Remapping Modern Germany after National Socialism, 1945-1961

By Matthew D. Mingus

Located in the often-contentious center of the European continent, German territory has regularly served as a primary tool through which to understand and study Germany’s economic, cultural, and political development. Many German geographers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became deeply invested in geopolitical determinism—the idea that a nation’s territorial holdings (or losses) dictate every other aspect of its existence. Taking this as his premise, Mingus focuses on the use of maps as mediums through which the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union sought to reshape German national identity after the Second World War. As important as maps and the study of geography have been to the field of European history, few scholars have looked at the postwar development of occupied Germany through the lens of the map—the most effective means to orient German citizens ontologically within a clearly and purposefully delineated spatial framework. Mingus traces the institutions and individuals involved in the massive cartographic overhaul of postwar Germany. In doing so, he explores not only the causes and methods behind the production and reproduction of Germany’s mapped space but also the very real consequences of this practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780815654162

Book preview

The series Syracuse Studies in Geography is distinguished by works in historical geography, political economy, and environmental geography but also publishes theoretically informed books across the breadth of the discipline.

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Market Orientalism: Cultural Economy and the Arab Gulf States

Benjamin Smith

Copyright © 2017 by Syracuse University Press

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3550-5 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3538-3 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5416-2 (e-book)

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Manufactured in the United States of America

To Lindsey, to Isaac, to the adventures ahead . . .

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1.Orientation

2.Germany’s Cartographic Collapse

3.Rebuilding Germany’s Geography: An Occupation

4.The End of Occupation?

5.Mapping and Selling the Two-State Solution

6.Conclusion: Mapping Germany, Mapping Europe

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Deutsches Grenzland in Not, 1935

2.Occupied Germany, 1945–49, 1968

3.German student studying geography, 1949

4.Deutsches Sprachgebiet im 9. Jahrhundert (vereinfacht nach Mackensen, Helbok u.a.) and Deutsches Sprachgebiet im 15. Jahrhundert (vereinfacht nach Mackensen, Helbok u.a.), 1953

5.Die Staatliche Einteilung Deutschlands im Jahre 1953, 1953

6.Die Verwaltungseinteilung Deutschlands (in den Grenzen von 1937) Stand vom Jahre 1957, 1958

7.Untitled map of German population distribution, 1951

8.Untitled map of German population distribution, 1954

9.Verteilung der Heimatvertriebenen auf die deutschen Länder 1952, 1956

10.Untitled map from Heute magazine displaying information about German states, 1949

11.Untitled map from Heute magazine displaying productivity growth in Europe, 1949

12.Bremen Enclave, 1946

13.Administrative Districts of the DDR after 1952, 1974

14.Länder of the Federal Republic after 1949, 1974

15.Wie die direkte und die indirekte ERP-Hilfe 1948/49 verteilt wird, 1948

16.Amerika Hilft Europa, Europa Hilft Sich Selbst, 1948

17.Untitled map displaying trade between the United States and Europe, 1948

18.Germany, 1956

19.Sample 1, 1952

20.Sample 2, 1952

Acknowledgments

This book would have been an impossible project without the very generous support of several institutions and individuals. My editors at Syracuse University Press, Alison Shay and Kelly Balenske, helped push the manuscript forward, answered all of my (many) questions, and made the revisions process a generally pleasant experience. Don Mitchell and the other series advisers for the press as well as two anonymous peer reviewers offered invaluable criticism that made this work stronger and, I think, more convincing. Annie Barva did an incredibly thorough job of copyediting this book. I am grateful for her extraordinary patience. The University of Florida, the University of New Mexico at Gallup, the Georg Eckert Institute, the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, and the American Geographical Society Library provided financial support. The staff and faculty of these institutions—and of every library, archive, and society cited throughout this manuscript—work tirelessly to make their material accessible to the public (and, by extension, to me). In our contemporary political climate, mired in a myopic and fanatical obsession with the excesses of big government, I hope that this book speaks to the value of the librarians, faculty, bureaucrats, historians, and archivists charged with maintaining and preserving our historical commons.

Intellectually, I owe this project to my mentors, teachers, and colleagues. Peter Bergmann, Alice Freifeld, and Sheryl Kroen guided and influenced every page. My friend and adviser Geoffrey Giles carefully and brilliantly helped me craft a jumbled mess of ideas into what I hope is now a fair reflection of his effectiveness as both a scholar and a teacher. Geoffrey Martin continually encouraged my research and provided me with advice and lively conversation. My fellow faculty at the University of New Mexico at Gallup have been instrumental in keeping me sane while I tackled this book alongside a seemingly inhuman fifteen-credit-hour teaching load each semester: Stephen Buggie, Bruce Gjeltema, Ken Roberts, Jim Sayers, Kristian Simcox, Kristi Wilson, and John Zimmerman supported me in my teaching, in my research, and in friendship. Carolyn Kuchera, in particular, donated her time and energy to reading and commenting on various parts of this manuscript. Raymond Calderon, Kyle Chancellor, Whitney Conroy, my brother, Aaron Mingus, Richard Reyes (who I hope enjoys all the serial commas!), and Lane and Toni Towery provided many necessary, off-campus distractions. They all have helped make Gallup, New Mexico, my home.

