Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum

German Studies Association

Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum Author(s): Woodruff D. Smith Source: German Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb., 1980), pp. 51-68 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1429483 . Accessed: 03/08/2013 09:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum

Woodruff D. Smith University of Texas at San Antonio Lebensraum is probably the best known of all twentieth century German political terms. Until the collapse of 1945,it was also extraordinarily successful. From the early 1920s, radical conservatives assembled popular support by demanding an expansion of Germany's Lebensraum. The genuine belief of many Nazi leaders in the concept of Lebensraum helped bring about Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941 and the subsequent "resettlement" programs in Eastern Europe.' Lebensraum was therefore successful according to two criteria of efficacy for political concepts: it helped to aggregate support for its employers, and it was accepted by those employers as a basis for policymaking. That disastrous consequences followed from its success stemmed from the lack of correspondence between the concept and the social reality that it was supposed to explain. Among the reasons for Lebensraum's political success and for its inherent lack of reality, the nature of its intellectual origins was probably the most important. Lebensraum possessed an aura of scientific respectability which it derived from the high academic reputations of its originator and some of its twentieth

1. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, tr. by Jean Steinberg (New York, 1970), pp. 250, 400-20, 494; Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (2 vols.; New York, 1973),1: pp. xxxiv, 81-82, 111-31,211.


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century proponents. At the same time, Lebensraum fit very neatly after 1918 into the ideological framework of the German right and of popular conservative literature.2 Its ready adoption by conservatives was in part due to the fact that Lebensraum, from its first formulation in the 1890s, was replete with easilyrecognized conservative ideological components. Lebensraum legitimized partisan political ideas by tying them together in a respectable scientific framework, and thus became highly attractive to people already inclined to accept German radical conservatism. Lebensraum's mixed scientific and ideological origins were therefore crucial to its narrow political success. They also led to its ultimate failure as guide for policy, since its ideological elements were based upon very incorrect perceptions of society. The term "Lebensraum" was first used in its classic sense in the 1890s by the renowned Leipzig University geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who published its most cogent statement in an essay in 1901.3Ratzel presented Lebensraum as a uniform factor underlying biological change and the relationship between living species and their environments. Fascinated by the variety of living nature, Ratzel believed that the only "laws" that could be applied to it were complex, probabilistic and very un-Newtonian statements of general tendency.4 He was willing to confront great masses of data and to take a broader view of the scientific method than were the doctrinaire positivists. This was an intellectual advantage for Ratzel (and other German scientists), but it was a danger as well. Contradictions contained within Ratzel's theories tended to be disguised as mere complexities. Ratzel's method of presenting multiple examples of whatever point he wanted to make was exhaustive but not rigorous. Often he proved nothing more than his ability to use in

2. See, for example, Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich, 1926). 3. Friedrich Ratzel, "Der Lebensraum. Eine biogeographische Studie," in

K. Bicher, K. V. Fricker, et al., Festgaben fir Albert Schiffle zur siebensigen Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages am 24. Februar 1901 (Tubingen, 1901), pp. 101-89.

4. For sympathetic discussions of Ratzel's thought and career, see Harriet

Wanklyn (Mrs. J. A. Steers),

Friedrich

Ratzel. A Biographical

Memoir and

Bibliography (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 40-43, and Gunther Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Geographen (Stuttgart, 1977). For a less

sympathetic assessment, especially of Ratzel as an ethnologist, see Wilhelm E. Muhlmann,

Geschichte

Bonn, 1968),pp. 124-27.

der Anthropologie

(2nd ed.; Frankfurt


am Main and

Woodruff D. Smith

53

many different ways the vocabulary suggested by his original thesis.5 But it all looked authoritative; and of course much of it was, since Ratzel was usually careful and observant. His methods, however, allowed him (consciously or unconsciously) to transfer nonscientific ideas into a scientific context and then to "prove" their validity through repetition rather than through a conscientious attempt to falsify hypotheses. His procedure with Lebensraum followed this pattern. Ratzel defined Lebensraum as the geographical surface area required to support a living species at its current population size and mode of existence.6 The exact boundaries of a species' Lebensraum were relative to its members' metabolic requirements and environment, and expanded as population grew. Lebensraum seemed to place Darwinian natural selection in a spatial and environmental dimension. A species' adaptation to its total environment led to evolutionary success and a tendency to spread. Without impediments, a species and its Lebensraum would expand to cover the area of an everwidening circle, but in' reality the nature and direction of were determined by surface geography, expansion environmental changes, and confrontation with other life forms. In each of these cases, further adaptation was required, and in the last case the familiar Darwinian struggle for existence took place if the newly-confronted species required the same physical resources. The history of any species, including man, was thus the story of its changing patterns of adaptation to its Lebensraum. Man's prime means of adaptation was culture, which Ratzel saw as technology, intellectual traits, and social organization. A state, for example, was simply the result of a particular people's adaptation to an environment. The form that a state or an entire culture took was therefore shaped by the relationship to Lebensraum and the struggle for it. Ratzel supported these conclusions about humans by citing what he called similar processes among literally hundreds of other species.7

