Anti-semitism in early 20th century German geography. From a “spaceless” people to the root of the “ills” of urbanization

This paper will explore anti-Semitism in German geography before and during National Socialism. The attention paid to German geography's links to National Socialism by historians of the discipline contrasts sharply and surprisingly with the dearth of research on the role of anti-Semitism in the academic geography of the time. The paper will examine the role of anti-Semitic thought in geographical writing and thinking, particularly within the context of the regionalist landscape paradigm dominant in the period and in relation to the anti-modernism and anti-urbanism rife in the discipline after the end of World War I. At the same time, it is argued that the apparent rarity of explicitly anti-Semitic writing in geography is at least partially explainable by a general lack of interest in spaces of modernity, large cities and capitalist productions of space in the writing of interwar geographers. As the concept of “the Jew” was closely linked to urbanization, an urban character and urban space, there were few areas of contact between geography and the discursive spaces of the “Jewish question”.