ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with spatial science and planning both generally and in relation to Nazism. It traces the ideas and practice of two of the twentieth-century founders of spatial science, Walter Christaller and Edgar Kant, back to the origins of modernity in the Renaissance, when the “duplicitous” and “diabolic” cartographic space of the scenic landscape was constructed. The diabolic character of the scene is manifested by Mephistopheles’ unbidden murder of the aged couple in response to Faust’s subliminal desires. For Christ, and hence for Christianity, the devil is a powerful symbol of the diabolic. The chorographic map might be described as being literally “diabolic” in that it appears to represent diverse relational phenomena at the same time as it also frames them within a “transcendent” absolute and abstract space. When space in the sense of “room” elides with space in the Newtonian and Euclidean sense, a confusing, “diabolic,” notion of space can arise.