5. Muhlmann, Geschichte der Anthropologie, pp. 124-27. 6. Friedrich Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben. Eine vergleichende Erdkunde (2 vols.; Leipzig and Vienna, 1901), 1: pp. 590-606. 7. Ibid., 2: pp. 3-17, 578-82, 652-77; Ratzel, "Lebensraum," pp. 101-89; Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (3rd ed.; Munich and Berlin, 1923),pp. 132.



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The unit of Ratzel's analysis for humans was the Volk, primarily a cultural entity in which race played a relatively minor role. Ratzel argued that most Vblker were racially mixed, and he attacked the idea that race was the primary explanatory factor in human history.8 His alternative use of the Volk, however, was very questionable, especially his assumption that a culturally-defined Volk was the equivalent of the biologicallydefined species units in his overall theory. Like many contemporaries, Ratzel employed a mere analogy (between a social entity and a living organism) as though it were a law of nature. This is very apparent in the most famous element of the Lebensraum concept, derived in part from the psychologist Gustav Fechner. This was the idea that, like a plant, a Volk had to grow and to expand its Lebensraum or die.9 Two key elements of Ratzel's concept of Lebensraum are of particular interest here. One was the heavy emphasis that he placed on migration, the behavioral consequence of the need to expand Lebensraum, and on colonization, the effective occupation and exploration of new space by a species. Of the many forms of human migration, only that resulting in colonization created historical change and encouraged the development and diffusion of culture. Colonization, for humans, meant agriculture. Conquest was a frequent concomitant of migration, but only if conquest were accompanied by the establishment of direct farming by the conquerors would true colonization occur. Ratzel's was essentially a peasant-oriented theory of historical change which differed profoundly from that, for example, of Gobineau.10 The second key element, closely related to the first, was the notion that human culture depended directly on the working of the land. The roots of cultural advance for any Volk lay in its methods of agriculture; truly successful peoples were those with effective and stable agricultural systems.1 This idea of agrarian

8. Friedrich Ratzel, "Geschichte, Volkerkunde und historische Perspektive," Historische Zeitschrift 93 (1904), pp. 1-46, esp. pp. 10-12. 9.

Miihlmann, Geschichte der Anthropologie,

pp. 124-27; Buttmann, Ratzel,

pp. 100-15. 10. Ratzel, "Lebensraum," pp. 126-27;Ratzel, Politische Geographie, pp. 3359, 90-121;Friedrich Ratzel, Volkerkunde (2 vols.; 2nd revised ed.; Leipzig and Vienna, 1894), 1: pp. 121-32,2: pp. 372-73. 11. Ratzel, Vblkerkunde,

2: pp. 652-67.

1: pp. 19-28, 71-81; Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben,


Woodruff D. Smith

55

primacy led directly to Ratzel's functional definition of human Lebensraum as essentially farming land. There were other aspects of Lebensraum besides agriculture, but agriculture was fundamental. Ratzel's Lebensraum had an immediate impact after 1901 among geographers, political scientists, and anthropologists. The concept was incorporated by the Swede Rudolf Kjellen into his theory of "geopolitics", and was accepted also by the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer after 1918. Its scientific vogue lasted into the 1940s. In addition, through the efforts of the geopoliticians and the novels of Hans Grimm, Lebensraum became a catchword of conservative politics in the 1920sas it was used to attack the Versailles Treaty for stealing living-space from the German Volk.12 Many of Ratzel's biographers have treated Lebensraum as an entirely scientific concept in the tradition of Humboldt and Darwin, which was taken over by politicians for purposes never intended by Ratzel.'3 But social science is seldom completely divorced from contemporary politics, especially in the case of someone like Ratzel who was also a prominent journalist and an active political participant. There are in Ratzel's scientific writings, especially in his treatment of Lebensraum, a great many significant places where the influence of conservative political ideologies can be clearly discerned. We shall concentrate here on the two key elements of Lebensraum previously noted: the concept of agrarian primacy, and colonization. Ratzel ascribed his emphasis on agriculture to his own agrarian background.14 In fact, he was the son of a senior domestic servant of the Grand Duke of Baden, and he grew up in a house in the ducal park, an idyllic setting which became no less idyllic in his memory as he grew older. In his late teens and early twenties, while preparing for university entrance, Ratzel worked as an apothecary in small southwest German and Swiss villages where he presumably came into contact with rural life.

