Friedrick Ratzel | Biography

Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................2
Life:............................................................................................................................................2
Ratzel Contribution and Achievements: ....................................................................................4
Legacy:.......................................................................................................................................5
Quotations:.................................................................................................................................6
Ratzel Main Geographic Works:................................................................................................6
Anthropogeographie: .................................................................................................................6
Polistiche Geographie:...............................................................................................................8
Unity in diversity: ....................................................................................................................11
Personal view of ratzel:............................................................................................................11
Conclusion: ..............................................................................................................................13
References:...............................................................................................................................13

Friedrick Ratzel
Introduction:
Friedrick Ratzel (August 30, 1844 – August 9, 1904) was a German geographer
and ethnographer, notable for coining the term Lebensraum—"living space." His initial
insight was that a social group of human beings in many ways functions similarly to an
individual, organic organism, namely seeking the necessities for life and sufficient space in
which to find or produce them—Lebensraum. However, this concept became problematic
when focused specifically on the needs of German people, without regard for others or
humankind as a whole. This self-centered viewpoint provided justification for the expansion
of Germany and the subsequent suffering those in other nations, as well as support for social
Darwinist rationalization for imperialist and racist policies generally.
Life:
Friedrich Ratzel was born on August 30, 1844 into an important family in
Karlsruhe, Germany. His father was the head of the household staff of the Grand Duke of
Baden, a position highly regarded at the time. Friedrich attended high school in Karlsruhe for
six years before being apprenticed at age 15 to an apothecary.
In 1863 Ratzel went to Rapperswil on the Lake of Zurich, Switzerland, where he
began to study the classics. After an additional year as an apothecary at Mörs near Krefeld in
the Ruhr area (1865-1866), he spent a short time at the high school in Karlsruhe and later
became a student of zoologyat the universities of Heidelberg, Jena, and Berlin. He received
his Ph.D. in 1868, and the following year published his first work—Sein und Werden der
organischen Welt, a commentary on Charles Darwin and his ideas.

After the completion of his schooling, Ratzel started to travel, an experience that
transformed him from a zoologist/biologist to geographer. He began fieldwork in
the Mediterranean, writing letters about his experiences. These letters led to a job as a
traveling reporter for the Kölnishe Zeitung newspaper, which provided him the means for
further travel.
His career was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Ratzel joined
the army, and traveled through Hungary and over the Carpathians, where he saw villages with
German people living in a foreign land. This experience stimulated his interest in human
geography and influenced his later work. After the war, Ratzel embarked on several
expeditions, the lengthiest and most important being his 1874-1875 trip to North
America, Cuba, and Mexico. He studied the influence of people of German origin in
the United States, especially in the Midwest, as well as other ethnic groups in North America.
He produced a written work of his account in 1876, Stadte-ünd Culturbilder aus
Nordamerika, which would help establish the field of cultural geography. According to
Ratzel, cities are the best places to study people because life is "blended, compressed, and
accelerated" in cities, and they bring out the "greatest, best, most typical aspects of people."
Ratzel had traveled to cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.,
New Orleans, and San Francisco to conduct his research.

