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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the pivotal role the notion of Lebensraum played within the Nazi spatial mindscape. Tracing the complex and contradictory genealogies of Lebensraum, we note how geographers’ engagement with Geopolitik has only made modest reference to the role Lebensraum played in shaping the biopolitical and genocidal machinery implemented by Hitlerism and its followers. Moreover, most of this literature highlights a clear discontinuity between the Lebensraum concept formulated by German academic geographers and the Nazis respectively. Rather than emphasizing the divide between German Geopolitik and Nazi biopolitics, we claim that the Third Reich incorporated Lebensraum by merging its duplicitous meaning, as living/vital space and as life-world. Equality important were both Nazi ‘functionalist’ understandings of Lebensraum as well as its ontological merging of Lebens and Raum in which the racialised German nation is conceived as a spatial organism whose expansion is the essential expression of life. As such, we approach the Nazi Lebensraum grand imagery as a truly geo-bio-political dispositif, in which life and space matched with no gap, no residues. The attempted realisation of this perfect coincidence, we argue, contributed in a crucial way to produce spaces of eviction and displacement and, ultimately, genocide, and annihilation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Paolo Giaccaria is assistant professor in Political and Economic Geography at the University of Turin. After completing his PhD at the London School of Economics with a dissertation on the use – and misuse – of biological metaphors in geographical discourses, his recent research interests have been focusing on two issues, the biopolitical spatiality of the Third Reich and the Holocaust and non-human biopolitics in cattle breeding. His most recent book is Hitler's Geographies (edited with Claudio Minca, University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Claudio Minca is Head and Professor of Cultural Geography at Wageningen University. His research centers on three major themes: tourism and travel theories of modernity; the spatialization of (bio)politics; and the relationship between modern knowledge, space, and landscape in postcolonial geography. His most recent books are On Schmitt and Space (with R. Rowan, Routledge, 2015), Hitler's Geographies (with P. Giaccaria, Chicago Univ. Press, 2016) and Moroccan Dreams (with L. Wagner, I. B. Tauris, 2016).
Notes
1. Giaccaria and Minca, Hitler's Geographies.
2. Giaccaria and Minca, “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp.”
3. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum.”
4. See Cole, Holocaust City; Cole, Traces of the Holocaust.
5. Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz.
6. Sofsky, The Order of Terror.
7. Blatman, The Death Marches.
8. Giaccaria and Minca, “Nazi Biopolitics.”
9. Chiantera-Stutte, “Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa.”
10. Smith, The Ideological Origins.
11. Herb, Under the Map of Germany.
12. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front.
13. Kopp, Germany's Wild East.
14. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards.
15. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Bassin, “Blood or Soil?”; Heske, “Karl Haushofer”; Herb, “Persuasive Cartography”; Herb, Under the Map of Germany.
16. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum”; Smith, The Ideological Origins; Murphy, The Heroic Earth; Murphy, “‘A Sum of the Most Wonderful Things'”; Diner, “Knowledge of Expansion”; Herwig, “Geopolitik.”
17. Abrahamsson, “On the Genealogy of Lebensraum.”
18. Minca, “Carl Schmitt.”
19. Giaccaria and Minca, “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp”; Giaccaria and Minca, “Nazi Biopolitics.”
20. Elden, “National Socialism and the Politics of Calculation.”
21. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life.”
22. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Bassin, “Blood or Soil?”; Murphy, The Heroic Earth; Abrahamsson, “On the Genealogy of Lebensraum.”
23. Rössler, “Applied Geography and Area Research”; Wolf, “The East as Historical Imagination.”
24. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Bassin, “Blood or Soil?”
25. Barnes and Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory”; Barnes and Clayton, “Continental European Geographers.”
26. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics.
27. Troll, “Geographic Science in Germany.”
28. Mullin, “The Impact of National Socialist Policies”; Heske, “Karl Haushofer”; Fahlbusch, Rössler, and Siegrist, “Conservatism, Ideology and Geography”; Herb, Under the Map of Germany; Olwig, “The Duplicity of Space”; Kost, “The Conception of Politics”; Rössler, “Applied Geography and Area Research.”
29. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Bassin, “Imperialism and the Nation State”; Bassin, “Blood or Soil?”
