Ratzel, Friedrich b.August 30, 1844; Karlsruhe, Baden d.August 9, 1904;Ammerland am Starnberger See, Bavaria
German journalist and geographer who became famous for his travel reports about the United States and Mexico, as well as his scholarly writing about North America and the problems of human geography.
Following the wish of his father, who was a personal servant at the ducal court of Baden, Ratzel began an apprenticeship as a pharmacist and subsequently worked as a pharmacist’s assistant for several years after passing his pharmacy examination. His lively interest in the natural sciences spurred him, however, to strive for a university education. After he obtained his Abitur (academic high school certification) through evening studies, he began his university education, first at the University of Karlsruhe in 1866, and then continued at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena, und Berlin. By 1868 the twenty-four-year-old received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Afterward, Ratzel wanted to continue his university studies at the universities of Montpellier and Cette; however, a continued shortage of money and the loss of his microscope caused him increasingly to resort to the composition of travel accounts, which he wrote with great success, starting in the early 1870s, for the Koln- ische Zeitung (Cologne Newspaper). The reports were published collectively in the two-volume Wandertage eines Naturforsch- ers (Excursions of a Naturalist, 1873— 1874). From August 1873 until June 1875 he toured the United States on behalf of the Kolnische Zeitung. He visited New York, Boston (where he sought out the zoologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz), Philadelphia, and Washington (where he sought the Republican politician and political commentator Carl Schurz). He then turned southward and went to Florida via Savannah. From there he continued to Louisiana, visited New Orleans, and went up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Cincinnati. He studied Niagara Falls and then spent some time in Chicago and St. Louis. Ratzel crossed the great prairie regions of the middle west and reached Denver. He hiked westward across the Yosemite Valley, through the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and finally reached San Francisco, where he embarked in October 1874 on a trip along the American West Coast to Mexico. After his arrival in Mexico, he toured, on different excursions, the interior of the country. Ratzel visited Mexico City and reached Germany again, after a four-week stopover in Cuba, in June 1875. Motivated by his American adventure, Ratzel now turned to geography, for which he qualified as a university lecturer (Habilitation) in 1875 with a work on Chinese emigration. Starting in 1876 as a university lecturer and after 1880 as a full professor at the University of Munich, Ratzel began an indefatigable period of publication. He published numerous essays in geographical journals, reworked his American reports into monographs (Stadte- und Kul- turbilder aus Nordamerika [Cities and Culture of North America, 1876]; Aus Mexico [From Mexico, 1878]), and collected his observations in an enthusiastically written two-volume introduction to North American culture and geography for people who were ready to leave for the United States (Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika [The United States of America, 1878—1880]). In 1886 he accepted a position at the University of Leipzig, where he taught with great success as a popular college professor until his death in 1904. The publication of his most famous works occurred during the Leipzig period. To those works belong the two-volume Anthropogeo- graphie (Human Geography, 1882—1891) and the three-volume Volkerkunde (Ethnology, 1885—1888), as well as his internationally recognized and influential book Polit- ische Geographie (Political Geography, 1897). The Politische Geographie became the foundation of geopolitics, a new field of cultural studies that came into fashion during the 1920s. It also, especially through its adoption by Karl Haushofer, became the source of the National Socialist Lebensraum (living space) ideology. While many contemporary German-speaking geographers were reservedly opposed to Ratzel’s work, his ideas were made known in American geography through his student, Ellen Churchill Semple. Even today Ratzel is one of the most frequently read German geographers in America.Ute Wardenga
See also Schurz, Carl; Travel Literature, German-U.S.
References and Further Reading
Antonsich, Marco, Vladimir Kolossov, and
Paola M. Pagnini, eds. Europe between Political Geography and Geopolitics: On the Centenary of RatzeΓs Politische Geographie. 2 vols. Rome: Societa Geografica Italiana, 2001.
Hunter, James M. Perspective on RatzeΓs Political Geography. Lanham, MD: London University, 1983.