Of course, my source of greatest support has been my family. My in-laws, Tom and Kelly Smith, and my parents, Marty and Becky Mingus, never seemed to doubt that this book would become a reality. I am most indebted, though, to my best friend and partner, Lindsey Smith-Mingus. She supported me through graduate school, moved multiple times for my career, tolerated my extensive research travel, and continues to listen patiently to my occasional wild ranting. She is a phenomenal teacher and the world’s best mother, and she has a fantastic laugh. I have never loved anyone more. It is to her and to our new son, Isaac, that I dedicate this book.

1

Orientation

Soon enough we have forgotten [the map] is a picture someone has arranged for us (chopped and manipulated, selected and coded). Soon enough . . . it is the world, it is real, it is . . . reality.

—Denis Wood, The Power of Maps

Few German geographers lived through as much territorial upheaval and uncertainty as Emil Meynen, and none was so successful at transforming himself. By the time Meynen died, on August 23, 1994, at the age of ninety-one, he had worked for the Nazis, their Allied conquerors, the American military occupation, and the government of West Germany. Despite this varied sequence of employers, his opportunism and determination helped him maintain a relatively autonomous office and staff that produced cartographic material and geographical studies during what was, in the mid–twentieth century, the greatest period of map creation and dissemination in the history of the world. Indeed, by the time of his death, his efforts had been significantly rewarded and internationally recognized. In 1969, Meynen was awarded both the University of Bonn’s Alexander von Humboldt Medal and the Federal Republic of Germany’s Grand Cross of Merit.¹ In 1967, he received the Robert Gradmann Medal for his contribution to German cultural studies. In 1977, he was the recipient of the Berlin Geographical Society’s Carl Ritter Medal. As the geographer Ute Wardenga notes, Meynen was presented with honorary memberships in several international geographical and cartographical organizations, including the International Cartographical Association (1984). Moreover, he was granted honorary chairmanships of the Central Committee of German Area Studies (1987) and Germany’s Standing Committee on Geographic Names (1987). On four separate occasions—his fiftieth, seventieth, seventy-fifth, and ninetieth birthdays—colloquia were organized to appreciate, comment on, and contribute to his academic work.² He was, quite frankly, a very celebrated geographer.

Yet when one examines Emil Meynen’s early life and career, these resulting accolades seem obscene. Although he was born in 1902 and came of age under the Weimar Republic’s democratic government, he—like many other Weimar-era geographers—was heavily influenced by pan-Germanism as well as by the study and glorification of the German Volk. As explained in subsequent chapters, after completing his habilitation at the University of Cologne, he went on to serve as a prominent geographer in the Third Reich. He established himself as both the director of the Office of German Folk Research Organizations and as an advocate of the aggressive and expansionist Lebensraum policy, even serving for a short time along the eastern front in Poland during the Second World War.

After the defeat of National Socialism in 1945, the American military plucked Meynen and several of his staffers from German territory that was to become part of the Soviet Union’s zone of occupation. After an initial period of working for the Allied military occupation, Meynen was arrested and interrogated. Once he was convincingly denazified, he was even more deeply integrated into the production and study of maps in postwar Germany. As determined by his British and American interrogators, Meynen’s potential usefulness outweighed his earlier cooperation with the Nazis.

The transformation of Emil Meynen’s life and career mirrors the transformation of cartography in Germany. As this book argues, both transformations were important for re-creating Germany after the Second World War. Every government and military institution that employed Meynen recognized that geography was to play a vital role in the reconstruction of Germany’s political identity. Mapping Germany had been a problem since the March Revolution of 1848–49, but the Allied powers were confident that—with the help of Meynen and other German geographers—they could create a convincingly static, peaceful, and final draft of what had been a territorially erratic German state.

