ABSTRACT
Relatively little information has reached the English-speaking academic community concerning developments in German geography of a social science character since World War II. The behavioral environment focus on the "landscape" has been exposed recently in Germany as the ideology of a whole generation of scholars, are coming into repute again in the literature in English. The role of geofactors in motivation is determined rather by the value system obtaining at the time among the social groups involved. The landscape concept became known to American colleagues only in a rather muted version by way of the school of Carl Sauer, with its concern to explain the human occupancy of an area in a relatively traditionless continent, so that its object of investigation provided only slight historical depth. Observations that attribute an existing land use not to fundamental natural potential but to the persistence of social values might be mentioned as examples of the role of societal values and attitudes.