Upon his return in 1875, Ratzel became a lecturer in geography at the Technical High
School in Munich. In 1876 he was promoted to assistant professor, which rose to a full
professorship in 1880. While at Munich, Ratzel produced several books and established his
career as an academic. In 1886, he accepted an appointment at the University of Leipzig. His
lectures were widely attended, notably by the influential American geographer Ellen
Churchill Semple.
Ratzel produced the foundations of human geography in his three-
volume Anthropogeographie from 1882 to 1891. This work was misinterpreted by many of
his students, creating a number of environmental determinists. He published his work on
political geography, Politische Geography, in 1897. It was in this work that Ratzel introduced
concepts that contributed to Lebensraum and later to social Darwinism.
Ratzel continued his work at Leipzig until his sudden death on August 9, 1904, while
on holiday with his wife and daughters in Ammerland, Germany.
Ratzel Contribution and Achievements:
Influenced by thinkers like Charles Darwin and zoologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel,
Ratzel wrote on a variety of topics, ranging from zoology and biology to geography, cultural
geography, and geostrategy. His famous essay Lebensraum (1901), for example, dealt with
the topic of biogeography. Through his writings, Ratzel created a foundation for the uniquely
German variant of geopolitics—geopolitik.
Ratzel’s key contribution to geopolitik was the application of the biological concept
of growth and development to geography. Until then, states with their borders were
considered static, bound to a certain geographic location. States, however, according to
Ratzel, are organic and growing, with borders representing only a temporary halt in their
movement. Just like a biological organism grows and develops, it is not natural for states to
be static. The expanse of a state’s borders is a reflection of the health of the nation.
Ratzel’s idea of Raum (space) grew from his organic state conception. His early
concept of Lebensraum did not consider political or economic expansion, but rather spiritual
and racial nationalist expansion. He regarded the Raum-motiv as a historical driving force,
pushing peoples with great Kultur to naturally expand. Space, for Ratzel, was a vague

concept, theoretically unbounded just as was Hitler’s later. Raum was defined by
where German people live, where other weaker states could serve to support German people
economically, and where German culture could fertilize other cultures. However, it ought to
be noted that Ratzel did not use his concept of Raum in an aggressive manner, but he simply
theorized about the natural expansion of strong states into areas controlled by weaker states.
Ratzel’s writings coincided with the development of the Second Industrial
Revolution, after the Franco-Prussian War, and the subsequent search for markets, that
brought Germany into competition with England. Influenced by the American geostrategist,
Alfred Thayer Mahan, Ratzel wrote of aspirations for German naval reach, arguing that sea
power, unlike land power, was self-sustaining, as the profit from international trade would
pay for the merchant marines. Ratzel's writings were widely welcomed, especially as a
justification for German imperial expansion.
Legacy:
Ratzel's writings, especially his concept of Lebensraum, were used in the
development of Social Darwinism. Ratzel influenced numerous scholars in the area of
geopolitics. German geostrategist, Karl Haushofer, integrated Ratzel’s ideas on the division
between sea and land powers into his own theories, adopting the view that borders are largely

insignificant, especially as the nation ought to be in a frequent state of struggle with those
around it.
Rudolf Kjellén was a famous Swedish student of Ratzel's, who further elaborated on
his "organic state theory" and who coined the term “geopolitics.” Kjellen’s interpretation of
Ratzel was very popular among Nazis, and was used as a justification for German
expansionistic politics leading to World War II.
Quotations:
"A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the
heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is
one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law."
"Culture grows in places that can adequately support dense labor populations."
Ratzel Main Geographic Works:
Anthropogeographie:
In Anthropogeographie (vol. 1, 1882, and vol. 2, 1891) he considered population
distribution, its relation to migration and environment, and also the effects of environment on
individuals and societies. His other works included Die Erde und das Leben: Eine
vergleichende Erdkunde(1901–02|); “Earth and Life: A.
Although Ratzel’s ideas certainly had an effect in the period after world war I,
subjectively he still belonged to Europe’s pre-1914 era. This is apparent, for example, from
his insistence that spatial growth of the state need not necessarily resemble that of other
aggregate-organisms and take the form of an amorphous extrusion beyond existing
boundaries into immediately adjacent areas. Rather, he believed that the expansion of
advanced states could be a rational and planned affair, accomplished through the selective
sending out of groups of excess population for the purposes of colonization (1899-1912: I,
147-48, 167-68). The territorial needs of these groups could be met through land acquisition
overseas, in the non-European world (1899-1912: I, 167-68). As noted, Ratzel rejected the
idea of territorial expansion on the European continent itself. Moreover, although he did

