Friedrich Ratzel: biography of this German geographer and ethnographer.

This was the life of Friedrich Ratzel, an ethnographer who unknowingly influenced the emergence of Nazism.

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

For him a country, rather than a soulless administrative and bureaucratic system, was an organism, a living being in its own way. And like all living things 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.

We will now take a look at the life and thought of this researcher through a biography of Friedrich Ratzel. a biography of Friedrich Ratzela very patriotic German geographer who, without apparently wanting it, developed texts that would become the inspiration of the party that did the most damage in the Europe of the 20th century.

Brief 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 education

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

On his return from Switzerland he worked as a clerk in Moers, near Krefeld in Westphalia, during the years 1865 and 1866. After this experience he spent some time studying at the high school in his native Karlsruhe, where he began to study biology, especially zoology.. He completed 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 of Karlsruhe, becoming a student of zoology to later study 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 he lived through the German Unification, an event that had been brewing during the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in the creation of the German Empire in 1871. in 1871. He was not a passive witness to these events since, motivated by a patriotic spirit, he decided to enlist in 1870 in the Prussian army immediately after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. He was wounded twice in the war, a conflict in which the German side was victorious. This fact marked Ratzel's thought and work.

Traveling around the world

After the war and the end of his studies, Ratzel embarked on a period of travels that would turn him from a biologist and zoologist to a 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 in North America, Cuba and Mexico, trips that were an important turning point in his career and that would gain him considerable influence. In these trips he focused on seeing how Germans arriving in America influenced the culture and way of life in the United States, especially in the Midwest.

He made a written record of his travels in 1876 with his "Städte-und Kulturbilder aus Nordamerika" ("Profile of the Cities and Cultures of North America"), a 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 is fast-paced and they bring out the most typical and best traits of their inhabitants.

Teaching career and final years

Returning to German soil in 1875 Ratzel became a lecturer in geography at the Technical Institute in Munich. 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 established himself definitively as a scholar and prolific writer. Six years later he would accept a job at the University of Leipzig giving lectures attended by great minds in geography, among them the American Ellen Churchill Semple.

During his years as a lecturer, Ratzel laid the foundations of human geography, in particular by publishing his two volumes of "Anthropogeographie" in 1882 and 1891, a work that was to be published by the University of Leipzig in 1891. in 1882 and 1891, a work that has been misinterpreted by his own disciples as pro-environmental determinist. Shortly thereafter he published "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 for decades later by the Nazis.

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

His thought

Among those who influenced Friedrich Ratzel's thinking were 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 a seed for social Darwinism and eugenic views.

Ratzel's life coincided with a period in which Germany was developing industrially, something that had a significant impact on his life.This had a significant impact on the author's thinking and also on his texts. After the German victory in the Franco-Prussian war, the German Empire was becoming a superpower in competition with Great Britain and needed to expand into new markets. It is from this historical fact that Ratzel began to speak of "lebensraum" or "living space".

The main thrust of his thinking was that the life of a State was more like the life of an organism than a simple bureaucratic and administrative structure.. And like all living things, the state/country is born, lives, grows and dies. Taking Ratzel's original idea of the "lebensraum", human societies form cultures and states according to 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 the society needs to nourish itself.

His early concept of the "lebensraum" did not have a political or economic sense, but rather a spiritual and racial one, an expansionist nationalism but not necessarily a military one. 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 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 enrich culturally and economically the new countries where they were going to end up, expanding geographically the German nation without the need of wars or invasions, only by influence.

At the same time he considered that for Germany to have a greater economic growth it was necessary for it to expand terrotorially and gain some kind of control between the North, Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas. It was this idea that the Nazis later used when they reinterpreted Ratzel's "lebensraum" concept. Although the Nazi party was founded in 1920, 16 years after Friedrich Ratzel's death, the fact that he took the idea of the German living space has led people to believe that Ratzel was a Nazi, although today it is becoming clear that this was not the case.

His works

Friedrich Ratzel was a prolific writer of scholarly texts which laid the foundations of geopolitical laid the foundations of geographical determinism.. The main idea of his work is that the human activity of a given group depends directly on the physical space it occupies.

In these works, he also exposes his interest in knowing and interpreting the extent to which the territory represents a political power. Some of his most important texts are:

• Vorgeschichte des europäischen Menschen (Prehistory of the Europeans, 1875).
• Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (The United States of America, 1878-80)
• Die Erde, in 24 Vorträgen (The Earth in 24 lectures, 1881)
• Völkerkunde (Etnología, 1885,1886,1888)
• Die Erde und das Leben (La Tierra y la Vida, 1902)
• Anthropogeographie (Antropogeografía, 1891)
• Politische Geographie (Geografía política, 1897)

Referencias bibliográficas:

• 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.