Afterword: geographers, historical geographies, war

This paper provides a commentary on the articles in the special issue. In their introduction, the editors identify three linking themes: the varieties of wartime experience, of geographers and others; moral geographies, including the moral bases to the interpretative categories used to write about those experiences; and the contrast between 'major' and 'minor' historical geographies of war. Building upon, but also extending from these concerns, this afterword addresses three topics in order to elaborate upon the arguments of the several papers: the connections between biography, geography and memory; the importance of the intellectual and political context before 1939 in understanding the nature of geography and the experiences of geographers in Europe during the Second World War; the co-constitutive relationships between the arts of geography and the acts of war, including geography's material and civic expression.