Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

by Steven Seegel, Olga Lazutkina (Translator), Sergei Troitskyi (Translator)

Overview

ENG

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe.

RUS

Географические карты - это не просто яркие картинки или сухие топологические визуализации. Зачастую это глубоко эмоциональные истории о неудачных политических проектах, не сложившихся отношениях и исчезнувших странах. В своей книге Стивен Сигел проводит нас через такие исторических драмы, подробно рассматривая карты, показывающие реальный и воображаемый мир Восточно-Центральной Европы на протяжении периода мировых войн и революций. В коллективной биографии пяти выдающихся географов 1870-1950 годов - Альбрехта Пенка, Эугениуша Ромера, Степана Рудницкого, Исайи Боумана и графа Паля Теле

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887196268
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Series:	Contemporary European Studies
Pages:	500
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

ENG

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire, published by University of Chicago Press, and Ukraine under Western Eyes.

RUS

Стивен Сигел -- профессор славянских и евразийских исследований Техасского университета в Остине. Автор книги Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Professor Penck's Pupils

Many of Europe's greatest nineteenth-century adventurers, men like Alexander von Humboldt, Cecil Rhodes, and David Livingstone, found their bearings as geographers on the frontiers of America, Africa, and Asia before 1914. Their achievements are noteworthy, but the formative encounters of such explorers are often neglected. A key one came on 24 August 1912, when the Transcontinental Excursion of the American Geographical Society (AGS) began. Sponsored by the organization founded in New York City in 1851 after similar societies were established in Paris (1821), Berlin (1828), London (1830), and St. Petersburg (1845), the trip was formally kicked off by the U.S. government's incorporation and recognition of Alaska in 1912, purchased for $7.2 million from Russia in 1867. The gentlemen of the AGS celebrated over sixty years of existence by inaugurating a new building at Broadway and 156th Street, eventually the headquarters for President Wilson's U.S. Inquiry of 1917, a team of experts responsible for remapping a postdynastic world. Steeped in colonial geography, the American organizers scheduled the two-month trip with the goal of studying environmental landscapes, also bringing into personal contact forty-three European and seventy U.S. men within specialized fields of knowledge. The Harvard professor William Morris Davis handpicked a young Bowman, just back from his second research stint in South America, to serve as one of the three lead marshals. Scores of British, Italian, German, Austrian, and Russian geographers arrived with their expertise and fantasies of America, to discover landscapes pleasing to the eye, and apply for the first time the emerging subdisciplines of geography.

Those involved in the AGS 1912 excursion were pupils of each other, lovers of nature, and products of a century's firm belief in progress and the advancement of geography. The fellowship of geographers was a confraternity of scientists across borders. Many would become intimate friends. Like Penck in German-speaking Central Europe, Count Teleki was eager to learn things abroad. He traveled with his friend and Hungarian compatriot, the geographer Jeno Cholnoky (1870–1950). Eugeniusz Romer arrived in New York from Poland, also representing Austria-Hungary in the register. Theirs was a long, exciting, wending voyage. When Teleki and Cholnoky left Budapest, they embarked on a journey by land and sea that would cover around thirteen thousand miles. In the United States, the Hungarians were most impressed by the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, and Santa Fe. Teleki especially loved the Grand Canyon. Isaiah Bowman was in awe of the leading lights whose works he had read as a graduate student under Davis at Harvard. They were kindred experts and diviners of the world's great outdoors: Teleki and Romer, Eduard Brückner (1862–1927) of Austria, Emmanuel de Martonne (1873–1955) and Lucien Gallois (1857–1941) of France, the Germans Joseph Partsch (1851–1925) and Harry Waldbaur (1888–1961). These men belonged to Europe's grand explorer tradition as it evolved into a new multidisciplinary profession in the twentieth century. As an elated Davis and Bowman secured their contacts to develop American geography from the U.S. East Coast westward, the men expanded the enterprise quickly and with as much alacrity as their predecessors Humboldt, Karl Ritter, and Friedrich Ratzel had done in East Central Europe's recent nineteenth-century past.

