Hitler's Geographies

“That the Nazi regime was an expansionist project has been well appreciated since the 1930s, but its protean spatial imaginings and practices have been neither satisfactorily conceptualized nor interrelated until now. Hitler's Geographies is a landmark collection that undertakes the challenging theoretical and empirical labor of reconstructing the spatialities of the Third Reich. It will be required reading for understanding the intersections of geopolitics, imperial ambitions, and settlement fantasies with the topographies of racialized screening, ghettoization, and mass murder.”

“Giaccaria and Minca have been in the vanguard of the intellectual project of integrated geohistory focusing on cultural issues for many years. With Hitler’s Geographies, they offer the first edited volume attempting to mark out this compelling theoretical territory in relation to a major twentieth-century phenomenon: Nazism. This book is an excellent conceptual collection for understanding and applying the notions of Lebensraum, geopolitics, biopolitics, and central place theory. It also provides valuable examples of key concepts from cultural geography, including the nuances of space versus place, cultural landscapes and their emotional burdens and legacies, and emotional distance and proximity in cinema. The theoretical and historiographical contributions of Hitler’s Geographies will be of great interest to scholars of the Third Reich, national socialism, the Holocaust, spatial theory, cultural theory, and various branches of geography.”

“In reworking theoretical and historical agendas about Nazism’s mobilizations of knowledge, nature, place, Hitler’s Geographies offers an important contribution to understanding the Third Reich for anyone concerned with culture, domination, environment, or memory.”

“With Hitler’s Geographies, Giaccaria and Minca aim to highlight Nazism as a spatial project—one whose racial politics required thinking about space in a particular way and putting these ideas into practice. The editors do an excellent job of laying out this rationale. In particular, this book connects with and builds upon contemporary social theories that are prevalent in geography and other social sciences, making it a pertinent and intriguing utilization of social theory to address a key historic topic. A bold endeavor, Hitler’s Geographies will soon be the go-to volume for those interested in the spatiality of the biopolitics of Nazism.”

"In its search for the spatial-geographical foundations of a years-long, highly influential, regionally based project (Nazism), Hitler's Geographies demonstrates the value of looking broadly and deeply at the geographical ideas and assumptions undergirding world-changing developments in particular times and places. The results of such efforts could be of enormous benefit to historical and geographical understanding alike."

"Hitler's Geographies offers a[n]... ambitious project: a preliminary attempt 'to start formulating a tentative spatial theory of the Third Reich' through a collection of essays that 'directly engag[e] with the specific relationship between spatial theory, Nazi ideology and its geopolitical and genocidal practices" (2-3)... It is a useful contribution to the field that whets the appetite for a more thorough and comprehensive effort to develop a spatial theory of the Third Reich."

"Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich is a well planned, meticulously executed work that examines the Nazi mapping enterprise through a new level of interdisciplinary rigor."