“The stratified record upon which we set our feet”

In Thomas Mann’s tetralogy of the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph and His Brothers, the narrator declares history is not only “that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time,” but it is also “the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us.” ¹ By opening up history to its spatial, geographical, and geological dimensions Mann both predicts and encapsulates the twentieth century’s “spatial turn,” ² a critical shift that divested geography of its largely passive role as history’s “stage” and brought to the fore intersections between the humanities and the earth sciences.