By means of hermeneutic source criticism, my paper investigates how the events of “Kiel 1969” gave rise to a myth. It concludes that the congress’s participants experienced “Kiel 1969” as the site of an enormously dense social interaction within their science. Most importantly, participants’ suggestive oral reports in the aftermath of the congress turned it into the “myth of Kiel”, which became an essential driving force of German-speaking geography’s modernization.

This special issue shows that environmental justice perspectives are useful for analysing current socio-ecological conflicts. It aims at exploring climate and marine narratives, environmental knowledge claims, multiple ontologies, climate change adaptation, and the spatial and temporal shaping of socio-ecological struggles for climate and marine justice in more detail. Furthermore, it takes up current strands of climate and marine justice scholarship and explores avenues for further research.

Soil erosion by wind and water is a commonly recognized phenomenon on agricultural land. Erosion in forests is studied less and generally considered to be limited because of the soil protection by vegetation. However, trees, when toppled because of old age or wind, loosen a considerable amount of soil when their roots are pulled from the ground. In addition, the holes left in the ground act as collectors for water and concentrated runoff, causing significant soil loss on forested slopes.

Based on a critique of statistical and cartographic analyses of migration patterns of young adults in rural areas of Central Germany, we conclude that there is an emergence of cultures of (out-)migration in some rural regions and discuss possible approaches from psychoanalytically informed migration research and complex systems theory that may help us to understand why, in these regions, adolescents often consider leaving the most viable option.

This is a book review of an Italian-language geography book by Marcello Tanca entitled Geografia e fiction. Opera, film, canzone, fumetto. This book uses geographical tools and approaches to study fictional worlds within opera, films, songs and comics. Taking this proposal seriously, this book review mobilises the language of comics, usually associated with fiction, to provide a visual book review.

The paper discusses how virtual reality (VR) could make a difference to geographic education. A key argument is that virtual immersive environments were acquired affectively and emotionally by users. This should be considered for the processes of consuming, producing, and mediating geographic knowledge via and with VR. To discuss this a teaching and research project is presented in which students produced VR field trips based on empiric research in the cities of Vienna and Berlin.

In this editorial, we introduce the special section on the politics of memory of Kiel 1969, the famous German geographers' conference, in which, as the myth narrates, a revolution took place within the discipline of German-language geography. We introduce the three individual statements by Verne, Strohmayer and Weichhart, who all recount their entanglements with the myth of Kiel 1969, and place them in a wider context of the history of geography.