the Reich Reform,” highly regarded by Vogel, who had a profound interest in the same.Christaller devoted himself to his study at the Institute of Local Government Science of the University of Berlin, while thinking deeply about administrative geography as he drew maps of political territories in medieval Germany. Research funds granted by this Institution made it possible for Christaller to visit many local governments in the country. In 1937 he published his second book, Rural Settlement Patterns in the German Reich and their Relationship to the Organization of Local Government, which was later accepted as his habilitation thesis by Freiburg University.Before the discontinuance of the atlas-making project due to Vogel’s death in 1938, Christaller moved to Freiburg University as Assistant at the newly established Institute of Local Government Science. This job was offered by Friedrich Metz, an intimate of Robert Gradmann who was Christaller’s former supervisor. Metz was much interested in the issue of Germany’s western border. Both Gradmann, a patrioticconservative, and Metz, a radical-nationalist, longed for the recovery of lost territories of the German Reich. Consequently, Central Places in Southern Germany (Christaller 1933), which theoretically argued that the central place system in southwestern Germany extended over the border between Germany and France, was a desirable academic work for Gradmann and Metz, who considered the ceded territories, Elsas and Lothringen (or Alsace and Lorraine in French, respectively), to originally be German possessions. Such an understanding of Christaller’s book suggests the book to be controversial, involving a territorial issue concerning the extent of “southern Germany.”During his research work at the Institute of Local Government Science of the University of Berlin, Christaller was convinced that local government science and its relevant disciplines lacked studies from the spatial perspective. Thus, he proposed a new research field, Kommunalgeographie or “local government geography,” as a subfield of settlement geography. Christaller (1934) appeared in Jahrbuch fur Kommunalwissenschaft, a journal published by the Institute of Local Government Science of the University of Berlin. The paper discussed the reorganization of administrative areas in Germany, with aim to apply central place theory to this issue. In addition, it was not only partially concerned with a model of mixed central place hierarchy, later applied by Christaller to plan the reorganization of the central settlement system in the incorporated Eastern territories, but also related to proposing “local government geography.”