Special issue  

In diesem Editorial begründen wir die intellektuelle Agenda, die dem Themenheft «German Theory» zugrunde liegt. Um diese mit anglophonen, aber auch anderen (frankophonen, lusophonen) Theoriediskussionen ins Gespräch zu bringen, möchten wir aus der deutschsprachigen Geistesgeschichte entstandene Denkstile bewusster, autonomer, aber auch dialogischer in den Blick nehmen, in internationale Theoriedebatten einbringen, und so für eine Pluralität von Denkstilen werben.

Carl Sauer is considered to be the founder of cultural geography. I reassess Sauer's work by considering the debates in German geography that led up to the publication of his seminal work The Morphology of Landscape. Instead of focusing on culture, I focus on Sauer's use of phenomenology (for the first time in geography). I argue that Sauerian phenomenology provides answers for central philosophical problems of geography regarding the reality of area, region, and landscape.

The struggle for life chances, especially in the context of related social conflicts, is a global phenomenon, although the concept originated in the German-speaking world. Using a case study of possible conflicts over space and landscape, the relevance of these four approaches for spatial research and human geography, as well as for dealing with space- or landscape-related conflicts, is demonstrated.

In this paper, I approach German Theory as a conjunctive geography: as something that could, but did not take place. I explore the reasons why there is no German Theory (yet) by tracing the Foucault reception in German language geography and the German humanities. I study why these two variants of a German Foucault have not traveled to Anglophone geography. Finally, I speculate what could have happened had the German Foucault traveled to Anglophone geography.

This contribution would like to give an introduction to the anthropologically and phenomenologically founded philosophy of corporeality, which can be connected to human geography, in order to enable a deeper understanding of our human-environment relationship. That is, because Phenomenology and Philosophical Anthropology are still marginal in human geography as a source of knowledge of spatial-social facts.

Scientific freedom involves three aspects: Freedom as power and privilege, freedom as a right of defence, and freedom as autonomy for self-regulation. But how to decide in science when science itself has marked all scientific criteria as contingent? At this point, the article proposes to acknowledge the decision-making challenges in science, to engage in theory-theoretical dialogues and thus to preserve autonomy.

The cultural memory of Aleida and Jan Assmann has received little recognition in international geography. However, by focusing on the concerns of a geographical study of places of memory, it is possible to develop a spatially oriented conception of cultural memory spaces based on the assumption that places of memory cannot be a storage, but only an anchor for memories.

In (Anthropo-)Geography, especially in the Anthropocene, the question of what constitutes the human is of utmost interest. In the process, this human is often strangely assumed to be self-evident, almost (self-)explanatory. In the sense of a German Theory, we want to encourage to pose these question on the human anew with Helmuth Plessner and to point out new possible answers. Otherwise these questions are in danger of withering away into a Minimal Anthropology.

This paper aims to contribute to discussions on the development of language-based schools of thought in geography and how these are mobilized and de- and recontextualized when they travel beyond their origins. Against this backdrop, we study why, how and with what consequences German geographical knowledge traveled to Argentina in the 1940s following the employment of the four German geography professors Wilhelm Rohmeder, Gustav Fochler-Hauke, Fritz Machatschek and Willi Czajka in Tucumán.