Geographica Helvetica (Jul 2021)

Kiel 1969: Ein quellenkritischer Blick auf Tradierungsprozesse als „Arbeit am Mythos“

  • U. Wardenga

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-76-299-2021
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 76
pp. 299 – 303

Abstract

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The contribution uses the example of the 1969 Congress of German Geographers in Kiel to illustrate how traditions are born and passed on in German-speaking geography. By means of hermeneutic source criticism, it investigates how the events of „Kiel 1969“ gave rise to a myth. It concludes that the congress's participants experienced „Kiel 1969“ as the site of an enormously dense social interaction within their science. Most importantly, participants' suggestive oral reports in the aftermath of the congress turned it into the „myth of Kiel“, which became an essential driving force of German-speaking geography's modernization.