https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/view/84/2366
In February 1942, Budapest’s Palace of Art hosted a German exhibition titled “Autobahn und Wasserstraßen”. Organized by Fritz Todt, chief engineer of the Autobahn and the Third Reich’s first Minister of Armaments and Munitions (Milward https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/download/84/2366/8080?inline=1#CR31: 57–58), the exhibition’s displays focused on several areas of interest for both the Germans presenting the material and the Hungarians viewing it: the Danube River as a pan-European waterway, intra-European traffic patterns, and hydraulic engineering and shipping in Hungary. One of the civil servants tasked with preparing “Autobahn und Wasserstraßen” was Rudolf Hoffmann. During the initial stages of setting up the exhibition, Hoffmann became concerned that the importance of what the Germans were proposing would be lost on the audience. Perhaps they would fail to recognize the Nazi war effort – well underway by 1942 – as an important step toward replacing the old European order with something new and better. Perhaps they would fail to understand that European connectedness and a fundamental shift away from reliance on maritime transportation were the prerequisites for the new potential regime of rail, water and motorway consolidation on display in Budapest (Hoffmann https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/download/84/2366/8080?inline=1#CR20: n.p.). To make all of this clearer, Hoffmann designed some maps.
The maps produced, as described by Hoffmann ( https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/download/84/2366/8080?inline=1#CR20: n.p.), projected two very different European continents to the Palace of Art’s attendees. The first – Das alte Europa: Zerrissen und abhängig von England (see Fig. https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/download/84/2366/8080?inline=1#Fig1) – depicts an “old Europe” that is “torn apart and dependent on England”. According to Hoffmann, a plaque accompanying this map pointed out “Old Europe’s” heavy reliance on sea travel and lack of land-based traffic. Hoffmann chose to colour the various European nation states in a variety of hues, a decision meant to emphasize their differences and disagreements. The Soviet Union was very deliberately cut off from the rest of Europe, as well. This map projects a Europe that is inefficient, chaotic and under the imperial control of a once-great maritime power.
Hoffmann’s second map – Das neue Europa: ein freier Organismus (see Fig. https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/download/84/2366/8080?inline=1#Fig2) – shows its audience a European cartographic order far superior to its “old” counterpart. Here, the “new Europe” is “a free organism” with shipping and traffic patterns connecting all the people and nations of Europe to one another. There is no differentiation in colour between any of the nation states, and an eastern German border is conspicuously absent. Hoffmann attached a plaque to this map as well, using it to explain that, in this new Europe, continental routes – railways, waterways and highways – would carry the bulk of traffic.
These maps are an excellent example of how Germans interested in area research – and, specifically, contributors to Raumforschung und Raumordnung (RuR) – understood the relationship between cartography and their national identity. The presentation of an ever-evolving Greater Germany, with flexible borders and an eye toward territorial expansion, dominates the maps of the RuR from the publication of its first edition through the Second World War. After the defeat of the Third Reich and the partitioning of Germany, a new territorial order required the re-creation of the German national map. Hoffmann, in fact, would contribute some of the first articulations of this new map in the pages of RuR – eleven years after presenting his alte/neue Europas in Budapest. As discussed at in the https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/view/84/2366, Hoffmann’s maps, and many of the maps in RuR, reflect the context of Germany’s territorial reality: a reality that rapidly shifted from expansionism before and during the Second World War, to cartographic confusion in the immediate post-war years, and finally, by the mid-1950s, to a solidification of German territory into two separate and distinct nation states.
https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/view/84/2366
