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, more than an administrative and bureaucratic system lacking a soul, was an organism, a living being in its own way. And like every living being, it is born, lives, grows and dies. If he grows up he will need a space to nourish himself, a place in which he can live fully, an idea that gave rise to the famous “lebensraum” so popularized by the Nazis during the Third Reich.
Below we will see the life and thoughts of this researcher through a biography of Friedrich Ratzel a very patriotic German geographer who, apparently unintentionally, developed texts that would become the inspiration of the party that did the most damage in 20th century Europe.
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 apothecaries’ apprentice at the age of 15 Later, in 1863, he traveled to Rapperswil, Switzerland, to begin studying classical languages and literature.
Upon his return from Switzerland he worked as an apothecary in Moers, near Krefeld in Westphalia, during the years 1865 and 1866. After this experience He took the opportunity to spend some time studying at the institute in his native Karlsruhe, where he would begin studying biology, especially zoology He would complete these studies at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, finishing them definitively in 1868. The following year he published
After a year as an apothecary in Moers, near Krefeld in Westphalia (1865-1866) he spent a short time at the institute in Karlsruhe, becoming a student of zoology and later studying at the universities 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 lived 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 to these events since, motivated by a patriotic spirit, he decided to enlist in the Prussian army in 1870 as soon as the Franco-Prussian War broke out. He was wounded twice in the war, a conflict in which the German side would emerge victorious. This fact marked Ratzel’s thought and work.
Travelling the world
After the war and finishing Ratzel studies He embarked on a period of travel that would transform him from a biologist and zoologist to a geographer He began 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 represented an important turning point in his career and that would make him gain notable influence. On these trips he focused on seeing how the Germans who arrived in America influenced the culture and lifestyle in the United States, especially in the Midwest.
He left a written record of 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 the most important 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 life there happens at an accelerated rate and they bring out the most typical and best traits of their inhabitants.
Teaching career and recent years
Upon returning to German lands in 1875 Ratzel became a geography lecturer at the Munich Technical Institute. In 1876 he became an assistant professor and then in 1880 he became a full professor at the institution.
While in Munich Ratzel wrote several books and definitively established himself as an academic and prolific writer. Six years later he would accept a job at the University of Leipzig giving conferences 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 lay 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 pro-environmental determinist. Shortly afterward he would publish “Politische Geographie” (1897), a text in which he speaks of the famous “Lebensraum” or “living space,” an idea that would be reinterpreted in a rather distorted way decades later by the Nazis.
His last years were dedicated to teaching and publishing new texts. Friedrich Ratzel He continued working 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 just a teenager in 1859, when the English naturalist published his more than famous “The Origin of Species”, whose evolutionary ideas were misinterpreted and applied to society, serving as the seed for the Social Darwinism and eugenic views.
Ratzel’s life coincided with a period when 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 talk to us about “lebensraum” or “living space.”
The main idea of his thought was that The life of a State was more similar to the life of an organization 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 “lebensraum”, human societies form cultures and states taking into account the following three aspects: the “Rahmen”, which is the natural framework or physical environment in which the society lives, the “Stella”, which is the position that this society occupies, and the “Raum” which is the space that society needs to nourish itself.
His early concept of “lebensraum” did not have a political or economic meaning, 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 of German society, it was necessary for these people to expand geographically, but not aggressively.
He defended a “natural” expansion, in the sense that the more Germans, the more of them had to leave German countries and populate other weaker states He considered that the Germans would contribute to culturally and economically enriching the new countries to which they ended up, geographically expanding the German nation without the need for wars or invasions, only for influence.
At the same time, he considered that for Germany to have greater economic growth, it was necessary for it to expand territorially and obtain some type of control between the North, Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas. This idea was what the Nazis later used when they reinterpreted Ratzel’s concept of “lebensraum.” Although the Nazi party was founded in 1920, 16 years after the death of Friedrich Ratzel, the fact that he took up the idea of the German living space has led to people thinking that Ratzel was a Nazi, even though today it is being taken awareness that this was not the case.
His work
Friedrich Ratzel was a prolific writer of academic texts which laid the foundations of geographical 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 political power. Some of his most important texts are:
