ABSTRACT
Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) has entered 'the annals of geography' as one of the founding figures of modern academic geography. Not including book reviews, Ratzel's oeuvre amounts to over 1200 published papers and books, behind which also stand copious unpublished archival materials (see Bibliography, Ratzel, 1906). Relatively little of this work continues to be read or be taken note of by contemporary geographers not specifically interested in disciplinary history, and with respect to those who do not read German, the relative dearth of available translations has further limited the possibilities of engaging the spaces of Ratzel's geography or the ongoing evolution and deepening of his spatial imaginary (Natter, 2003b). The present essay, part of a larger project, seeks to address some elements of this lacuna. The essay presupposes arguments made in greater depth elsewhere that the body of Ratzel's work has largely been displaced into a corpus that inadequately reflects on the dynamic, possibilist dimensions of his thought, which has led to a one-sided categorization of its orientation as environmental deterministic. Further, it notes that Ratzel's selective engagement with the Tagespolitik of his lifetime is well documented in his various writings (e.g. affirmation of the German state as created following 1871, his advocacy for a time on behalf of the Colonial Society and later for the Navy League) and has not escaped the attention of German and disciplinary historians (Smith, 1991; Schultz 1980, 2000; Natter 2004b). Yet it also notes that few geographers have attempted
to grasp the significance of Ratzel's epistemological attempts to conceptualize a complex and unitary theory of space and to see the various subdisciplinary and substantive outcomes of that effort (cultural geography, human geography, political geography, transportation geography, biogeography) as an often breathtaking exploration of the varied geographic dimensions of a dynamic theory of space (Natter, 2004b).