12. Rudolf Kjellen, Der Staat als Lebensform, tr. by J. Sandmeier (4th ed.; Berlin, 1924), pp. 25-26; Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action (New York, 1942),pp. 49-52;Fritz Hesse, "Das Gesetz der wachsenden Raume," Zeitschriftfiir Geopolitik 1 (1924)pp. 1-4;Kurt Vowinckel, "Zum Begriff Lebensraum," Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik 16 (1939),p. 638;Grimm, Volk ohne Raum. 13. Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel, pp. 36-40;Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 88-95. 14. Friedrich Ratzel, Jugenderinnerungen (Munich, 1966),pp. 107-47.


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Ratzel's experience of agriculture itself was thus, at best, secondhand. Childhood in a ducal park was probably more conducive to a standard nineteenth century romantic view of rural life than to an accurate understanding of the realities of farming. Ratzel was never again personally connected with rural society after he entered Heidelberg University in the 1860s, never developed expertise in the academic study of agriculture, and subscribed throughout his career to an idealized, essentially literary view of agrarian life, in which happiness and moral rectitude were to be found in interaction between man and nature.15If the origins of Ratzel's agrarianism are to be sought in his background, they probably lie in his family's lower middle-class status, in his academic career, and in his politics. Ratzel prided himself not only on his attachment to nature and the countryside, but also on the fact that he came from virtuous lower middle-class stock.16His adolescence coincided with the growth of a distinct lower middle class consciousness among the shopkeepers, artisans, and pre-industrial "white collar" workers who were collectively described as the Mittelstand.'7 This growth was due in part to a recognition of the dangers to the status and economic well-being of the Mittelstand inherent in an expanding industrial society, and it paralleled similar developments among other segments of the population. It led as early as the 1850s to the appearance of moderately antiindustrial and anti-modernist ideologies which evolved from political attitudes already held by many Kleinbuirger.'8 One aspect of Mittelstand conservative ideology focused upon an idealized image of the pre-industrial peasant, drawn in large part from literary Romanticism but now expanded into the basis of a vague lower middle class political ideology.'9 15. Ibid.; Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 14-29. 16. Ratzel, Jugenderinnerungen, esp. p. 135. 17. A great deal of attention has recently been paid to the Mittelstand in German history. See Herman Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes in Germany 1914-1933(Princeton, 1969),pp. 3-12, and Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (Beverley Hills, 1974). 18. Lebovics, Social Conservatism, pp. 3-12;George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964),pp. 13-51;Donald G. Rohr, The Origins of Social Liberalism in Germany (Chicago, 1963),pp. 104-30. 19. Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 52-66, 108-25;Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (Garden City, New York, 1965),pp. 82-101.


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Kleinbiirger agrarianism accompanied the decline of real peasant agriculture, but its main appeal was to urban dwellers. Idealized agrarian imagery offered a strong contrast to the obvious ills of an industrial society increasingly distrusted by the traditional lower middle class: rural space versus urban crowding and violence, etc. Ratzel, with his Kleinbiirger origins, was clearly influenced by lower middle class agrarianism from an early period. Its effects can be seen in his emphasis in his early work on the importance of free peasant culture to a successful society.20

A second factor in Ratzel's social background which may have influenced his concept of agrarian primacy was his professional situation as an academic and geographer. In the late nineteenth century, German academics probably tended on the whole to move to the right in politics.21 Many who had been moderate liberals in 1848became avowed conservatives after the 1860s.Others who continued to belong to liberal political parties tended to assume socially conservative attitudes - to decry the materialism, social dislocation, and lack of cultural roots implicit in modern industrial society. Young academics, such as Ratzel, who entered academe in the late 1860s and the 1870s, were introduced into a profession whose assumptions and mode of political expression were largely conservative. Ratzel's own political associations, which had been vaguely liberal in the early 1870s,turned decisively to the right after his full-time entry into academic employment in the mid-1870s.22 Perhaps the most likely reason for the conservative turn of Bismarckian academic life was fear on the part of academics in non-scientific fields that industrialization and social change would make their skills less relevant to society and lower their status.23These attitudes, originally peculiar to the "humanities," became generalized in the second half of the century because of the high prestige of the most conservative disciplines. Thus, to play the role of an academic properly meant taking on

20. See, for example, Friedrich Ratzel, "Arakan unter britischer Regierung," Globus 30 (1876), pp. 284-85. 21. On the academic profession, see Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933(Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 14-80,253-69. 22. Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 30-36, 51-60. 23. Ringer, German Mandarins, pp. 14-80.


