"Naturgesetze der Kultur": Die Wiener Geographen und die Ursprünge der „Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie

In 1925 the German geographer Albrecht Penck published the map of the "Deutscher Volks- und Kulturboden". In the aftermath of the First World War, Penck wanted to justify a revisionist and even further expansionist notion of German cultural superiority in East Central and Eastern Europe, which was intended to prove in particular the dominance of "Germanness" in the cultural landscape. However, the idea of a "cultural boundary", the basic element of Penck's concept, had already been developed before World War I in Vienna by his doctoral student Erwin Hanslik, who distanced himself from his early ideas in later years. This article aims to historicize the formation and radicalization of this geopolitical construct as a result of practices of observation, reception and adaptation against the socio-political backdrop of the late Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War.