Building on his earlier work, Mapping Europe's Borderlands (2012), Steven Seegel has produced another fascinating book on the history of cartography in east central Europe. This time he explores the power of map making through the collective biography of five influential geographers, each of them from a different national background but all of them interested in the region that came to be known as east central Europe after WWI. Seegel presents this collective biography as “a transnational love story.” His protagonists—the German Albrecht Penck (1858–1945), the Pole Eugeniusz Romer (1871–1954), the Ukrainian Stepan Rudnyts΄kyi (1877–1937), the Hungarian Count Pál Teleki (1879–1941), and the Canadian-born American Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950)—all knew each other, inspired each other, and at times supported each other in their research projects and careers. They committed to the same scientific standards and ideals and cultivated a cosmopolitan professional comradery. In fact, Seegel calls his protagonists “German geographers” (14), as they were all shaped by the traditions of German scholarship, spoke German as the academic lingua franca of their time, and considered Penck, who subsequently held the prestigious chairs of geography in Vienna and Berlin and lectured around the world, the group's senior figure and mentor.

Yet the love story does not end well. Based on a rich and multilingual source base, Seegel provides a tale of gradual alienation and growing enmity between the five geographers. WWI and the ensuing national conflicts during the first half of the twentieth century tore apart the transnational academic culture in which they had come of age. Suddenly, it mattered a great deal if one identified with German, Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, or American national interests. This was all the more so the case as the five geographers began to play influential political roles by advising their respective governments, or, in Teleki's case, by advancing to the office of the prime minister. Each of them put his academic expertise to the service of his nation. This meant producing suggestive maps and biased geographic evidence in support of nationalist ambitions and discrediting the maps and geographic evidence produced by the other side, even if this meant tearing publicly apart the work of former friends, mentors, and mentees.

Seegel's map men subscribed to the very nationalism, imperialism, racism, and antisemitism that ruined the cosmopolitan world around 1900, and their life stories began to mirror the drama of twentieth-century central Europe. Penck saw his once international professional sphere increasingly reduced to German academia the more he sided with his country's aggressive foreign policy between 1914 to 1945. Bombed out in Berlin, he died isolated in German-occupied Prague in the spring of 1945. Rudnyts΄kyi made an academic career in Soviet Ukraine but was shot by the NKVD in 1937. The regime mistrusted a Ukrainian national activist with international connections. Teleki, while in office as prime minister, committed suicide in the spring of 1941, possibly in desperation over his failure to maintain Hungary's neutrality vis-à-vis Hitler. Romer survived WWII in occupied Poland against all odds but had to experience firsthand the brutality of the German and Soviet regimes. Bowman, physically removed from the European theater of war and profiting from the United States’ rise to global power, fared best. He made a career as president of Johns Hopkins University and advised both the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations on central European affairs. But neither his hope for setting up a cutting-edge geographical institute at Johns Hopkins nor having his son Robert carry on the father's academic legacy materialized. In both cases, Bowman's shameless promotion of his personal interests was to no avail.

Seegel organizes the life stories of the five geographers as a nostalgic tale on east central Europe's destruction during the first half of the twentieth century. The map men produced the maps that both mirrored and shaped the nationalist perceptions that drove the violent clash over east central Europe's political reorganization between 1914 and 1945. Some readers might have appreciated a more succinct language and a more sparse use of German terms, where translations would have been fine. Also, Seegel goes into great detail about the interconnected biographies of his protagonists, including their offspring, while keeping the background information on the complex history of east central Europe relatively short. The less informed reader might have appreciated more historical context to follow the argument. But everybody interested in the region will benefit from reading this well composed, original, and inspiring book about the power and potentially destructive force of map mapping.