Stadt und Verstadterung [Cities and Urbanization]

April 1936 issue of the German ‘Magazine for Geopolitics’

This compilation of essays was edited by Karl Haushofer, a prominent Nazi geographer, and published by Kurt Vowinckel in Leipzig as the April 1936 edition of Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik (Magazine for Geopolitics). The theme of the contents, about 75 pages in total, is “Cities and Urbanization”; featuring four related articles and several reports, literature reviews, and ‘fundamental questions’ by various German (mostly Nazi-affiliated) authors. The essay “The Urbanization of Central and Western Europe from 1830 – 1930” includes two folding maps that emphasize the paucity of urban centers in Eastern Europe.

Kaul Haushofer developed the concept of Geopolitik, a particular school of German nationalist ideology that incorporated racial tenets with physical geography and state-building. Haushofer, a popularizer of the term Lebensraum, was extremely influential on Hitler, though the former’s wife, Martha, was half-Jewish. Their son, Albrecht Haushofer, participated in an attempt to assassinate Hitler and was executed in 1944. Martha and Karl Haushofer died in a 1946 suicide pact after learning of impending charges in the Nuremberg Trials.