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conservative attitudes. Agrarianism was popular among academics, as among the Mittelstand, because its imagery symbolized the negation of industrialization and all its works. In addition, agrarianism offered academics a useful political link to a middle class public. Although Ratzel was trained in science and showed little fear of disciplinary obsolescence, the general attitudes of his profession probably affected his thinking. Ratzel, largely selftaught at the secondary school level, had not acquired the humanistic educational background of his colleagues. Like many scientists, he was eager to find acceptance from the established role-models of German academe by other means. As a result, he tended to follow the political and social opinions prevailing in the universities, among which were academic social conservatism and intellectual agrarianism.24 Another source of anti-modernism in German academic and intellectual life was the career structure of the university system. An excess of university graduates, the small number of academic job openings, and the token payment given junior university faculty created an unpleasant outlook for many graduates desiring to go into teaching. In many cases, this was translated into a dislike of the social changes which appeared to have led to rejection, and thus to an anti-modernist outlook.25 Ratzel experienced some aspects of this career-squeeze in his mid-twenties. After taking his doctorate in zoology in 1868, he was unable to find a job. He wrote a popular exposition of Darwin and then became a travel correspondent for the Kolnische Zeitung and other journals.26 Through his travels in the United States and elsewhere in the 1870s, he became interested in geography, and through his journalism he acquired the reputation that led to his first teaching position at the Munich Technische Hochschule, and also to his role as a political commentator. The delay Ratzel experienced in the start of his academic career may have made him sympathetic to criticisms of modern society. His criticism, though, was likely to be of a 24.

Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 190-203; Buttmann,

29.

Ratzel, pp. 20-

25. Ringer, German Mandarins, pp. 42-61. 26. Fritz Ratzel, Sein und Werden der organischen Welt. Eine populidre Schbpfungsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1869). Friedrich Ratzel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (2 vols.; Munich, 1878, 1880), is based on Ratzel's journalistic reports from the United States.


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respectable conservative sort that would not spoil whatever career chances came along. Ratzel remained a journalist as well as an academic to the end of his life. One of the sources of his literary popularity was his ability to combine both roles, relating his scientific work to current social concerns.27 Ratzel's political associations may also have directed him toward agrarianism. He was a fairly prominent adherent of the conservative wing of the National Liberal party, which was characterized in the 1870s by a very weak commitment to political reform and very strong support of nationalism and Bismarck.28 Many of Ratzel's older party associates were moderate 1848 liberals who had accepted the Bismarckian unification and had been driven ideologically to the right by the growth of working-class socialism. Ratzel's early journalistic work was for moderate liberal newspapers like the Kolnische Zeitung, and later he wrote primarily for Die Grenzboten, itself a symbol of the National Liberals' drift toward conservatism.29 The National Liberals fell on hard times after Bismarck's 1879tariffs caused the party to split and after Bismarck ceased to rely on them as his main political support. Ratzel participated in the National Liberals' attempt to find a new ideological foundation and a social basis of support in the 1880sand 90s. He helped to lead them into a strongly colonialist position in the mid80s, and he remained an important figure as the right-wing National Liberals turned toward social conservatism and antimodernism in a search for support from the Mittelstand.30These new ideological directions included advocacy of state intervention to protect traditional occupations, and sometimes

27. Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 56-60. Ratzel's combination of roles can be seen in his many political articles. See, for example, his unsigned article "Volker und Raume," Die Grenzboten 53 (1894), pp. 1-10. 28. For Ratzel as a political publicist, see his National Liberal colonialist Wider die Reichsnbrgler. Ein Wort zur Kolonialfrage aus pamphlet Wdhlerkreisen (Munich, 1884). 29. For an idea of the proportions of Ratzel's articles that appeared in particular journals, see the bibliography in Wanklyn, Ratzel, p. 45ff. For an example of Die Grenzboten's political stance, see the editorial on "Die innere Lage," Die Grenzboten 62 (1903), pp. 8-17. 30. See Anon. (Friedrich Ratzel), "Ein Beitrag zu den Anfangen der deutschen Kolonialpolitik," Die Grenzboten 62 (1903), pp. 115-16. For a discussion of German politics in the 1890s and the role of National Liberals in them, see J. C. G. Rohl, Germany without Bismarck: The Crisis of Government in the Second Reich, 1890-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), esp. pp. 118-99.


