This book is an invitation to take a dive into the spaces of the history of the present. Karl Schlögel seeks to “spatialize” the historical emergence of the present and to tie the historical view back to the spatial locale of events as they can be observed in the present. In other words, Schlögel seeks to open the historian's gaze to the spatial aspect of history. The fact that the spatial dimension, or the concept of space, has for such a long time been absent from (at least) German-speaking historical scholarship—and the social sciences at large—has, of course, to do with German history from 1933 to 1945. Then, “space” was used as a valuable argument and instance of social policy with all its well-known drastic implications. In this context and with this space concept, scholarly geography has played an important if inglorious role in the past. The intricate connection of the “blood and soil” and “nation without space” ideologies—both established on the basis of geographical space as a container of social life—has led to the elimination of “space” in the humanities. Not least because of the unholy alliance of these concepts, a radical reorientation of geographical thought was at last embarked on at the end of the 1960s. Given its extreme political implications, this was—and is—one of the most important tasks in the history of science since the Second World War. As there were very few inter-disciplinary points of contact at the time between the humanities and geography, these changes were left unnoticed.

With this book, Schlögel struck a chord with a broad German-speaking audience and rose to the top of the best-seller list. It is distressing that a publication that blatantly draws on the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel, one of the founding fathers of the above-mentioned Nazi geopolitics, could rise to such commercial success and establish an award-wining career in Germany. The popularity of the book among the general public is contrasted, however, with the profound skepticism in the academic communities of both historians and younger generation geographers. In trying to explain this gap, and offering an alternative perspective for the integration of space into historiography, the content of the book shall be presented against the backdrop of the author's claim.

According to Schlögel, “we can form an adequate picture of the world only if we begin to think of the long-forgotten nexus of space, time, and action” (7). This collection of essays is organized into four main chapters spread over about 500 pages, including “The Return of Space,” “Reading Maps,” “The Work of the Eye,” and “Europa, Diaphanous.” Schlögel suggests nothing less than a new way of seeing and perceiving history as well as a “revival of the historical narrative itself” (xx), which in the sense of a “spatial” (18) or “topographical hermeneutics” (19) moves the reading of historical spaces by way of looking at their key locales of action, boundaries, and geographical representations (maps, city plans) to the center of historical scientific work. In his approximately fifty exemplary expeditions through various periods of world history (or perhaps rather through various places of the historical world), from Ground Zero to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Sarajevo and Moscow to the construction of India, he uses, relying on authorities like Walter Benjamin or Herodotus, the notion of the stroller or flâneur (215) as a conceptual tool to frame the experience of history in a spatial manner; to develop an investigation of “the spatial side of the historical world” (46).

This “essayistic” book is indeed very well-written and entertaining to read. Schlögel is drawing attention to the long-neglected history of eastern Europe. But this very important task is tarnished by the aforementioned conceptual problems with a rather simplistic spatialization of time. To draw attention to the spatiality of history and social life in general is, of course, important. The question is, however, on the basis of what spatial concept? An important part of the work of humanities scholars and social scientists that subscribe to the spatial turn appears to be based on the assumption that geographical space is a given fact and not theory-dependent. As the latest theory developments in geography show, this is not the case. What space there “is” for actors depends on what the actors are doing. Schlögel's important suggestion could provide insight.