adopt the view of relations between states as a struggle for space, which meant existence, it
may well be argued that he did not necessarily feel that the ultimate outcome of this would be
a general armed conflagration. Despite a not infrequently aggressive tone, in important
respects his thinking unmistakably reflected some of the dominant optimism of nineteenth-
century liberalism.
This was an ambiguity that Ratzel shared fully with social darwinism in general, and
in his writings as well can be found the vision of the progressive march of civilization toward
ultimate perfection. One example of this was his optimistic conviction that the petty
squabbles between the nations of Europe would be irresistibly overcome by the further
development of international commerce and transportation (1898: 144-45; 1899-1912: I, 242;
1901-1902: II, 676). In this spirit, he may well have ultimately allowed for the possibility of a
peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution of the existing space-need through international
negotiation and moderation. The outbreak of world war I dashed forever the hope that
developments might in fact follow such a course, and Germany’s situation after 1918 led
rather to an intensification of the ideas we have been discussing.
The overseas colonies were lost with no prospect of reacquisition, but even more
damaging was the loss of territories in Europe itself that the Germans considered to be
rightfully theirs. The atmosphere of the 1920s was consequently marked by a sense of mass
claustrophobia and obsession with Germany’s space-need, an obsession well demonstrated by
the remarkable popularity of works such as Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (A people
without space) (Grimm, 1927; Smith, 1983), or by the flourishing of the new science of
Geopolitik. In such an atmosphere, Ratzel’s postulates about Lebensraum seemed to take on a
new relevance and urgency (Lange, 1965: 432-33), and his Political geography appeared in
its third and definitive edition in 1923. The value of his arguments remained the fact that they
seemed to offer a scientific basis and justification for these concerns.

FIG: ANTROPO GEOGRAPHIE BY RATZEL
Polistiche Geographie:
For Ratzel, the cultural development of a state was inseparable from its spatial growth.
Consequently, states of limited territorial extent, such as tribal groupings in Africa, were
associated with lower levels of development. This condition Ratzel termed Kleinraum (1899-
1912:1, 236-38, 241; 1923: 152-53). The advance of civilization was marked everywhere by
the progressive broadening of the territorial base of the state.
In considering the present and the future, Ratzel declared repeatedly that the territorial
base of the European states had become too narrow, and would in the future have to give way
to the modern principle of Grossraum. Concerning precisely what was meant by the
designation gross, or large, Ratzel remained vague, but judging from his usage it implied a
state with physical dimensions greater than those normal or indeed possible on the European
continent. Ratzel did not coin this term, which had already been used in the German literature

on political economy some three decades earlier (von Inama-Sternegg, 1869: 9ff; Faber,
1982: 392), but within his system it acquired a new significance. His models came from the
non-European world, most notably from the impressive example of the rapid and vibrant
colonization of the United States, but included Australia, Russia, and China as well (1905:
476; 1923: 264, 270). These countries, he insisted, exemplified the pattern that was to be the
wave of the future: politically unified states based on continental or at least sub continental
land masses (Faber, 1982: 392). Ratzel expressed an understandable consternation at the fact
that it was indeed the ’young’ non-European powers which seemed to have the spatial
advantage, but most fundamentally his urging of the Grossraum principle was intended, as
was his entire theory, to awaken Germany to the enormity of the stakes in the current struggle
for colonial acquisitions.
It is entirely logical that in Ratzel’s theory of the state and political expansion the idea
of the people as a nation or Volk was accorded only a minor significance. The state for him
was an organic whole that developed out of the interaction between a group of people and the
territory they occupy - ein Stuck Boden und ein Stück Menschheit, in his famous formulation
(1923: 2). It is precisely this shared relationship to the land that waa wnportant in bonding the
group together, and not an a priori ethnic or racial kinship. He made this point explicitly in
defining the Volk as ’a politically united body made up of groups and individuals, who need
neither to be related ethnically nor linguistically, but who through their common territory are
spatially linked together (verbundene)’ (1923: 3, emphasis added). Ratzel did not deny the
existence of ethnicity as such, and even allowed that the circumstance of ethnic kinship had
historically been one factor, among many, for fostering cohesion and unity within a state
(1923: 141). He left no doubt, however, that in the Europe of his day it was unacceptable to
continue to view ethnic or national affinity as the ultimate basis for the formation of the state.
To the national principle outlined earlier in this essay, Ratzel emphatically contrasted
his own geographical or territorial principle, and insisted that in the modern world the basis
for a successful state must be the idea of Grossraum. Accordingly, he condemned the striving
for an exclusively nationally founded state, or Nationalitdtenpolitik, which represented a
dreamy goal for many of his contemporaries in central and Eastern Europe: Ratzel applied
this logic with admirable consistency to the situation in his own country. In an early essay,
for example, he rejected on principle the claims of the Germans in the Baltic regions to
membership in a German state, arguing that this would violate the exclusively geographical
or territorial logic which must be the foundation of all political unions (1878: 198). He firmly

