The Conceptualisation of the Regional in historical-geographical Regional Studies (1922–1970)

• Applicant: Dr. Patrick Reitinger
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566332644

The project contributes to a new historical picture of the development of regional geographic theories and methods in Germany by breaking away from the previous narratives surrounding the Kiel Geographers' Conference of 1969 and, on the basis of a broad archival tradition, examining how “the regional” was conceptually understood in the period “before Kiel”. The study focuses on historical-geographical regional studies as an important approach to regional geography in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such a critical deconstruction of existing specialist histories must of course take into account the fact that regional geographic concepts “before Kiel” were mostly those that were conceived and further developed at least in the temporal context of the Nazi regime. For this reason, the project will look at their scientific-political, historical and regional-historical circumstances in order to understand the relationship between epistemic practices in geography and the ideological-political ideas in the scientific system from the Weimar Republic through the Nazi era to the early post-war period of the Federal Republic of Germany. The geographer Hans Fehn (1903-1988), a typical representative of his generation in the 20th century who worked intensively in regional geography and who is representative of a historical-geographical perspective within regional geography, is examined as an example. Fehn's research practices, his project results and his everyday life and activities within the framework of the academic system between 1922 and 1970 are examined in three sub-studies, which deal with the spatial semantics and the relationship between texts, maps and images in his regional geography publications, with aspects of materiality, processuality and historicity in his regional geography research practices and with a contextualization of his work as a geographer and regional geographer through a historical-geographical policy field analysis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants