Remapping Modern Germany after National Socialism, 1945–1961 by Matthew D. Mingus (review)

"Germany is exceptional," writes Matthew Mingus near the beginning of his book (25). More particularly, "although [rejecting] the carving of a uniquely evil German notch into the bedpost of modern historiography," he argues for a kind of German geographic Sonderweg, citing Max Otte's claim that Germany was special because it was at the center of the most significant reconfigurations of the European map in 1919, 1945, and 1990 (25). Mingus's well-written book centers on the second remapping, beginning in the rubble of World War II and the so-called "Stunde Null."

Mingus begins by showing how modern geography and cartography were German creations and emphasizing the importance of these disciplines to National Socialism—the concepts of Lebensraum and Geopolitik proving particularly influential. In this chapter we are introduced to German geographers who worked for the Third Reich, especially Emil Meynen, head of the Abteilung für Landeskunde im Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme (AfL). While this organization, created in the spring of 1941, was permitted to pursue its own research, it "was also required to participate in the collection and dissemination of cartographic data … and shared a fairly intimate relationship with the government and military institutions of the Third Reich during the Second World War" (45). In the third chapter we learn how, in the aftermath the war, the United States unsurprisingly wanted to extract such mapmakers for its own purposes because, as Mingus nicely puts it, "the future of German space, as the Americans understood it, would need to be drawn by Germans if that space were to have any real meaningful authority" (58). A new AfL headed by Meynen and his staff was reborn in 1947, this time as the Amt für Landeskunde, initially more or less under the authority of the Americans. This new AfL became postwar Germany's top geographic agency. Meynen then worked on important map-making projects for the US military government and helped to reestablish the German network of geographers.

The fourth chapter focuses on the period from 1949 until 1952, when the recently established German Democratic Republic began to fortify its western border. Mingus shows how, even after the formal territorial split between the GDR and the Federal Republic in 1949, Meynen in particular "worked hard to consistently include those geographers who ended up on the other side of the Iron Curtain" (117). However, the escalation of the Cold War made that aim increasingly difficult: by 1950, for example, West Germany had ordered the AfL to cease all cooperation with GDR geographers, though Meynen sometimes continued to operate outside such restrictions. Chapter 5 illustrates that "as with US-Soviet interaction, the relationship between East and West German geographers slowly deteriorated throughout the 1950s," making the larger point that each of the Germanies strove to legitimize itself "by actively undermining the territorial legitimacy of its counterpart" (124, 12). Many West German geographers, realizing that their dependence on the United States was not temporary, shifted from trying to maintain connections with their eastern colleagues to proving their value to the Americans. Mingus further demonstrates, in a fascinating section, how West Germany increasingly turned to public relations firms for its mapmaking. He concludes by reminding the reader of "the vital role geography plays in the construction of a nation-state's political identity" (151).

Mingus's presentation of Meynen throughout the book is particularly well done, deftly revealing the geographer's almost eigensinnig nature and his remarkable skill, regardless of the political context, "to manipulate the circumstances in which he found himself to the benefit of his research" (118). However, though the author acknowledges a focus on the Federal Republic, the reader cannot help, especially given the book's title, but wish he had devoted more attention to East Germany. Detailed treatment of the GDR appears only in a handful of places, mostly in two paragraphs at the end of chapter 4. Moreover...