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anti-industrial agrarianism. The National Liberals found themselves speaking increasingly for small business and agriculture, for the little man squeezed by the big interests. The images conveyed by the already-existing agrarian ideology were taken over into National Liberal statements almost wholesale. They were not taken over easily, since many National Liberals found them distasteful. However, in the early 90s they seemed to be a means of saving the party. A National Liberal like Ratzel was in essence forced either to work agrarianism into his political world-view or else to reject his party affiliation. To choose the former seems not to have been difficult for him. In the 1890s, however other parties also turned toward the Mittelstand and agrarianism. The Conservative Party, which largely represented Junker agriculture, did so in order to reverse the policy of Chancellor Leo von Caprivi of reducing agricultural tariffs to encourage other countries to reduce tariffs on German industrial exports.31The Junkers, the Conservatives, and their academic supporters advanced themselves as the protectors of traditional agrarian culture and generalized the issue into a debate on the relative merits of agricultural and industrial society. The general engagement of the intellectual community in the agrarian-industrial issue drew Ratzel in also. Although he saw merit in the government's policy, Ratzel found himself intellectually on the agrarian side, more as a result of his prior commitment to the protection of traditional agricultural society than because of any great love he bore the Junkers.32 Considering the coincidence of the tariff debate (1891-1902)with the formulation of the Lebensraum concept, Ratzel's political involvement, and the content of the theory itself, it appears likely that the intense discussion of the tariff issue was a force behind both the comprehensive formulation of Lebensraum and its agrarian slant. Lebensraum was, in part at least, a seemingly very scientific support for the peasant- and Mittelstand-oriented agrarian ideology, which was a cover for the self-conscious interests of the big landowners. 31. Kenneth D. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization 1890-1902(Chicago and London, 1970),pp. 56-67. 32. For the impact of the tariff debate on the academic community, see Barkin, pp. 131-207.For Ratzel's rather complex position on the effectiveness of the tariff revisions themselves, see his article "Der mitteleuropaische Wirtschaftsverein," Die Grenzboten 63 (1904), pp. 253-59.


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In terms of the tariff debate, Lebensraum showed that reducing grain tariffs to create industrial markets violated the natural laws according to which peoples expand and prosper.33 The expansion of trade in itself was not objectionable, but at thL expense of destroying the agricultural sector it was madness, since it would sacrifice the future of the German people. Only with a secure agricultural foundation and an adequate Lebensraum could permanent commercial expansion take place. Reflections of the political and social origin of agrarian primacy appear frequently in Ratzel's writings. For example, a common element of late nineteenth century agrarian conservative ideology was a hierarchy of economic activities and related classes in terms of their purported social and cultural utility.34Trade ranked above factory manufacturing, supposedly because it provided essential commodities and developed more "heroic" values. Peasant agriculture had the highest place of all. This frequently-repeated scheme, because it supported without completely ruling out industry, agricultural protection could appeal both to conservative industrialists and to moderate pro-agrarians like Ratzel who had connections with business leaders. The same hierarchy is turned into a scientific principle in Lebensraum. Human Lebensraum was a composite of a number of spheres of existence and activity, but the defining, basic sphere for all "cultured" peoples was agriculture. Ratzel, like certain other conservative colonialist pamphleteers, believed that Kultur as civilization and Kultur as agriculture were inextricably linked.35 A society without a large and dominant agrarian base was not, by definition, cultured. In his important analysis of urban location, Ratzel used a similar approach. A city, he wrote, possesses relationships to many overlapping geographical areas, for example the city's economic market area and its inhabitants' horizon of emotional loyalty.36But the most

33. The essential agricultural basis of human Lebensraum is constantly emphasized in the many expressions Ratzel gave to his theory. See, for example, his "Lebensraum," pp. 111-12,139-40. 34. Barkin, pp. 150-55; Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, Uberseeische Politik, eine culturwissenschaftliche Studie (Hamburg, 1881), pp. 13-14,74-75. 35. Ratzel, Volkerkunde, 1: p. 25; 2: p. 372;Hubbe-Schleiden, Uberseeische Politik, pp. 13-14, 74-75;Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben, 2: pp. 652-67. 36. Friedrich Ratzel, "Die geographische Lage der grossen Stadte," Karl Bucher, Friedrich Ratzel, et al., Die Gro3fstadt(Dresden, 1903),pp. 33-72.


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essential of these areas for determining the form and essence of a city is the agricultural region from which it derives its foodstuffs. The most culturally "advanced" cities have been those with close connections to flourishing agricultural hinterlands. In Ratzel's ethnological conception of the adaptation of human communities to their environments through cultural "diffusion," the spread of agricultural technology played the key role.37 The element of agrarian primacy in Lebensraum thus had its roots partly in Ratzel's social origins and attitudes, in his conservative political affiliations, and in major political issues of the late nineteenth century. It is not surprising that twentieth century radical conservatives already committed to a generalized anti-modern, pro-agrarian ideology should have picked up Lebensraum so readily. The connection between Lebensraum and peasant agriculture is stated explicitly, for example, in one of Hitler's speeches: History has taught us that a nation can exist without cities, but history would have taught us one day, if the old system had continued, that a nation cannot exist without farmers... Lasting successes a government can win only if the necessity is recognized for "the securing of a people's Lebensraum and thus of its own agricultural class."38 The "geopoliticians" who employed the Lebensraum idea after about 1920were entirely aware of its agrarian orientation.39 Lebensraum caused Karl Haushofer and other geopoliticians some theoretical difficulties since their basic economic conception, that of an autarkic economic area centering around an expanding industrial Germany, was implicitly at variance with the agrarianism in Lebensraum.40 At times, Haushofer appears to have thought that the prime reason for encompassing Lebensraum within geopolitics was simply that Lebensraum was related to political ideas accepted by the audience of geopolitics. Haushofer did, however, advocate the taking of

