The State as a “form of life” and the space as <i>Leistungsraum</i>: the reception of Ratzel in the First and Second World Wars

Abstract

My contribution explores the meaning of war and the role of Germany, which was seen as representing a Mittellage, before the First and the Second World Wars, through the eyes of two main authors who radically reinterpreted and appropriated geographical political thinking, particularly the work of Ratzel. I am referring to the Swedish political scholar Rudolf Kjellen and the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt. The consideration of the triple relation between space, Ratzel and war casts light on Kjellen's and Schmitt's use of Ratzel as a lever in order to promote their idea of politics and political science. Ratzel's concepts offered Kjellen and, in a different way, Schmitt, a means of justifying their way of overcoming and stretching the “limits” of their disciplines and, at the same time, of introducing a new idea of political and geographical organization, which de facto legitimized German expansion, in two crucial periods of German political life – the First and the Second World Wars. As a consequence, their Ratzel was oriented toward militant aims. Moreover, their scientific and political ideas were clearly intertwined – they explicitly rejected the idea of separating their roles as political activists and as members of a scientific community.