Hettner,Alfred b.August 6, 1859; Dresden, Saxony d.August 31, 1941; Heidelberg, Baden
German geographer who lived in Colombia and explored South American geography and geology. He became the leading German geographer around the turn of the twentieth century. From 1871 to 1881, he attended the universities of Halle, Bonn, and Straβburg.
Immediately upon completion of his doctorate, he worked as a private tutor in Colombia and used this opportunity to explore, in the years from 1882 to 1884, large parts of the mountain range system of Bogota. After qualifying as a university lecturer (Habilitation) in 1887 at the University of Leipzig, Hettner traveled to Peru on behalf of the Berliner Volkerkundemuseum (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) and joined other expeditions in the Peruvian Andes, especially to Lake Titicaca and in the region around Mollendo, Arequipa, and Tacna, and in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. These expeditions were financed by the Gesellschaft fur Erd- kunde zu Berlin (Society for Geography in Berlin). While the scientific results of these trips were published only in part— Die Kordillere von Bogota (The Mountain System of Bogota, 1892)—Hettner turned his travel notes into several popular articles and monographs. These writings give a vivid picture of life in the parts of South America he visited at the turn of the century, though the portrayal is not free of European racist biases. These publications include, among others, Reisen in den columbianischen Anden (Travels in the Colombian Andes, 1888), and Das Deutschtum in Sudbrasilien und Sudchile (Germans in Southern Brazil and Southern Chile, 1903). In 1894 Hettner was appointed professor of geography at the University of Leipzig. In 1897 he received an appointment at the University of Tubingen and just one year later at the University of Heidelberg. Hettner achieved, as the publisher of the Geo- graphische Zeitschrift (Geographic Journal), which he founded in 1895, an internationally recognized position as one of the leading and, as a result of his harsh polemics, most feared theoreticians of geography. In 1927 he published his influential work Die Geographie, ihre Geschichte, ihr Wesen und ihre Methoden (Geography: Its History, Nature, and Methods). His vehemently held regional geographic (landerkundlich) approach defined the subject as a spatial science whose goal it was to explore and represent the earth as a complex of extended areas, countries, landscapes, and localities. Besides numerous geographical studies (e.g., Das europaische Russland [European Russia] 1907; Englands Weltherrschaf und der Krieg [England’s World Domination and the War], 1915), he also published treatises on physical geography (Die Klimate der Erde [The Climates of the Earth], 1930). The latter were primarily a reaction to the “geographic cycle” of the American geographer William Morris Davis, who was teaching at Harvard University. Hettner did not share Davis’s views, which were rapidly adopted in the German-speaking world after the turn of the twentieth century, and bitterly attacked them.Ute Wardenga References and Further Reading
Wardenga, Ute. Geographie als Chorologie. Zur Genese und Struktur von Alfred Hettners Konstrukt der Geographie. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995.