37. Ratzel, Volkerkunde, 1: pp. 19-28, 71-81. 38. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler April 1922 - August 1939, ed. by Norman H.

Baynes (2 vols.; New York, 1969;reprint of 1942ed.), 1: p. 835. 39. Dorpalen, Haushofer, pp. 7-13; Karl Haushofer, "Was ist Geopolitik?," (typescript), Nachlass Haushofer, HC 834, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 40. Karl Haushofer, Weltpolitik von Heute (Berlin, 1936),pp. 22-50.


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additional settlement land for peasant agriculture.41 A second set of ideas included within Lebensraum consisted of Ratzel's views on migration and colonization. We have already seen that Ratzel used the term "colonization" not simply as a metaphor, but as a term exactly descriptive of the way in which a species establishes itself in a new area. He did not choose the term accidentally. Ratzel was a long-time member and important propagandist of the German colonial movement. He appears to have derived at least some of the content of this vital portion of the Lebensraum idea from a particular colonialist ideology and to have developed it in part because of the political requirements of his particular section of the colonial movement. When Ratzel's formulation of Lebensraum first appeared, it was taken by non-German commentators to be simply a justification for limitless German aggressive aims.42It was in fact a great deal more than that, but it was unquestionably imperialistic. We are not so much concerned with the relationship that Lebensraum bore to imperialism in general as with the influence of a particular kind of colonialist ideology on the specific content of Ratzel's theory. Ratzel, although an ardent imperialist, was not an uncritical or stupid one. He pointed out in 1899,for example, that it would be insane for Germany actively to support the Boers against the British.43 Mere imperialist sentiment is not the distinguishing feature of Lebensraum, but rather Ratzel's view of colonialism primarily as the occupation of new farming land to maintain peasant agriculture. Emigrationist colonialism, the popular imperialist ideology which Ratzel adopted, had come into existence long before 1871 and was closely related to radical social conservatism and agrarianism. It was a reaction to the Auswanderung, the massive emigration from Germany that began just after 1815 and continued in cycles through the 1890s and which, before midcentury, was supplied mainly by rural and small-town inhabitants of the southwestern German states who were driven

41. Kjellen, Der Staat als Lebensform, pp. 25-26; Hesse, "Das Gesetz der wachsenden Raume," pp. 1-4; Vowinckel, "Zum Begriff Lebensraum," p. 638; Nachlass Haushofer ("Geopolitica"), HC 829, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 42. Dorpalen, Haushofer, pp. 50-51; G. A. Huckel, "La geographie de la circulation," Annales de Geographie 15 (1906), p. 403. 43. Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel, p. 38.



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out by the decline of small-scale agriculture. Ratzel himself came from this same population.44 Up to the 1880s, the most popular reaction to emigration among moderate liberals was that all Germans must be free to emigrate. The Auswanderung was due to unavoidable "overpopulation" in the countryside; the only alternatives to it were a swelling of the new urban proletariat or revolutionary violence, neither of which was desirable to moderate liberals or potential emigrants.45 Freedom to emigrate became by the 1860s a frequent, if fairly minor, element both of liberal thought and of the social outlook of a rural and small-town middle class faced with the pressures of industrialization. Emigrationist colonialism began as a variant to the main liberal emigrationist line in the Vormirz period. It became briefly popular in 1848 and again in the 1870s, in the latter case because of the celebrated tendency among Kleinbiirger and small farmers to look increasingly to the German state for defense against social change.46 In the 1870s, the Mittelstand, to whom freedom of emigration had for years seemed a necessary resort against economic decline, rapidly took on attitudes of emotional, jingoistic nationalism. Emigration, with its attendant loss to Germany of manpower and resources, now seemed "unpatriotic." The solution to this dilemma lay in the widespread adoption of emigrationist colonialism. According to emigrationist colonialists like Friedrich Fabri, Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, and Ratzel, Germany should establish colonies in temperate zones overseas where small farmers, traders and artisans could flourish in their traditional occupations without threat from industrialization.47 Colonies were seen as responses both to the Auswanderung and to the social dissolution that seemed to cause the Auswanderung.