Understanding the gravity with which the Allies approached Germany’s remapping after the Second World War requires a brief primer on the disputed legitimacy of German state territory in the nineteenth century. Located in the often contentious center of the European continent, German territory has regularly served as a primary tool through which to study Germany’s economic, cultural, and political development. Even prior to Germany’s unification in 1871, many Germans sought to establish a spatial framework within which their culture could play a vibrant role. Nineteenth-century German politicians and journalists invented the idea of Mitteleuropa in an effort to conceptualize and later to assert their authority over Middle Europe. Although initially utilized during the March Revolution,³ Mitteleuropa eventually became the rallying cry for Germans interested in the consolidation of Europe’s center and wary of the perceived cultural cohesion of Britain, Russia, and the United States during the First World War.⁴ After the defeat of the Central powers in 1918, the fantasy of a German Mitte became more powerful than ever before. As the historian Henry Cord Meyer convincingly argues, after 1918 Mitteleuropa "was reborn ideologically on the German ethnic frontier. While a majority of Reich-Germans were temporarily preoccupied with Western associations, or concentrated on the social and political issues of the Weimar Republic, the Germans in the borderlands fashioned the new gesamtdeutsch, mid-European outlook."⁵ But Mitteleuropa was only one manifestation of a much larger trend in the vernacular of Germany’s geographical imagination. As discussed at length in the next chapter, many German geographers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became deeply invested in several forms of geopolitical determinism, the idea that a nation’s territorial holdings (or losses) dictated every other aspect of its existence.⁶ In part, this book agrees with that worldview: cartographic expressions of national territory, real or imagined, heavily influence cultural and national identity.

Appealing to the importance of a nation’s place on the map, though, need not suggest that all claims of geographic influence and determinism are equal. During the Historikerstreit, historians’ quarrel, of the 1980s, right-wing revisionist historians in Germany attempted to soften the image of the Third Reich by approaching totalitarian regimes comparatively. Michael Stürmer, one of the controversy’s central participants, wrote in his book Das ruhelose Reich: Deutschland, 1866–1918 (The Restless Empire: Germany, 1866–1918) that geography played a prominent role in developing Germany’s aggressive foreign policy.⁷ According to Stürmer, Germany’s central position in Europe exposed it to an environment entirely unlike that of other western European states. His argument is explicitly one of German geographic uniqueness—a geographic Sonderweg, special path, which explains, if not excuses, the atrocities of the Third Reich. Democracy in Germany, stuck in the Mitte between France and Russia, he argued, was doomed to be inevitably problematic. Surrounded by hostile others, the German state required the installation of an authoritarian government for its existence.

Stürmer’s argument denies many historical realities, is too obviously informed by his nationalist brand of politics, and has been rightly criticized by leading scholars both inside⁸ and outside Germany.⁹ Stürmer’s critics, however, have been too quick to dismiss all potential forms of a "new geopolitical Sonderweg thesis.¹⁰ It is easy to claim, as the British historian Richard Evans does, that history is made not by geopolitics but by people."¹¹ People, though, are integral to the construction and production of the mapped spaces upon which geopolitical narratives depend. Maps are the primary way through which national territory is codified and disseminated. Although every nation-state has its own unique spatial development—the story of how it fought (or is fighting) for its place in our collective cartographic dogma—Germany’s geographic Sonderweg after the Second World War is particularly alluring. Initially burdened with spatial terminology associated with Nazi expansionism—Lebensraum, Heimat, and Geopolitik—German geographers were denazified and then forced to remap an already established cartography of their nation-state under the supervision of the Allied occupation. This remapping was an explicit attempt to reproduce a new national identity through the disciplines of geography and cartography—an identity that would still be shaped by an image of Germany but that would also be so forcefully emblazoned into the minds of the German public that potential territorial expansion would be undesirable.

In an effort to study this redrafting of space, this book offers a history about maps of Germany, the interests behind their (re)production, and their political and cultural consequences. As previously mentioned, this story is couched within one of history’s largest mapmaking and map-dissemination projects—a moment that literally redefined Germany and emphasized the value of cartography to the governments, corporations, and people operating within its borders (and sometimes, problematically, on them). It should come as no surprise that this moment occurred during and immediately after the Second World War, one of the geographically largest military conflicts in history. As John K. Wright, the International Geographical Union president who served on its Committee of Cartography, so astutely observed in 1949, Modern war is the most powerful of all stimulants to human mobility.¹² Wright might have also mentioned that those forces most heavily invested in modern war were usually those most interested in the subsequent stimulation of that mobility. The nation-state with the greatest interest in all postwar German cartographic projects, besides Germany itself, was the United States, the most powerful military and economic force involved in the German occupation. Yet the beginning of the Second World War found the US military scrambling to pull together a coherent cartography of Europe and the rest of the world. With practically no maps to guide the massive conflict it had committed to, the United States became obsessed with standardizing and centralizing its mapmaking efforts. The consequence of this prioritization was the recruitment of cartographers into well-funded and highly respected military agencies, such as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the War Department, the State Department, and the Army Map Service. Together, these cartographers, along with the foreign geographers they recruited and on a scale never before realized, collected, analyzed, and produced maps of the various world regions in which the United States was militarily involved. Whereas the United States had produced roughly 9 million maps during the First World War (few, if any, of which were ever cataloged or stored by the government after the end of the conflict), it produced more than 500 million maps between 1941 and 1945.¹³

