Mental Maps

Geographical and Historical Perspectives

Janne Holmén, Norbert Götz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032114415
• eBook ISBN: 9781000485608
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The concept of mental maps is used in several disciplines including geography, psychology, history, linguistics, economics, anthropology, political science, and computer game design. However, until now, there has been little communication between these disciplines and methodological schools involved in mental mapping.

Mental Maps: Geographical and Historical Perspectives addresses this situation by bringing together scholars from some of the related fields. Ute Schneider examines the development of German geographer Heinrich Schiffers' mental maps, using his books on Africa from the 1930s to the 1970s. Efrat Ben-Ze'ev and Chloé Yvroux investigate conceptions of Israel and Palestine, particularly the West Bank, held by French and Israeli students. By superimposing large numbers of sketch maps, Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau, Sophie de Ruffray, and Nicolas Lambert identify "soft" and "hard" macro-regions on the mental maps of geography students across the world. Janne Holmén investigates whether the Baltic and the Mediterranean Seas are seen as links or divisions between the countries that line their shores, according to the mental maps of high school seniors. Similarly, Dario Musolino maps regional preferences of Italian entrepreneurs. Finally, Lars-Erik Edlund offers an essayistic account of mental mapping, based on memories of maps in his own family.

This edited volume book uses printed maps, survey data and hand drawn maps as sources, contributing to the study of human perception of space from the perspectives of different disciplines.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa

Ute Schneider

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Athenäum publishing house in Germany planned a revised and extended edition of Heinrich Schiffers’ (1901–1982) successful book Wilder Erdteil Afrika (English translation: The Quest for Africa). The bestselling author had published several monographs about Africa since the 1930s, and authored and edited numerous works after World War II. Nearly all of these works, whose substantial print runs are testament to their popularity, are characterized by an engaging combination of text, images, and cartographic material, creating narratives and mental maps about Africa, its history, and the colonial past. In his later writings, he stressed the importance of “relearning” with regard to Africa and struggled to remap the imaginative geography of Africa. In this paper, I examine the characteristics of Schiffers’ imaginative geography and the change in his writings and maps. I explore whether his concept of “relearning” was an epistemological decolonization or if there were any continuities found in his imaginative geography. In order to grasp the specifics of his thinking, his geography will be briefly compared with that of his contemporary, Frankfurt zoo director Bernhard Grzimek.

Introduction

In 1977, linguist and Arabist Karl Stowasser (1977) reviewed a book by geographer Heinrich Schiffers in the renowned Middle East Journal. Schiffers had published a historical and political regional geography of Libya together with two colleagues under the title Libya: Burning Desert – Blooming Sand. Despite an overall positive review, Stowasser included the following remark about the style of the book: “Some readers may also feel slightly irritated by the jaunty and somewhat breathless ‘gee-whiz-would you believe that?’ (1977, p. 220) exclamation-point-ridden style in which a good deal of the material is presented.” He mentioned in amusement the constant reminders given to readers to refrain from a Eurocentric view and smugly stated: “the index even contains a curious item ‘umlernen’” (1977, p. 220). This emphasis on “relearning” is noticeable insofar as it is not a technical term. Schiffers seems rather to be using it to describe a process of epistemological decolonization, which his thinking and geography had to pass through since his first books in the inter-war period had been published. However – and this makes Schiffers’ use of “umlernen” quite interesting – it not only means an active process of relearning old episteme but includes echoes of the democratic re-education of the Germans after 1945.

A glance into the book confirms this impression. Right on the first pages, Schiffers (1975, pp. 9–12) paints a panoramic view of Libya as a country between tradition and modern age, between “pious Islamic sharifs” and “Rommel’s tank brigades”, between shepherds and oil traders. Since the discovery of oil at the end of the 1950s, the country experienced a boom and the “bold Libyan reform experiment” attracted business interest and Western attention. The “Westerners” however, argued Schiffers, not only had considerable knowledge gaps but held a view of Libya that originated from colonial times and focused on the coastal region. He demanded a rethink of the approach for the “project era” – as he named the process of decolonization and development policy – that had just begun. Moreover, he argued, the Europeans were the ones who had to do the relearning. They had to comprehend, for example, that their continent and the “Western” world with it, the “centre of all values and yardsticks” for centuries, “has not pointed the way for the Third (and Fourth¹) World for quite some time now”.

Heinrich Schiffers did not exclude himself from the necessity of this process. He and his two “travel companions” had made themselves familiar with the country and its people since their first immersion in the “Islamic-Arabic world zone” in 1958. As a “Westerner willing to relearn”, he had had to completely revise his first publication from the same year just four years later. The resubmitted book was based on “long discussions”, neither being intended to be a “journalistic portrait” nor a “regional fact book filled with geographic or ecological stereotypes and many tables” (1975, p. 11).

