Friedrich Ratzel: biography of this German geographer and ethnographer

Friedrich Ratzel was a German geographer and ethnographer whose knowledge in biology and zoology gave rise to a truly particular conception of states and societies.

For him, a country, rather than an administrative and bureaucratic system devoid of soul, was an organism, a living being in his own way. And like every living being, it is born, lives, grows and dies. If it grows, it will need a space to nourish itself, a place where it can live fully, an idea that gave rise to the famous "lebensraum" so popularized by the Nazis during the Third Reich.

Next we will see the life and thoughts of this researcher through a biography of Friedrich Ratzel, a very patriotic German geographer who, apparently without wanting to, developed texts would become the inspiration for the party that did the most damage in 20th century Europe.

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Short biography of Friedrich Ratzel

Friedrich Ratzel was born on August 30, 1844, in Karlsruhe, Germany. His father had direct contact with the nobility although he was not part of it since he was the head of the domestic staff of the Grand Duke of Baden.

Early years and training

Young Friedrich he attended Karlsruhe school for six years before becoming an apprentice apothecaries at the age of 15. Later, in 1863, he traveled to Rapperswil, Switzerland, to begin studying classical languages ​​and literature.

On his return from Switzerland he worked as an apothecary at Moers, near Krefeld in Westphalia, during the years 1865 and 1866. After this experience He took the opportunity to spend time studying at the institute in his native Karlsruhe, a place where he would begin studies of biology, especially zoology. He would finish these studies at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, finally finishing them in 1868. The following year he published

After a year being an apothecary at Moers, near Krefeld in Westphalia (1865-1866) he spent a short time at the institute in Karlsruhe, him becoming a zoology student to later study at the University of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, finishing his studies in 1868. In 1869 he published "Sein und Werden der organischen Welt" (Being and becoming of the organic world)

During his youth he lived through the German Unification, an event that had taken place during the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in the creation of the German Empire in 1871. He was not a passive witness of these events since, motivated by a patriotic spirit, he decided to enlist in 1870 in the Prussian army as soon as the Franco-Prussian war broke out. He was wounded twice in the war, a conflict in which the German side would be victorious. This fact marked the thought and work of Ratzel.

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Travelling the world

After the war and finishing Ratzel's studies he embarked on a period of journeys that would take him from biologist and zoologist to geographer. He began by conducting field studies in the Mediterranean and writing several letters describing what he was observing. These letters became the gateway to a more than fruitful job working as a correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung newspaper in 1871.

Friedrich Ratzel embarked on several expeditions between 1874 and 1875 traveling through North America, Cuba and Mexico, trips that were an important turning point in his career and that would make him win notable influence. On these trips he focused on seeing how the Germans who came to America influenced the culture and lifestyle in the United States, especially in the Midwest.

He recorded his travels in 1876 with his "Städte-und Kulturbilder aus Nordamerika" ("Profile of the Cities and Cultures of North America"), record of what he observed in major American cities: New York, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, Richmond, and Charleston. According to Ratzel, cities are the best place to study people because there life proceeds in an accelerated way and they bring out the most typical and best features of their inhabitants.

Teaching career and last years

Upon returning to Germany in 1875, Ratzel became a geography lecturer at the Technical Institute in Munich. In 1876 he became an assistant professor and then in 1880 he became a permanent professor at the institution.

While in Munich, Ratzel wrote several books and established himself definitively as an academic and prolific writer. Six years later he would accept a job at the University of Leipzig, giving lectures attended by great minds in geography, including the American Ellen Churchill Semple.

The years in which he worked as a teacher would serve for Ratzel to found the foundations of human geography, especially by publishing his two volumes of "Anthropogeographie" in 1882 and 1891, a work that has been misinterpreted by his own disciples as a pro-environmental determinist. Shortly afterwards he would publish “Politische Geographie” (1897), a text in which he speaks of the famous “Lebensraum” or “Vital space”, an idea that would be reinterpreted in a quite distorted way for decades later by the Nazis.

His last years were devoted to teaching and publishing new texts. Friedrich Ratzel he continued to work in Leipzig until his sudden death on August 9, 1904 while on vacation in Ammerland, Germany, just two weeks before turning 60.

His thought

Among those influential in Friedrich Ratzel's thought we find Charles Darwin and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel among others. It should be noted that Darwin became famous when Ratzel was barely a teenager in 1859, when the English naturalist published his more than famous "The Origin of the species ”, whose evolutionary ideas were misinterpreted and applied to society, serving as a seed for social Darwinism and opinions eugenic.

Ratzel's life coincided with a period in which Germany was developing industrially, something that had a significant impact on the author's way of thinking and also on his texts. After the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War the German Empire was becoming a superpower that competed with Great Britain and was in need of expanding into new markets. It is from this historical fact that Ratzel begins to tell us about the "lebensraum" or "living space".

The main idea of ​​his thinking was that the life of a state was more like the life of an organism rather than being a simple bureaucratic and administrative structure. And like every living being, the state / country is born, lives, grows and dies. Taking Ratzel's original idea of ​​the "lebensraum", human societies make up cultures and states attending to the following three aspects: the "Rahmen", which is the framework natural or physical environment in which society lives, the "Stella", which is the position that this society occupies, and the "Raum" which is the space that society needs to nurture.

His early concept of the "lebensraum" did not have a political or economic sense, but rather a spiritual and racial one, an expansionist but not necessarily military nationalism. As societies grow they need more "Raum", and as was the case in German society it was necessary for these people to expand geographically, but not aggressively.

He advocated a "natural" expansion, in the sense that more Germans more of them had to leave German countries and populate other weaker states. He believed that the Germans would contribute to the cultural and economic enrichment of the new countries to which they were to stop, geographically expanding the German nation without the need for wars or invasions, just by influence.

He in turn considered that for Germany to have a higher economic growth it was necessary to expand territorially and gain some kind of control between the North, Baltic, Black, and Adriatic. This idea was the one used by the Nazis later when they reinterpreted Ratzel's concept of “lebensraum”. Despite the fact that the Nazi party was founded in 1920, 16 years after the death of Friedrich Ratzel, whoever got the idea of ​​space vital German has led to the thought that Ratzel was a Nazi, although today it is becoming aware that this was not So.

His work

Friedrich Ratzel was a prolific writer of academic texts which laid the foundations of geographic determinism. The main idea of ​​his work is that the human activity of a certain group depends directly on the physical space it occupies.

He also exposes in these works his interest in knowing and interpreting to what extent the territory represents a political power. Some of the most important texts of him are:

• Vorgeschichte des europäischen Menschen (Prehistory of the Europeans, 1875)
• Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (United States of America, 1878–80)
• Die Erde, in 24 Vorträgen (The Earth in 24 conferences, 1881)
• Völkerkunde (Ethnology, 1885,1886,1888)
• Die Erde und das Leben (Earth and Life, 1902)
• Anthropogeographie (Anthropogeography, 1891)
• Politische Geographie (Political Geography, 1897)

Bibliographic references:

• Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Ratzel, Friedrich". New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
• Dorpalen, Andreas. The World of General Haushofer. Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York: 1984.
• Martin, Geoffrey J. and Preston E. James. All Possible Worlds. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc: 1993.
• Mattern, Johannes. Geopolitik: Doctrine of National Self-Sufficiency and Empire. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore: 1942.
• Wanklyn, Harriet. Friedrich Ratzel, a Biographical Memoir and Bibliography. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1961.