44. Probably the best short study of German emigration is Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration 1816-1885 (Cambridge,

Mass., 1964).

45. See, for example, Robert Mohl, "Ober Auswanderung," Zeitschrift fur die gesammte

Staatswissenschaft

4 (1847), pp. 320-49.

46. On emigrationist colonialism, see Woodruff D. Smith, "The Ideology of German Colonialism, 1840-1906,"The Journal of Modern History 46 (1974), pp. 641-62,and Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill, 1978), pp. 9-12, 17-19. 47.

Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? (Gotha, 1879), pp. 1-

13;Wilhelm Hiibbe-Schleiden, Deutsche Colonisation (Hamburg, 1881),pp. 3-5, 18-19; Ratzel, Reichsn6rgler,

pp. 10-11.


Woodruff D. Smith

65

Emigrationist colonialism appeared to reconcile faith in emigration with popular nationalism. Unlike emigrants to America, settlers in colonies would contribute to the German economy and preserve for Germany the virtues of pre-industrial culture.48

Because of its lower middle class appeal, emigrationist colonialism became a significant influence in politics in the 1870s as it lost its liberal connections. It was adopted as part of its platform by the new Kolonialverein in 1882 and helped lead to Bismarck's acquisition of a colonial empire in 1884.Emigrationist colonialism was also employed by conservative parties and pressure groups, such as the Pan-German League, to broaden their lower middle-class support in the 1880sand 90s. It remained an element of German radical conservative thinking long after the Auswanderung ended in the 1890s and was prominently featured in Nazi ideology.49 Emigrationism was not the only important German imperialist ideology. Another ideology, employing a different colonial image, became important in the 1870s: an aggressive economic imperialism mainly for the benefit of German business and associated with the idea of Weltpolitik. Economic imperialists tended to favor small trading colonies and to ridicule the settlement plans of the emigrationists, creating many bitter disputes within the colonial movement.50 Many of the elements of Ratzel's social background that inclined him toward agrarianism also encouraged him to become an early adherent of emigrationist colonialism - especially his lower middle class origins, his experience of southwestern German rural villages, and his fervent nationalism. Ratzel's activities as a traveler and geographer and his many business contacts also provided connections to the incipient colonial movement in the 1870s.51He participated in the establishment of 48. For a later version of this idea, see Paul Rohrbach, Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (Dusseldorf and Leipzig, 1912), pp. 133-60. 49. Smith, German Colonial Empire, pp. 221-33. On colonialism in the Nazi period, see Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich, 1969). 50. See, for example, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 26 April 1900, p. 178;21 May 1903, pp. 197-200. 51. Friedrich Ratzel, Die chinesische Auswanderung. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Handelsgeographie (Breslau, 1876); Anon. (Friedrich Ratzel), "Die Entwicklung des Westens der Vereinigten Staaten," Globus 36 (1879), pp. 237-38; Georg Schweinfurth and Friedrich Ratzel, eds., Emin Pascha. Eine Sammlung von Reisebriefe und Berichten (Leipzig, 1888), pp. v-xiii.



66

pressure organizations which pushed for stronger governmental protection of commerce abroad and, in the early 1880s, for the acquisition of an actual German colonial empire. Ratzel was an early member of the Kolonialverein of 1882and of its successor, the Kolonialgesellschaft, founded in 1887.52Ratzel's commercial contacts might possibly have made him an advocate of "economic," rather than emigrationist, colonialism. At times, in fact, Ratzel argued that colonies were mainly valuable as reserved trading areas for German merchants. But emigrationism was very popular, and Ratzel, like most of the propagandists of empire, turned primarily toward it in order to keep his public.53 In Ratzel's case, the emphasis on emigrationism corresponded also to his sincere belief that colonialism was a reasonable approach to the Auswanderung, a problem that greatly concerned him. He had some difficulty in reconciling the commercial views on colonies of his businessman associates with the grandiose schemes of emigrationist colonialists. When attacked in 1885, however, for waffling on the question, Ratzel came down strongly in favor of emigrationism, arguing that Germany's social well-being depended upon the movement of her people to large settlement colonies.54 Ratzel's work on acclimatization, which heavily influenced his theory of cultural diffusion, resulted from his attempt to counter the argument of the famed pathologist and anti-colonialist Rudolf Virchow that European populations could not reproduce in the tropics.55 There was also another, personal connection between emigrationist colonialism and Ratzel's theoretical work. In the early 1870s,he became a close friend of Moritz Wagner, professor of zoology at the University of Munich.56 During the most creative years in Ratzel's life, Wagner was the prime influence on his thinking. Ratzel dedicated his first really important work,

52. Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 77-83. 53. Friedrich Ratzel, "In welcher Richtung beeinflussen die afrikanischen Ereignisse die Thatigkeit des Kolonialvereins?," Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 15 January 1885,pp. 38-44. 54.