adhered to this position in his later work. In so doing, he not only opposed a popular current
of the time, but indeed raised fundamental questions at the outset about an issue that was to
become nothing less than a holy cause for many of his countrymen. Within the context of the
tensions between nation and empire discussed earlier in this essay, the significance of
Ratzel’s political geography is unmistakable.
He has discarded as ’retrograde’ the classic nineteenth-century idea of the nation
state as the ultimate form of political organization, and offered in its stead something
radically different. Presented in the language of the age, using, that is, the ’scientific’ precepts
of a rudely materialist social darwinism, his system was a coherent formulation and
justification of the concern that animated Europe’s modern age of imperialism: the drive for
political expansion. Its inordinate significance lay in the fact that it replaced an essentially
restricted ideal of political organization - limited spatially to the distribution of the nationality
and its national territory, and bound at least in theory by notions of international coexistence -
with a vision of biologically founded expansion having no ultimate goal besides that of
further growth and expansion.
In an early discussion of Ratzel, Franz Neumann identified this fundamental aspect of
his thinking and expressed it succinctly with the observation that ’The laws of movement ...
and space cannot be reconciled with the notion of a unified legal and political sovereignty
over a specific area’ (1944: 139). Older standards of relations between states were overruled
by the single exigency of the struggle for space, and success in the endeavour to expand
became the sole criterion for moral judgement.
FIG: POLITISCHE GEOGRAPHIE BY RATZEL

Unity in diversity:
Unity in diversity is a concept of "unity without uniformity and diversity without
fragmentation"[1] that shifts focus from unity based on a mere tolerance of physical, cultural,
linguistic, social, religious, political, ideological and/or psychological differences towards a
more complex unity based on an understanding that difference enriches human interactions. It
has applications in many fields,
including ecology, cosmology, philosophy religion and politics.
The idea and related phrase is very old and dates back to ancient times in both
Western and Eastern Old World cultures. The concept of unity in diversity was used by both
the indigenous peoples of North America and Taoist societies in 400–500 B.C. In premodern
Western culture, it has existed in an implicit form in certain organic conceptions of the
universe that developed in the civilizations of ancient Greeceand Rome.
"Unity in diversity" is used as a popular slogan or motto by a variety of religious and
political groups as an expression of harmony and unity between dissimilar individuals or
groups. The phrase is a deliberate oxymoron, the rhetorical combination of two
antonyms, unitas "unity, oneness" and varietas "variety, variousness". When used in a
political context, it is often used to advocate federalism and multiculturalism.
Personal view of ratzel:
Geography is the best subject to be part of, because it allows me - if I wish - to
explore anything or everything that happens on or near the surface of the Earth. That should
be enough to keep anyone happy, however broad their interests. In this Department alone,
students and staff can engage in a very broad spectrum of subjects, from glaciology to the
oceanography, from the biosphere to the constantly changing atmosphere, from air pollution
to human health, and from social inequalities to the views of one Earth offered by the latest
satellite and GIS technologies. When we also consider our close partners in Geoscience, that
scope widens yet further, to include mountain building, volcanoes, the slow motion of
continents, the landscapes of the ancient earth. In St Andrews, as in many other Universities,
the boundaries between geography and geoscience/geology are not clear and sharp. They
grade seamlessly into one another, just as geography grades into many other disciplines, such
as meteorology, sociology, archaeology, history, epidemiology, rock mechanics, physics, and

