Positional note
I am a white, German, able-bodied cis-woman doing a PhD at a university in the South of Europe with the experience of growing up in a working-class milieu. In my work, I commit to the study of visual cultural, critical historiography in education and post-colonial, decolonial and feminist theory. I am particularly invested in images and imaginaries of 'nature' and the ways they are producing a hegemonic relations with the world and its beings.
The book’s title Geographical Character Pictures points towards another emerging discourse around the late 19th century in Germany which was the belief that there is an “organic” link between a people and its landscape. Certain geographic phenomena would designate the character not only of the landscape but also of the people who lived in those places. This conjunction made it possible to imagine or to construct a German landscape.
Romantic landscape painting was much involved in this production of the German landscape/German national identity.
Invoking emotional sensibilities concerning ‘nature’ through particular visual arrangements, romantic landscape painting aimed to evoke those sensibilities in the viewer. Appreciation of those landscapes but also the artworks in themselves came to signify not only moral sensibilities but also national belonging.
Germany was a very young nation-state when this book was published in 1890 and after years of economic and cultural colonial relations, took on territorial power. By inscribing certain regions and certain geographic phenomena like the Alps or the oak forest a “German” characteristic, territorial claims and national belonging became possible within Europe and in the colonies.
Around the same time, from about 1888 to the end of WWI, associations for nature preservation and so-called “homeland” preservation emerged, with a strong force in the Rhine area. The nature preservation movement promoted the idea that protecting natural monuments and providing healthy recreation areas would lead to the integration of Germans of all political persuasions and social classes into the “imagined Heimat community” (Lekan, 2004, p. 16). Nature preservation, the aesthetic appreciation of landscape and the construction of a national community as well as the construction of the colonial other were intricately interlaced projects.
Outside of Europe in German colonies but also in the US where many Germans had emigrated, the active shaping of landscapes through agricultural production was part of creating a German identity abroad.