History of German geography
worldwide reputation and strategies of nationalisation and institutionalisation
pp. 9-44
in: Gary S. Dunbar (ed), Geography: discipline, profession and subject since 1870, Berlin, Springer, 2001Abstract
The prestige of German geography up to the beginning of the 20th century and the high international position of German sciences have often been the focus of historical research. The rise of Prussia, the problematical nation-building, and the local diversity in the various regions of Germany have produced a very complex but exciting subject. The English-speaking outsiders' views of German geography, perceived by experts who visited Germany in the first half of the 20th century, explain the situation very well. As Thomas Elkins has pointed out, two anglophone geographers were of special importance: Richard Hartshorne, who published his influential The Nature of Geography (1939) after spending some time in Austria and Germany, and Robert E. Dickinson (Elkins 1990, 21–23). Another expert was Samuel Van Valkenburg, who had studied under Albrecht Penck in 1915–1916 at the University of Berlin. His paper on "The German School of Geography" (Van Valkenburg 1951) is still—a half-century later—a very readable historical review of 20th-century German geography.