ABSTRACT
The chapter reflects on the relationship between geography and language in two interrelated parts. The first part works through a selection of autobiographical vignettes about growing up in Germany and learning from family history. Through an apparently naïve narrator, this part revisits German geopolitical history to emphasize the ordinariness of violence, but also to allude to the equal possibility of ordinary resistance. The second part extends the themes from the first part, this time using material from across Germany’s history, from which explanations of the author’s practice unfold. Taken together, both parts present entanglements of environment, language, and geopolitics to call for a stronger historical and political sensitivity in geographical writing and, in particular, in experimental geographical writing.