Ibid., p. 42.

55. Rudolf Virchow, "Acclimatisation," Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft

fur Anthropologie,

Ethnologie und Urgeschichte

(Berlin, 1885), pp.

202-14 [appended to Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie 17 (1885)]; Friedrich Ratzel, "Mythen und Einfalle uber den Ursprung der Volker," Globus 78(1900),pp. 21-25. 56. Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel, pp. 11, 24-26;Buttmann, Ratzel, pp. 37-42.


67

Woodruff D. Smith

the Anthropo-Geographie, to Wagner, even though Ratzel later conceded that Wagner's theories left much to be desired.57 Wagner, an early (although somewhat critical) German Darwinian, published a book in 1868in which he claimed to put Darwin's theories in their proper geographical context.58Wagner advanced a "migration theory" according to which all living species migrated over the earth's surface as a natural consequence of life. Natural selection occurred when migrating species came into conflict over territory. Wagner also proposed a "law" of species differentiation, in which trait differences varied with the spatial separation of the members of a species. The differentiation law had some impact on Ratzel's ethnology but not on Lebensraum, mainly because by the 1890s Ratzel had become convinced of its falsity. Rather, Ratzel primarily got from Wagner the idea of migration as a constant and natural aspect of life and as the arena for competition and adaptation to environment.59 Through Wagner he also received the idea of a connection between migration and "colonization" and an early, direct link to emigrationist colonialism, for Wagner was an important early emigrationist. Wagner had acquired his first reputation as a traveler and a writer on emigration and colonization. In the 1850s he wrote copiously about Central America as a likely site for German settlement, and he was employed to choose a location for a Bavarian colony in Guatemala.60 Long before he ventured into scientific theory, Wagner was well known as a formulator of emigrationist colonial ideology. His neo-Darwinian theories of were in part a scientific restatement themselves emigrationism, now supposedly bolstered by the theory of natural selection.61 Not only, therefore, did Ratzel's own early involvement with emigrationist colonialism probably contribute to the emphasis on migration and colonization in Lebensraum, 57. Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben, 2: p. 584; Friedrich Ratzel, AnthropoGeographie, oder Grundziige zur Anwendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte

(Stuttgart, 1882),dedication.

58. Moritz Wagner, Die Darwinische Theorie und das Migrationsgesetz der Organismen (Munich, 1868). 59. Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel, pp. 61-72. 60. Mortiz Wagner and Carl Scherzer, Die Republik Costa Rica in Central

Amerika (Leipzig, 1856);H. Ganslmayr, "Moritz Wagner und seine Bedeutung des fur die Ethnologie," Verhandlungen Amerikanisten Kongresses...1968 4: pp. 459-70.

XXXVIII.

Internationalen

61. Ganslmayr, "Wagner," pp. 459-71.


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but also the effect of Wagner on Ratzel's thinking must be regarded as an indirect ideological influence. Ratzel's Lebensraum, then, like a great many concepts in the social sciences, was composed of both scientific and ideological elements and was created in response both to intellectual and to socio-political stimuli. Conservative ideological constituents embedded in Lebensraum, such as agrarian primacy and emigrationist colonialism, made the concept attractive to twentieth century German conservatives and to the Nazis. Because Ratzel was an eminent scientist whose ideas were taken seriously by other scholars, Lebensraum provided "scientific" confirmation to the assumptions of conservatives and imperialists in the wake of Germany's defeat in 1914-18.The lack of rigor and extreme logical "flexibility" of Ratzel's work made it possible for Lebensraum to be integrated into many different ideological formulations and to be adapted to a variety of political circumstances after 1918. Lebensraum's origins led not only to its political success, but also to its ultimate failure as a basis for policy. The purpose of an ideology is not to arrive at truth, but rather to perform political tasks such as creating consensus. Most ideologies, precisely because of their purposes, are non-falsifiable, circular in logic, and dependent upon image-producing metaphors. Just as the uncritical incorporation of ideology into scientific theory can lead to bad theory, so too can the uncritical incorporation of ideology into policymaking lead to bad policy. When both occur simultaneously, when an inadequate scientific theory reinforces an inadequate ideology in influencing policy, the result can be disastrous. Thus, following the emigrationist, agrarian ideas contained in the Lebensraum theory, Germany, a laborimporting country, in two world wars sought eastern territories in which to settle her non-existent "excess" population, at great loss to herself and to others.


Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum

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