Saxony, 1858

Whenever Isaiah Bowman looked for inspiration to Ostmitteleuropa, he had a heroic German geographer of choice. That man's name was Friedrich Karl Albrecht Penck, born 25 September 1858 in Saxony, in the Reudnitz district of eastern Leipzig (figure 1.1). The Penck family was steeped in the region's history. Ludwig Emil, Albrecht's father, was born in Dresden in 1829 and moved to Leipzig as a young man, where he became a successful local book merchant. Elisabeth Starke, Albrecht's mother, came from a small town named Pillnitz. Both of Penck's parents were devout Christians, from Reformed evangelical Lutheran families. We learn the history primarily from Albrecht's memoirs in Berlin during World War II, in which he began with a Heimat saga of eighteenth-century provincial Saxony. Penck told sentimental tales of kinship similar to Bowman's, of a moral ascendancy into German academe and his social rise into a professional bourgeoisie. Penck's paternal grandfather, Ludwig Friedrich, had been a papermaker living in the village of Ilfeld (today Nordhausen), also from Saxony (Thuringia after 1946). Such genealogies are tantalizing and often uplifting, yet incomplete. In search of Heimat, Albrecht actually did not know the family tree, or elected not to unearth it, for any "premodern" part or member of his family. Boundaries therefore are not clear. This stylized memory was a search for the comforts of provincial place, which in Europe's age of industrial modernity and war was often imagined, through cultural geography, by strained romance and mythic continuity.

What was known was that the Pencks from the 1850s to the 1870s lived in Leipzig-Reudnitz and attended Lutheran services there. After Albrecht, Ludwig and Elizabeth had two daughters, Johanna, who was called Hanni (1862–1948), and Elsbeth (1868–1930). Protestant Saxony was the locus of Penck's identity, integral to the opportunities and privileges he enjoyed as a young, white European man. An affluent Protestant donor to Scandinavia, Auguste de Wilde of Leipzig, financed his early schooling away in Munich and his first trip abroad. She made confessional identity a precondition of eligibility. Young Albrecht was precocious, willful, and goal-oriented. Inspired by Humboldt, Ritter, and Ratzel, he soon found a calling in the study of geology and geography. He entered the University of Leipzig in 1875, rather close to home, at age seventeen where he came into a German ethos of specialization in the natural sciences. He published his first paper in 1877 on glacial deposits, then went to work for the geological survey of Saxony in 1878, for which he prepared some of his earliest maps (figure 1.2). In 1879, Penck published a major research paper on the formation of boulder clay in the German lowlands. Twenty years after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and midway between science and religion, Penck articulated geosophical and biogenetic explanations for the origins of Nordic and Alpine landscapes. Discoveries of deposits led him to suggest an ice sheet's threefold movement into northern Germany. When he found more boulder clay deposits near his family's home in Leipzig, he argued that their origins were not local, but in Scandinavia. Thus began Penck's lifelong global-to-local Nordophilia. Decades later, in 1905, he was honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as one of their own. Penck in his life would become a close friend and ally of the pro-German Swedish geographer Sven Hedin (1865–1952), the Eurasian explorer and anti-Semitic advocate (Hedin was actually part Jewish) for German militarism during the two world wars.

