Lebensraum : the entitlement of “legitimate” Germans to living space. Entfernung : the expulsion of “undesirables” to create empty space for German resettlement. During his thirteen years leading Germany, Hitler developed and made use of a number of powerful geostrategical concepts such as these in order to justify his imperialist expansion, exploitation, and genocide. As his twisted manifestation of spatial theory grew in Nazi ideology, it created a new and violent relationship between people and space in Germany and beyond.
With Hitler’s Geographies , editors Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca examine the variety of ways in which spatial theory evolved and was translated into real-world action under the Third Reich. They have gathered an outstanding collection by leading scholars, presenting key concepts and figures as well exploring the undeniable link between biopolitical power and spatial expansion and exclusion.
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Review
“That the Nazi regime was an expansionist project has been well appreciated since the 1930s, but its protean spatial imaginings and practices have been neither satisfactorily conceptualized nor interrelated until now. Hitler's Geographies is a landmark collection that undertakes the challenging theoretical and empirical labor of reconstructing the spatialities of the Third Reich. It will be required reading for understanding the intersections of geopolitics, imperial ambitions, and settlement fantasies with the topographies of racialized screening, ghettoization, and mass murder.”
( A. Dirk Moses, European University Institute, Florence )
“Giaccaria and Minca have been in the vanguard of the intellectual project of integrated geohistory focusing on cultural issues for many years. With Hitler’s Geographies , they offer the first edited volume attempting to mark out this compelling theoretical territory in relation to a major twentieth-century phenomenon: Nazism. This book is an excellent conceptual collection for understanding and applying the notions of Lebensraum , geopolitics, biopolitics, and central place theory. It also provides valuable examples of key concepts from cultural geography, including the nuances of space versus place, cultural landscapes and their emotional burdens and legacies, and emotional distance and proximity in cinema. The theoretical and historiographical contributions of Hitler’s Geographies will be of great interest to scholars of the Third Reich, national socialism, the Holocaust, spatial theory, cultural theory, and various branches of geography.”
( Anne Kelly Knowles, University of Maine )
“In reworking theoretical and historical agendas about Nazism’s mobilizations of knowledge, nature, place , Hitler’s Geographies offers an important contribution to understanding the Third Reich for anyone concerned with culture, domination, environment, or memory.”
( James D. Sidaway, National University of Singapore )
“With Hitler’s Geographies , Giaccaria and Minca aim to highlight Nazism as a spatial project—one whose racial politics required thinking about space in a particular way and putting these ideas into practice. The editors do an excellent job of laying out this rationale. In particular, this book connects with and builds upon contemporary social theories that are prevalent in geography and other social sciences, making it a pertinent and intriguing utilization of social theory to address a key historic topic. A bold endeavor, Hitler’s Geographies will soon be the go-to volume for those interested in the spatiality of the biopolitics of Nazism.”
( Colin Flint, Utah State University )
About the Author
Paolo Giaccaria is assistant professor of political and economic geography at the University of Turin, in Italy. Claudio Minca is professor and head of cultural geography at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands.
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