Cultural Geography

economic and cultural globalization, international

labour migration and new communications

technologies have reworked the bonds of alle-

giance between the state and many of its citizens.

The process has permitted a critical examination

of the traditional ways in which such allegiance

was forged, especially within European nation-

states, currently negotiating new relations

between territory, citizenship and identity within

the European Union (Agnew, 1998; Cosgrove

et al., 1998). It is easier today to recognize the

contingency of relations which had long seemed

natural and permanent. Among the most power-

ful connections between nation and state is the

material landscape. While nations are imagined

communities, in which no citizen can ever be

intimate with every fellow citizen, they are also

imagined territories, since no citizen can ever

know intimately the land of the whole state

(Anderson, 1983; Hooson, 1994). Iconic images

of nature and national landscape have thus

played a powerful role in the shaping of modern

nation-states as visible expressions of a claimed

natural relationship between a people or nation

and the territory or nature it occupied.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this

process is Germany, where academic geography

played a key role within a discourse of territorial

nationhood framed in terms of culture, land-

scape, community and home (Heimat). It was

from German cultural geography that landscape

emerged as a key concept, generating such tech-

niques as visible ‘landscape indicators’ to distin-

guish cultural regions. In the formation of

German national consciousness, ideas of both

territorial boundary and physical landscape are

deeply rooted. Humanists in fifteenth-century

Nuremberg, Augsberg and Ulm, whose philologi-

cal studies produced a German literary language,

also promoted local mapping and landscape

painting to celebrate belief in Germania

(Schama, 1995: 75–120; Wood, 1993). Theirs

was a distinct Kultur, unaffected by Roman

interference – either imperial or papal – a bul-

wark of authentic Christian virtue in the face of

Mediterranean decadence and Slavic barbarity.

Germany’s characteristic topography of hercyn-

ian rock, dense forest and open heaths became

figured as a shaping force of Teutonic character.

These elements were synthesized by early-

nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists such as

Caspar David Friedrich or the Grimm brothers

into iconic landscapes of iron crosses set among

crags, pine woods and dolmens (Figure 12.8).

When Germany united as a nation-state in 1880

under the dominance of Prussia, Berg und Wald

framed a muscular German self-image, so that

the many grandiose public monuments erected to

Count Bismarck deployed granite, oak leaves

and iron crosses to commemorate the founder of

the modern state (Lang, 1996; Michalski, 1998:

56–76).

Kulturlandschaftwas a focus of geographical

research in German universities in the late

nineteenth century, reflecting anxieties within the

new state over its territorial boundaries and cul-

tural unity. Unlike France or Britain, the distrib-

ution of German speakers corresponded to no

physically demarcated boundary. Geographers

responded therefore to the cultural ideal of a pro-

found connection between a German Volkand its

soil, a social psychology captured in the concept

of Heimatand visible in the unique settlement

forms of the German village. Landscape indica-

tors, such as house form, village morphology,

field pattern and enclosure, defined the true

German landscape as an ecological unity of

nature and people (Sandner, 1994). This tradition

of landscape and settlement geography yielded

dire consequences in the 1940s with the replan-

ning of captured eastern lands to resemble

German Kulturlandschäfte. It continues to echo

through German landscape conservation today.

Less dramatic parallels to Germany’s correlation

of people and territory through landscape can be

found in every European nation. They are evi-

dent in the iconic landscapes of downland,

copses, hedgerows and village spires pictured on

English topographic maps of the 1920s and in

the tapestry of hill slopes dotted with fruit trees

and vines gathered around the campanile of a

walled city which the Italian Macchiolini

painters produced in the years of Italian unifica-

tion (Agnew, 1998; Graham, 1997). They are

found too in the patchwork of tiny fields, white-

washed cottages and bare limestone washed by

wild Atlantic breakers which Irish nationalists

sought to preserve as the authentic landscapes of

a Celtic, Catholic nation within the Gaeltacht. In

every case pictorial images have served as vehi-

cles conveying national pride and identity

through specific, often geographically unrepre-

sentative, landscapes. Even in the former USSR,

despite its secular ideology and expressed belief

in the human conquest of nature through social-

ism and communism, painters, film-makers,

poets and novelists celebrated selected topo-

graphical features of Russian landscape as espe-

cially expressive of a collective Russian identity

and purpose (Bassin et al., 2000).

Unsurprisingly, it has been material expres-

sions of such iconic landscapes that have been

subject to regulation as a means of preserving

their visual appearance. Again, national parks

offer obvious examples. Their very designation

articulates a connection between a nation and a

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