Moving into the confraternity, Penck made his transnational career as a German geographer out of looking wider — and, when possible, being elsewhere. Leaving home in Saxony, the Protestant man became a creature of Prussian and Habsburg German-speaking Ostmitteleuropa. A geographer for Penck was a highly educated man, not power-seeking but an objective scientist, an academic who explained terrains. German geographers as such were wise experts, not mandarins in a closed caste but plein-air explorers of nature, Europeans open to outdoor laboratories. Appointed to positions of privilege, they had a civic duty to serve their governments. Penck's ascent into modern geography followed Otto von Bismarck's three wars of the 1860s and early 1870s, against Denmark, Habsburg Austria, and France. Historians' quarrels about post-1848 Germany's Sonderweg (special path) notwithstanding, the two Lutherans had something in common. Penck owed his authority to maps, states, and censuses, the mid to late nineteenth-century projects for grouping populations by confession and nationality in order to fix boundaries, control subjects, describe people statistically, and develop a common economic space. In Prussian, Saxon, and Habsburg lands, colonial map men like Penck joined in the ventures of geographical societies. This took place just as departments were formed and even more chairs of geography in Europe were created, the first one being for Ritter in Berlin in 1828.

In the life spans of individuals and countries, such modern or illiberal parallels after the 1848–49 revolutions beg for inspection. The geographer Penck did not serve in the military like Ritter. Nor was he of noble birth, or a poet-scientist in the mold of Humboldt. Rather, he secured an ivory tower habitus after Bismarck's project of German unification and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Disciplinary knowledge made him portable. He was also no amateur. He became a Privatdozent, equivalent to an assistant professor, in 1883 at the University of Munich at the age of twenty-seven. In 1885–86, Penck was appointed chair of physical geography at the University of Vienna, after the retirement of the renowned alpinist Friedrich Simony (1813–96). Touted for his research in geomorphology, he focused on the Ice Age in German valleys of the Alps and broadened himself into geology, climatology, and glaciology. Penck was not alone in his Nordic theories of glacial deposits; other geologists of this school in the 1880s were his colleague Eduard Brückner (1858–1945) and the Scandinavian academics Otto Torrell (1828–1900) and Gerard de Geer (1858–1943). In 1887, he coauthored Das Deutsche Reich with his friend Alfred Kirchhoff (1838–1907), the chair at the University of Halle since 1873, a major study of the Second Empire's geography. The survey framed Bismarck's unified kleindeutsche Germany as a sum of its regions, in effect Europe's newest empire. In Penck's Prussian-Saxon harmony of man and nature, German geography was an aspirational world science. The German tongue, the poetic language of high learning and of Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt, coordinated everything into an organic unity, a political cosmology that was also common globally to late imperial cultures.

Propelled by these new opportunities and ideas in the 1880s, Penck then made a great modern discovery of something else, the U.S. West from afar. From boyhood, he had loved Heimat literature and the adventure stories of Karl May (1842–1912), devouring the tales of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. He read May's cinematic fictions of cowboys and Indians, stock characters on the frontier. May's pulp storytelling combined racial escapism with European ethnocentrism for a middle-class readership of his era. Nature for Penck was geocoded in German space by ethnicity. Public patriarchal norms seeped into private life, where distant lines and local places of his parents' family romance blurred. In 1886, a year after he had been appointed chair of geography in Vienna, he married Ida von Ganghofer, sister of the successful Heimat novelist Ludwig von Ganghofer (1855–1920). Ida and Ludwig were children of August von Ganghofer, the powerful ministerial councilor of Bavaria. Ludwig endowed the mountainous peoples in Alpine and Tyrolean climes with virtue, evoking a fertile German south and east. Penck adored this literature in a dark age of empire and industry. His frontier space blurred into pastoral idyll. Bavaria, Saxony, and rural America were the stuff of Penck's home, a colonial explorer's open world with borders yet to be defined. Lands and oceans could be traversed transculturally by the expert's yearning for travel and curious gaze.

In Penck's passion for geosciences, networks of knowledge transfer (Wissenstransfer) and modern science occurred transnationally. Like many who came before and after, Penck saw himself as open to new knowledge everywhere. In any middle-class academic's life, he surmised, travel broadened the mind and satisfied the soul. So he took globe-trotting expeditions abroad. In the 1890s and 1900s, the professor's fame as a geomorphologist peaked, resulting in offers to lecture around the world. In 1891, Penck boldly proposed the first 1:1,000,000 map of the world at the International Geographical Congress (IGC) in Bern, Switzerland, in an attempt to standardize scale. The conservative was ahead of his time. The proposal, his brainchild, was taken up as the International Map of the World, or Millionth Map, later on in 1913.

In 1894, he published his masterwork, the twovolume Morphologie der Erdoberfläche. He wrote thousands of pages on fluctuations of the Ice Age and deposits in the valleys of the Alps. In 1897, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1831 in opposition to the Royal Geographical Society, it was modeled popularly on the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte, which started in Leipzig in 1822) invited him to visit England and North America for the first time. From 1899 to 1906, Penck engaged with the Association for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge in Vienna, to advance literacy and bring geography to an educated public. When the geographers Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) and Erich von Drygalski (1865–1949) founded the Berlin Oceanographic Institute in 1900, he had an integral role. Penck coauthored Die Alpen in Eiszeitalter, a vast three-volume study of Alpine formations in the Ice Age, between 1901 and 1909 with his Vienna colleague Eduard Brückner (1862–1927).

By 1906, Penck was at the apex of his career, a scientist appointed to Richthofen's chair of geography at the University of Berlin. When the museum of the Oceanographic Institute opened, he spoke at the kaiser's inauguration of it. As his résumé grew impressive, the filler, pedigree, and titles of academics in Germany mattered more. In the 1908–9 year, he visited Columbia University in New York City on exchange. More than half a century before the cultural diplomacy of Fulbright scholarships and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Albrecht had friendly contacts with William Morris Davis, Bowman's Harvard mentor and the leading geomorphologist in the United States. Penck's geography before 1914 was indeed transnational and transformational. He was synonymous with geography as a border-hopping pursuit, the result of global empirical research, the essence of higher specialized education. In short, he was part of a nineteenth-century civilizing endeavor.

West Galicia, 1871

Another of Bowman's heroes and Penck's own pupils was Eugeniusz Mikolaj Romer (1871–1954), Poland's most esteemed geographer after Copernicus (figure 1.3). Born in Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv (now part of Ukraine) on 3 February 1871, Romer was a subject of the Habsburg emperor Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916) and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Though later nationalized as Polish, Romer spoke fluent German and French. He also knew Russian, Ukrainian, and English. In autonomous Galicia, Eugeniusz was of mixed aristocratic origins, his family having the alternate spellings "von Römer," "Rommer," "Remer," "Rejmer," and "Roemer." It is mostly forgotten that the family had Saxon origins, for Romers settled in Poland and produced many scholars, diplomats, scientists, and artists. The large clan's national identity was ambiguous, but it was symbolized by the retention of estates from Livonia in the north and today's Lithuanian border with Latvia to the southern foot of the Western Carpathians, bordering Hungary, the Slovak Republic, and Ukraine. Eugeniusz came from a branch that settled around Jaslo, in southern Poland, during the fifteenth century.

Where Penck's linear, Bismarckian, modern German bourgeois story has traceable early modern gaps, the Romers' trajectory is also unclear in a different way. With the first partition of Poland-Lithuania by imperial Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772, the "lawful" acquisition of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria by Empress Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80) was a tragic event that affected the family's transformational belonging to Poland's early modern noble nation in Habsburg Galicia. Acculturation to high German, at least on the provincial level, seemed for the first time necessary and unavoidable. In Vienna in 1784, Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780–90) conferred rights to Eugeniusz's direct line, and in 1818, Emperor Francis I (r. 1804–35) made Romer's grandfather Henryk (Heinrich) a count. Count Henryk identified with Poland, which after its last partition in 1795 no longer existed as a state. By the Congress of Vienna of 1815, the Kingdom of Poland was placed under Tsar Alexander I. Henryk joined in Poland's November Uprising of 1830–31 against Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), who suppressed the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Henryk had two sons, Edmund and Wladyslaw. The latter was a medical student who joined in Poland's January Uprising of 1863–64. He perished. Eugeniusz's father Edmund, who also took part, was fortunate to survive. Chastened by the event, Edmund pledged loyalty to Habsburg rule in the wake of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Under the crown, Edmund worked as a lawyer by profession and a civil servant in Rzeszów and Lwów. He married Irena Körtvelyessy de Asguth, an affluent Hungarian noblewoman whose family owned lands in what became parts of Romania and Yugoslavia (after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920).

