Geography emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as a scientific discipline situated at the crossroads of the social and natural sciences, forging the bond between idiosyncratic and generic explanations. It is a science whose history is intimately related to the development of the modern state, and for purposes such as this, maps were privileged tools, supporting the formation of nation-states and helping to conceptualize the demographic development of national societies. Maps helped to define not only the form of their settlement and their geographical limits but also their needs, strengths, and weaknesses.
This tension between the objective pretension of cartographic production and its normative functions is well known in the historiography of cartography. In his remarkable Map Men, Steven Seegel opens a new chapter of our comprehension of the production of maps, showing the social and psychological tensions and the personal intentions that preceded cartographic drawings. “Place and maps are layered with meaning,” he writes (194), they “are like buildings, and they have layers of history” (220). As such, geography must be studied as a science of the “sensory history of encounters” (8). Seegel's work offers a comprehensive history of the lives of a handful of geographers in their involvement both physically and intellectually in the tragic history of twentieth-century Europe.
These objectives are very well followed by the author, who situates his inquiry at the crossroads of recent historiographical propositions on transnationalism, national indifference, and postcolonial thought. Seegel's conceptual architecture serves perfectly the narration of the geographers’ lives and the uncomfortable necessity of locating their transnational identities in the age of extreme nationalism. This choice permits him to conduct a sophisticated inquiry into the social practices of the production of geographical knowledge. It supports brilliantly his mobilization of a wide variety of sources, including the scientific writings, memoirs, personal journals, and epistolary relations of five prominent geographers involved in various degrees in the drawing and redrawing of Central and Eastern Europe during the first half of twentieth century. In the order of appearance and following the birth date from the oldest to youngest, these are Albrecht Penck (German), renowned professor and rector of Berlin University, and his pupils and contradictors, Eugeniusz Romer (Polish), Stepan Rudnyts'kyi (Ukrainian), Isaiah Bowman (American), and Count Pál Teleki (Hungarian). These are presented here with their personal histories and correspondences, mutual professional and moral commitments, their empathy, tensions, and open conflicts.
This intersubjective “epistolary geography” is composed of seven chapters organized chronologically—from the first decade of the twentieth century to the aftermath of World War I—and including a thematic analysis that highlights how the transformation of social-political and international contexts in Europe and in the United States impacted both the production of maps and the objectivization of geographical knowledge as well as friendships and professional relations.
The force of Seegel's book is to be found in his comprehensive analysis of the formation and collapse, under such cataclysmic historical circumstances, of an epistemic community made of shared scientific values, common cultural habitus, individual hope, and mutual sympathy—a community made not only of collective success but also of failure and personal tragedies. The geographers’ qualification as “transnational Germans” highlights the strong influence of German geographical propositions in fin-de-siècle Europe and in the United States. The expression underlines the circulation of German colonial thought and sheds light on the dominant position of Alfred Penck in the propagation of German intellectual schemes. It recalls notably how the reading of Friedrich Ratzel and his völkisch beliefs and theoretical propositions were shared, discussed, and assimilated in a growing geographical episteme that gave a central place to the antimodern notion of Heimat.
Map Men presents a history of scientific encounters in which the principles of colonial geography are continuously negotiated to promote contradictory national objectives. In the process, it demonstrates how Europe was simply too small geographically for all these competing cartographic projections. The struggle over the existence of Polish territory is the best illustration of this. The Polish geographer Romer, a former student of Penck, made every possible effort to advance Polish territorial rights over German and Ukrainian ones, thus fighting against centuries of imperial geographies. But Romer utilized Penck's völkisch argumentation and methodology to advance the Polish cause, while the German master denied the scientific nature of his study on Polish settlement, notably in Galicia.
The qualification of “transnational Germans” refers neither to national determinism nor to scientific principles of objectivity and idiosyncrasy; rather, the term refers to a shared professional ethic. Using the notion of Beruf, Steven Seegel follows a Weberian understanding of the geographer's working morality. He underlines that personal accomplishments are not only the expression of an individual emancipation but also the signs of moral collective commitments in which the prolific production of cartographic artifacts coincides with the adversity and the success of their authors. This idea constitutes a central line of the book and leads the author to state provocatively—and not without humor—that the famous American geographer “Isaiah Bowman was a map” (227).
The identification of the geographers’ morality with their geographical production is central to understanding how these “map men” encountered the limits of their adaptation to the emerging world order. After 1919, the German Alfred Penck could not adapt his thought to the new German political and territorial reality and promote colonial thinking that reflected the emerging mode of the Ostforschung and geohistorical revisionism, and this failure resulted in his academic isolation outside of Germany. In Hungary, Count Teleki's post-Trianon “Great Hungary” map illustrates how he opposed the Wilsonian principles of self-determination in his economic justification of a hegemonic Hungarian geography. His red map of Hungary shows both the failure of ethnic claims and his illiberal vision of Europe. Bowman's universalist aspiration of American “new-worldism” “collapsed” into “emotional maps.” His high scientific awareness didn't prevent his antisemitism toward peers (193). Behind their cold and flat features, Steven Seegel shows that maps were the result of emotional transactions fueled by a bourgeois, conservative, and often reactionary representation of the world.
Beyond any normative judgments, the reader is impressed by the lives of the geographers, animated by their passion for their work despite the myriad adversities they experienced, including forced migration, confinement, regimentation, and the loss of relatives. As such, Map Men is more a geography of loss than a geography of modernity, identity, or nationalism (232)—an angle that offers a strong heuristic potential for our understanding of the founding moment of geographical sciences.
