Hettner, Alfred (1859–1941)

Alfred Hettner was a prominent and highly influential German geographer who powerfully shaped the nature of the discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Greatly influenced by Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, and Carl Ritter, Hettner argued that geography consisted of the art of holistic regional description and synthesis, inductively seeking relations among phenomena that other disciplines ignored, particularly those between humans and the environment.

Son of a museum director in Dresden, Hettner grew up in comfortable circumstances. He started his higher education at the University of Halle in 1877. He moved to Bonn a year later and to Strasbourg a year after that. Much of his training was focused on physical geography. In 1897, he became a professor at Tübingen and later at Heidelberg, where he spent the remainder of his career. He placed great emphasis on the importance of fieldwork and undertook extensive journeys throughout Europe, Russia, and South America, emphasizing climatology and geomorphology and publishing books on all these regions. Health problems gradually forced him to abandon fieldwork and confined him to a wheelchair, although he achieved the status of the leading German theoretician in the discipline. His work became increasingly sophisticated theoretically, leading him to move away from Kant and to advocate more relational views of space.

At times, he engaged in sharp polemical debates with his peers. In 1895, Hettner founded and edited the widely read journal Geographisches Zeitschrift (Geographic Periodical).

Rather than embracing all the Earth sciences, as previous generations of German geographers maintained, geography for Hettner was the study of why differences among regions appeared and persisted: The core of the discipline was comparative regional analysis. However, he did not hold to a naive empiricism in which geographic regions and facts were simply given but, like Kant, believed them to be constructed through the mental imposition of conceptual order on Earth's surface. The relations between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the specific, representations and reality, always loomed large, in this view. Thus, for him, geography was defined by its methodology, not its content, and he viewed the growing schism between human and physical geography with alarm. His attempt to focus the discipline around regional synthesis should be seen in light of European colonialism more generally and German nation building and expansionism in particular.

In contrast to the increasingly reactionary geopolitics of Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, Hettner represented the progressive face of German geography. In this respect, he shared much with his French counterpart Paul Vidal de la Blache. Both men argued against the racism and xenophobia of geopolitics and environmental determinism, emphasizing instead the constitutive role of culture. By the 1930s, the rise of the Nazis put him in an increasingly precarious professional position.

Hettner was also long active in promoting geography in the schools at all levels and wrote several textbooks. His main disciple was Richard Hartshorne, who carried Hettner's Kantian worldview to the United States (but not unchanged in the process) and played a dominant role in the American version of chorology.

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