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Author’s NoteIntroduction
Argument: A Transnational Love Story
A Five-Headed Cast: Defining Map Men
Epistolary Geography
TriptychChapter 1: Professor Penck’s Pupils
Saxony, 1858
West Galicia, 1871
East Galicia, 1877
Ontario-Michigan, 1878
Budapest-Transylvania, 1879Chapter 2: Objectivity
WWI Collisions
Pan-American Careerist
Out of Eurasia
Fantasy Easts
Apotheosis
Paprika GeographyChapter 3: Courtiers
In Search of Patrons
Among the Defeated
Rump State
Melotrauma
Victors in Arms
New Worlds, New Men
Strings to Pull
Scenes from a BreakupChapter 4: Beruf
Vienna-Prague-Kharkov
Bodily Work
Of Glaciers and Men
An American in Mosul
1925: Volks- und Kulturboden
A Sort of Heimat-coming
Revision Institutionalized
IllusionsChapter 5: A League of Their Own
Wissenschaft Wars
Asymmetry
Third Reich
Knocking on Europe’s Door
Lives of a Salesman
Boys to Men
Children of SolovkiChapter 6: Ex-Homes
Old Worlds
Calling Dr. Love
You Can’t Go Heimat Again
Revenge
Suicide
Manpower
ContemplationChapter 7: Twilight
A Drive to the East
“Before Death Plucks My Ear”
Repatriation, in Place
A Multigenerational Affair
Freunde und Feinde
AfterlivesConclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A combination of biography and transnational history, Seegel's Map Men offers new and important insight into the inner lives, friendships, and complex emotional landscapes that informed the work of five geographers who were instrumental to the making of modern East Central Europe. . . . Meticulously researched, Map Men is a real achievement as a work of transnational history and collective biography, and it will undoubtedly make important contributions to a number of sub-fields in the history and geography of modern East Central Europe."

Hungarian Cultural Studies

"Seegel demonstrates an impressive command of primary sources in several languages including German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian ... He consistently sustains the entangled narrative of the lives of five geographers throughout the book, thus succeeding in telling a 'transnational love story.'"

Ab Imperio

Creatively researched and beautifully written, Seegel uses biography to refashion the historical map of Central Europe.

Kate Brown

"In his brilliant new book, historian Seegel has shifted his focus from maps to the men who make them. . . . Seegel succeeds in making the reader 'more skeptical of national-heroic and literalist readings of lives and maps'. In this and other regards, Map Men should be of great interest to the Polish or East Central European specialist—or for that reason, anyone interested in geographers or cartographers more generally."

H-Net

"The author [wishes] to shift the focus to no longer be interested in maps and diplomatic issues, already known, but in the relationships that these geographers maintained and their transnational dimension. We can only welcome this move..."

Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines

"Seegel’s compelling new book should become compulsory reading for those who are interested in the history of twentieth-century geography, and above all, for those who are scholars of East Central European history and geography. Seegel’s comparative study on the life and work of five geographers is an outstanding scholarly achievement."

Hungarian Geographical Bulletin

Seegel has written a remarkable work—one that is erudite, far-reaching, insightful, and focused on matters of enduring importance for the study of modern Europe. Maps are cold. By comparison, lives are much warmer. The great gift of this book is that it stirs up the placid world of maps so that we feel the lived, often momentous and deeply personal geographies that lay behind them. The life stories that intertwine here perfectly illustrate Seegel’s overarching theme of how late nineteenth-century Central Europe’s German-dominated Wissenschaft culture was undone in the heat of twentieth-century war and revolution.” 