30. Diner, “Knowledge of Expansion”; Kallis, Fascist Ideology; Danielsson, “Creating Genocidal Space.”
31. Kost, “Anti-Semitism in German Geography”; Wolkersdorfer, “Karl Haushofer and Geopolitics”; Natter, “Geopolitics in Germany”; Natter, “Friedrich Ratzel's Spatial Turn.”
32. See also Blackbourn, “The Conquest of Nature.”
33. Ibid.
34. Bassin, “Race Contra Space,” 126.
35. Murphy, The Heroic Earth, 247.
36. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics.
37. Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
38. On this see, among others, Fahlbusch, Rössler, and Siegrist, “Conservatism, Ideology and Geography”; Herb, Under the Map of Germany; Olwig, “The Duplicity of Space”; Rössler, “Applied Geography and Area Research”; Sandner and Rössler, “Geography and Empire in Germany”; Barnes and Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory”; Wolf, “The East as Historical Imagination.”
39. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 253–6.
40. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936.
41. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards.
42. See Danielsson, “Creating Genocidal Space”; also Zimmerer, “In Service of Empire.”
43. Hagen, “Mapping the Polish Corridor”; Wolf, “The East as Historical Imagination.”
44. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front.
45. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany.
46. Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust”; Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland”; Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-history of the Holocaust?”
47. Brüggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis?
48. Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich.
49. See, for example, Stone, “White Men with Low Moral Standards?”; Penny and Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism.
50. Smith, The Ideological Origins, 84.
51. Giaccaria and Minca, “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp”; Giaccaria and Minca, “Nazi Biopolitics.”
52. Elden, “National Socialism and the Politics of Calculation.”
53. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.”
54. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life.”
55. Hitler, Hitler's Second Book, 16.
56. Kühne, Belonging and Genocide.
57. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards.
58. Musiedlak, “L'espace totalitaire d'Adolf Hitler.”
59. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler.
60. Hitler, Hitler's Second Book.
61. Ibid., 19–27.
62. Olwig, “The Duplicity of Space,” 13.
63. Ibid., 3, 14.
64. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 252.
65. Bassin, “Race Contra Space”; Bassin, “Imperialism and the Nation State.”
66. Nelson, Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion, 72, 75.
67. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 25–31; Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 255.
68. Heske, “Karl Haushofer.”
69. Rössler, “Geography and Area Planning,” 62.
70. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 26.
71. Ibid.
72. Volz, 1926, in Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 28.
73. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 234–5.
74. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 273.
75. Mullin, “The Impact of National Socialist Policies.”
76. Schenk and Bromley. “Mass-Producing Traditional Small Cities”; Hagen, “Mapping the Polish Corridor.”
77. Hitler, Hitler's Second Book, 162.
78. Himmler, in Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 268.
79. Kühl, The Nazi Connection; Stone, “White Men with Low Moral Standards?”; Turda and Weindling, Blood and Homeland.
80. Hitler, 1933, in Domarus, The Essential Hitler's Speeches and Commentaries, 321–2.
81. Olwig, “The Duplicity of Space,” 4.
82. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 112, 115.
83. Hitler, in Domarus, The Essential Hitler's Speeches and Commentaries, 161.
84. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 109.
85. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience.
86. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 117.
87. Neumann, “The Phenomenology of the German People's Body,” 154, 156.
88. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 121.
89. Neumann, “Being Prosthetic in the First World War.”
90. Hitler, in Domarus, The Essential Hitler's Speeches and Commentaries, 225.
91. Mass, “The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear,” 237–8.
92. Ibid., 167.
93. Ibid., 235.
94. Neumann, “The Phenomenology of the German People's Body,” 158.
95. Murphy, “A Sum of the Most Wonderful Things,” 126.
96. Maull 1925, in Murphy, “A Sum of the Most Wonderful Things” 124.
97. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 115.
98. Ibid., 109.
99. Smith, The Ideological Origins, 243.
100. Hau, “The Holistic Gaze in German Medicine.”
101. Bramwell, Blood and Soil.
102. Lovin, “Blut und Boden.”
103. Smith, The Ideological Origins, 212–13.
104. Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis.
105. Blackbourn, “The Conquest of Nature,” 158.
106. Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” 112.
107. Pinwinkler, “Volk, Bevölkerung, Rasse, and Raum,” 93.
108. Weikart, Hitler's Ethic, 2–16.
109. Ibid., 45.
110. Hitler, in Domarus, The Essential Hitler's Speeches and Commentaries, 171–2.
111. Weikart, Hitler's Ethic, 88.
112. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 272.