so on. Geography shares with these adjacent subjects many of their methodologies,
techniques, and philosophies’, adding yet further to the diversity of geography as it is
practiced today.
Geography is certainly diverse. Diverse in its subject matter and its methods, diverse
in its aims, diverse it its language. So much so that one has to be expert in several sub-
dialects of English to hope to converse with all of the staff members in this building. The
diversity of geography is not in question. But is it unified?
Many answers have been suggested, and many definitions of geography have been
offered. Perhaps no definition will ever satisfy all geographers, nor encompass all of the
things that geographers do. But I don't believe that really matters because, in a sense, all
definitions are really just flags of convenience, just figments of our imagination that allow us
to think we understand a thing. Geography is too big, too diverse, its borders too porous for it
to fit neatly into one single definition, one single compartment of human endeavour.
But I believe it is unified. Geography is unified because the world is unified. The
world is all one world, as images taken from outside our Earth so clearly show. The Earth is
unified in the sense that it is one shared space, a common canvas on which all things are
drawn. But deeper than that, the Earth is unified because all things upon (and beyond) it are
interconnected, forming a single interconnected whole. No single thing stands isolated and
apart from any other: people are connected to the land through our needs for food, water,
shelter, and air. People are connected to each other in ceaseless networks of competition, co-
operation, and need. The atmosphere and the solid earth, the circulating waters, and the
cycles of food chains, the nexus of cause and effect bind everything together in one whole.
The diversity of the world invites a diversity of methods for its study. There is no single
methodology that can guarantee success in all situations: methods need to be tailored to
circumstance. In this sense, the diversity of methodologies within geography should be
regarded as a strength, not a source of discord.
The world is not compartmentalized; all subjects grade one into the other. The world,
the common ground of geographers, provides us with our point of reference, our unity. As
geographers we learn to read the world, to try to know its connections, and the relationships
between diverse things, to try to understand how the triumphs and tragedies of today have
unfolded from the worlds of the past, and how the decisions and events of today will shape
the world of tomorrow.

Conclusion:
This essay attempted an analysis of Ratzel’s political geography within the context of the
imperialism of the late nineteenth century. The practice of political expansion and the
incorporation of foreign societies was fundamentally at odds with the nation-state ideal that
had dominated for most of the century, and out of this tension arose new theories and
intellectual systems better suited to the exigencies of the new status quo. Ratzel’s political
geography figured importantly among such theories. Based on analogies between the organic
world and human society, it presented a thoroughly principled rejection of the nation-state
idea, and postulated instead the need for ongoing physical expansion to insure the vitality of
the state. Although his was not the only attempt to formulate such a theory, Ratzel’s specific
contribution lay in the creation of an appealing system and terminology that supplied a
seemingly ’scientific’ explanation and justification for expansionism (Schulte-Althoff, 1971:
144). In a materialist age that venerated science, this was of considerable significance. To the
extent that national socialist ideology maintained continuity with the nineteenth-century
imperialist tradition in general, it could adopt essentially as its own the core of Ratzel’s
theory of biological expansionism and Lebensraum. Department of Geography, University of
Wisconsin, USA.
References:
o http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Friedrich_Ratzel
o https://books.google.com.pk/books/about/Anthropogeographie.html?id=eGyLpwAACAAJ&re
dir_esc=y
o https://www.amazon.com/Politische-Geographie-German-Friedrich-Ratzel/dp/114364705X
o https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&hs=pKa&q=friedrich+ratzel+co
ntribution+to+geography&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi707CMrOLdAhUHzYUKHf
H8DgIQ1QIIxAEoAw&biw=1240&bih=659
o https://www.google.com/search?q=UNITY+AND+DIVERSITY+BY+RATZEL
&client=opera&tbm=isch&tbs=rimg:CVrcWjYnFuOEIjhSDb-1T9PT-3Nf-
qZl-yHMLhD-JVe73nct81GzICUyB1OiM-

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