Ratzel, Friedrich (1844–1904)

Friedrich Ratzel was a famous German geographer, zoologist, and anthropologist. His extensive work on the links between the physical environment and society and the organic nature of the state (Lebensraum, meaning “living space”) laid the foundations for geopolitics and political geography.

Apprenticed as an apothecary, it was not until age 21 that Ratzel read zoological studies at Heidelburg University, which introduced him to Darwinism, as interpreted by his then mentor, Ernst Haeckel. After Heidelburg, Ratzel briefly worked as a travel correspondent and was awarded the Iron Cross after enlisting in the Baden Infantry during the Franco-German War (1870). Following the war, he studied with Moritz Wagner at Munich, whose Lamarckian views on species migration later influenced Ratzel's own anthropo-geographic works. In 1886, he was awarded a professorship at Leipzig University, a position he held until his death in 1904 following a stroke.

Ratzel's writing was extensive and wide ranging; he was a rare geographer who published both human and physical works. His most notable works are Anthropogeographie (Vol. 1, 1882; Vol. 2, 1891) and Politische Geographie (1897). Anthropogeographie is a two-part study of the relationship between society and the physical environment, with many commentators seeing the first volume as an application of geography to human history and the second as a description of the geographic distribution of humankind. These works were slow to reach Anglophone geographers, with their eventual dissemination largely credited to Ellen Churchill Semple, an early adopter of the Ratzelian program outside Germany. These works have been the subject of much debate as to their links to environmental determinism and discourses of race. This idea, however, owes more to Semple's interpretation of Ratzel's ideas rather than Ratzel's initial aims of his work.

Politische Geographie considered the state as an organism expanding into space to grow, thus states required Lebensraum to grow. This work draws on biogeographical and Lamarckian language relating to evolutionary theory and is considered as part of a wider volume of theory regarding social Darwinism. Karl Haushofer's Geopolitik School (between 1920 and the 1930s) later adopted elements of Ratzel's work, stressing the need for state expansion to create Grossraum (“big space”). This idea became politicized and was adopted by the National Socialist (Nazi) movement as justification for its expansionist policies. Ratzel never imagined Lebensraum as part of a Nazi agenda—a movement he distanced himself from—instead suggesting that Grossraum would be a site of cultural intermixing for the good of the state.