But it was not simply the Second World War itself that spurred the production of maps. Throughout the postwar period, the US military, alongside the French, British, and Soviet forces, demanded the delineation of a defeated Germany’s new borders and prompted the difficult process of drafting, interpreting, and publicly explaining a very consciously constructed cartographic narrative. The most obvious and useful mapmakers of these new cartographic propositions were German geographers themselves. As I hope to make clear in the following chapters, Emil Meynen as well as the institutions under his direction played a particularly vital role in legitimizing the postwar cartographic identity of Germany. Government agents and institutions, however, were not the only vehicles of map creation after the war. The rise of international public-relations firms in the early twentieth century provided a unique outlet through which to effectively convince the world and its nation-states of Germany’s new boundaries. Coupled together, the efforts of the American military, the German geographers it employed, the postwar German government(s), and the public-relations firms hired all attempted to create and impose a purposeful and carefully prepared map of Germany tailored to perpetuate a cultural occupation of spatial perception.

Although the story of the remapping of Germany after the Second World War includes pieces of US history, it is primarily a story of an active and continuously self-mapping Germany—a nation-state and culture with a long and influential cartographic history. Germany had been one of the most technologically advanced states to consistently contribute to the creation of the cartographic and geographic disciplines. Its mapmakers, government land surveyors, and academic cartographers and geographers are vitally important to this study if we are to understand how a nation-state is authoritatively and for the most part unquestionably redrawn. Moreover, it is only through a study of postwar Germany that we can begin to see the cultural effects that radical cartographic change at a level never before attempted can have on individuals who suddenly do not know (in the abstract sense) where they are but have long been taught to defer to the authority of the map. Space, then, is not simply a concept that deserves to be parsed and fretted over by academic theoreticians. The transformation of space has real, tangible, empirical consequences that require inclusion into the historical record.

Critical Cartographies, Critical Histories: Destroying the Map’s Objectivity

Created by geographers and cartographers with various interests, the maps shown and discussed throughout the following chapters were clearly developed within a larger context of post–Second World War reconstruction and denazification. As a discipline dependent on both the deconstruction of seemingly objective structures (i.e., maps) and the perpetuation of empirical archival authority (i.e., historical scholarship), the history of cartography can serve as a medium through which to study the important convergences of time and space.

The discipline of history is spatializing itself, and as contemporary culture grows increasingly dependent on location-based media and an ever-globalizing economy, historians have begun to recognize the importance of spatial constructions when building their respective histories. Of particular interest are the early-modern and modern periods—eras in which a cartographic explosion of navigational charts, colonialism, and nation-state building demanded the abstraction, production, and dissemination of real space through the instrumental medium of the map. Although ancient Greek and Roman societies used maps to orient themselves and exploit natural resources, and although various religions took turns depicting the medieval world according to their respective imagined communities, it was only during the European Enlightenment that cartography gained the scientific confidence it defends to this day. Moreover, the necessity of disseminating cartographic material and, consequently, popularizing particular orientations became imperative only in the modern world—where to be left off of the map might mean the loss of one’s place in real space.¹⁴

Many historians have understood the importance of studying these spatial developments and have investigated them through several different thematic lenses.¹⁵ The history of cartography as an academic discipline, as an art, as a technological development, and as an instrument of exploration and subsequently exploitation has become the subject of hundreds, if not thousands, of published works. Space itself has also recently been a well-worn subject of interest, invoking the concepts of borders, bodies, geopolitics, environmental history, and (perhaps most relevant to this project) imperialism. Journals such as Imago Mundi, Cartographica, and The Portolan, among others, have provided academic forums in which to investigate these particular issues. Maps, however, have also appealed to a more broadly theoretical body of scholarship. Henri Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space,¹⁶ the Annales school’s géohistorie, Michel Foucault’s call for a history of spaces, and David Harvey’s critique of the relationship between capital and space are a few of the more famous and interdisciplinary examples of useful academic exercises undertaken so as to deconstruct our respective perceptions of our environments. More recently, the geographers Geoffrey Martin, Neil Smith, Dalia Varanka, and Jeremy Crampton have offered important histories of how society has mapped itself. Critical cartographers such as J. B. Harley, Denis Wood, John Krygier, John Pickles, and Mark Monmonier have chosen to focus on the institutionalization, professionalization, and political and economic interests involved in mapmaking and the academic disciplines of geography and cartography. By