ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three leading personalities, whose ideas and substantive works have had repercussions not only on their special fields, but also on geographic scholarship in general and on the public interest. It have selected the following as such leaders, Hermann Lautensach, Carl Troll, and Hans Bobek. Hermann Lautensach, who reached his eightieth year on September 20th, in the words of Carl Troll, the undisputed master of research in regional geography in Germany. Lautensach, says Troll, is one of the few living geographers who have researched in fields of both physical and cultural geography, encouraged to this end by his pursuit of regional geography. Troll's views of the purpose of geography are discussed in the first volume of the Bonner Geographischen Abhandlungen which he established in 1947. Bobek's emphasis on the appraisal of function as the key to the geographical interpretation of cities lies behind all his subsequent work on the theory of social geography.