University of Cincinnati Willard Sunderland

"Libraries that focus on collecting materials related to international relations and diplomatic studies should add this book to their shelves. It is a fascinating, original biographical analysis of the transnational lives of five 'map men'."

Western Association of Map Libraries

"Map Men makes a much-needed and timely intervention into the history of cartography and geography by placing the map-makers themselves front and center. This multifaceted book will appeal broadly to historians and historical geographers interested in nationalism, history of science and geography in East Central Europe, the role of transnational experts, and US relations with East Central Europe in the early twentieth century. Seegel presents a remarkable synthesis of the events of the early twentieth century anchored in individual lives and serves as a model for how historians might overcome national historiographies and nation-state borders to write more interconnected histories of East Central Europe."

Journal of East Central European Studies

Seegel has written a fascinating study of the cosmopolitan wanderings of a group of provincialists. We watch as the biographies of these ‘map men’—smart, frustrated, illiberal, self-important, and adventurous—converge to create a ‘Non-Republic of Letters’ that sought to give national causes an international profile via the politics of cartography. Well researched and with a spritely narrative voice, this book is an original, non-national journey across a deeply nationalist cartographic landscape.

Brown University Holly Case

"Everybody interested in the region will benefit from reading this well composed, original, and inspiring book about the power and potentially destructive force of ... mapping." 

Slavic Review

"Seegel does not just give audiences important content about the history of geography and the geography of history, but the very form - his methodologies- bear more scholarly attention. At one point, Seegel writes that ‘Our maps raise more questions about the integrity and rationality of lives and inner worlds than they can answer’ (p. 164). We are fortunate that Map Men has raised such questions, and we would do well to follow Seegel’s lead in contributing to a richer map of transatlantic history."

The Cartographic Journal

"Seegel presents a fascinating telling of the professional lives of five prominent geographers, how their lives interrwined, strengthened, and strained with the ebb and flow of peace and war."

Comparativ

"Seegel accomplishes an innovative and clearly-argued study on the geographers who were ultimately not spared from the upheavals of the 20th century."

Historische Zeitung (translated from German)

"Seegel has extensive language skills that allowed him to delve into their work at archives in both Europe and the U.S. This approach offers a very different look than prior biographies on several of these figures. The book include[s] reprints of maps by each scholar, including several beautiful color plates of key maps."

The Portolan

"Entrance into the map men’s worlds is facilitated by Seegel’s crisp, eloquent, and above all accessible writing. . . . [he] charts the difficult personalities, complicated lives, and tumultuous worlds of these men who, as he writes, 'loved geography and maps a bit too much'."

German Studies Review

"Seegel demonstrates an admirable passion for his subject, and Map Men can be seen as a bold experiment that touches off many bright sparks."

H-SHERA

"We may hope that Seegel’s Map Men, along with being a wonderful addition to the field of east central European history, will be an impetus for a shift in historical cartography and geography, forcing historians of Europe to move beyond the map itself to the people behind the maps. As Seegel writes, 'the disciplines of geography and cartography are not canonical, inherently democratic, or outside history itself.' It is necessary, then, to look not just at the maps, but at the people who created them and at the motivations these people had for creating their maps. Maps are fallible, just like the people behind them."

Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Through the fine-grained description and analysis of their interconnected education, scholarship, careers, and family lives, Seegel convincingly shows that maps are artifacts of emotions, desires, and folly, not any objective representations of the observed social reality. The use of archival and printed material in German, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian is meticulous and wide ranging, as evidenced by the one hundred pages of references and bibliography." 

American Historical Review

"In his remarkable Map Men, Steven Seegel opens a new chapter of our comprehension of the production of maps, showing the social and psychological tensions and the personal intentions that preceded cartographic drawings."

Austrian History Yearbook