The fairly popular Libya book was among the last of Schiffers’ works, which had been preceded by a large number of similarly popular publications that had seen repeated editions and reprints since 1935. Almost all of his publications found not only national and international attention; he was one of the more well-known authors of geographical handbooks after the Second World War. His career moved between science and school service and ended in the 1970s in the respectable and influential Munich Institute for Economic Research (IFO, today CESifo). Against the background of this extensive oeuvre and his influential position contributing fundamentally to the knowledge of Africa in the Federal Republic, his emphasis on “relearning” raises the question of what Schiffers’ perceptions of Africa at the different periods of his life and the different social and political contexts were like.

Schiffers’ continuous publication activities since the inter-war period provide a suitable basis for exploring the dimensions of his “relearning” from the texts, images, and maps. His emphasis on a conscious process of “relearning” raises the question as to how far imaginative geographies can be subjected to an intentional process of transformation, and whether an epistemological decolonization can be consciously accomplished. Such a perspective is directly related to research on “mental maps”, which examines among other aspects the worldviews, values and models of social groups and individual actors. In particular, the concept of Orientalism has encouraged work on imaginative geographies and the mental models of influential actors (Kitchin and Freundschuh 2000; Power and Sidaway 2004; Andreasson 2005; Tilley 2011).

In contrast to British and French colonial officials, however, the question of Schiffers’ “imaginative geography” and the meaning of “relearning” in his case still have an additional political dimension. After all, with the end of the “Third Reich” in 1945, all colonial ambitions and research projects, which had continued since 1918 ended abruptly. In spite of the loss of their colonies at the end of World War I, some German geographers continued their research on Africa as a colonial space after 1918 and co-operated after 1937 with the colonial-political office of the NSDAP (Schultz 1989; Haar and Fahlbusch 2005; Jureit 2012; Schneider 2012). After the war, Heinrich Schiffers was among the German researchers who had to undergo the formal de-nazification carried out by British officers and he, along with all Germans, was subjected to the process of “reeducation”. “Reeducation” meant for the British and American Allies a guided and comprehensive process of democratization of the German population. The question then arises as to whether Schiffers’ concept of “relearning” went beyond this democratization process and led to a change in his perception and imaginative geography of Africa. To some extent, I will argue, Schiffers succeeded in transforming his imaginative geography, but the epistemological decolonization had its limitations insofar as it remained attached to a European narrative of modernization and geopolitical thinking.

Past studies of mental maps have taken their evidence mainly from written sources, and have largely ignored visual evidence (Werlen 2008; Schenk 2013). Indeed, the inclusion of photo and, above all, map material has been given comparatively little attention, although the research on mental maps has pointed to the power of visualizations and the link between text and image. Beyond it, this matters because cognitive mapping research continues to debate the status of maps and their influence on spatial behavior, as well as the relation between reception and literacy, and finally the media practices of mapping (Gregory 1994; Kitchin and Blades 2001; Cosgrove 2008; Gieseking 2013).

This study works to bring the visual into the study of mental maps through an exploration of the evolving work of Schiffers. His writings allow such a combined text-image analysis, because his books always contained extensive visual material. An analysis of both also provides insights into the coherence or potential tensions between “relearning” and his imaginative geography on the verbal and visual levels. This is important not least because Schiffers’ publications gained a widespread audience, and they have simultaneously exposed knowledge, world images, and representations. The following considerations will focus on Schiffers’ work, including text, photos and maps, and look for evidence of his “relearning” his own imaginative geographies.

Career path between academia and politics

Heinrich Schiffers was born in 1901, the son of a master baker in Aachen, and attended a humanist grammar school until the lower sixth grade. In 1921, he passed his first teacher’s exam and three years later in Cologne the supplementary exam in Latin and Greek that was required for full-fledged enrollment. He then studied German, History, and French. In 1940 and 1941, he enrolled as a guest student in Cologne, with geography as his main subject.² At the same time, he worked as a teacher of geography and French at various schools starting in 1927. He was drafted in 1941, and according to his own statements, worked as an interpreter in the military. His name is included on a list of “speakers essential to the war effort” by Hitler’s “Beauftragter für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP”, a kind of commissioner for supervising the entire mental and philosophical training and education of the NSDAP from 1940 and he was a member of the “Reichskolonialbund” (Reich Colonial League), a union of all colonial associations and organizations with the aim to regain colonies, until 1941.³

Schiffers found the time to write a dissertation after a first book manuscript titled “The Sahara in Europe’s View”, which was destroyed in a fire in 1943. In August 1944, he obtained his doctorate in Marburg under Helmuth Kanter (1891–1976) with research on Algeria titled “The Ténéré as a Type of North African Desert Region.” Schiffers maintained a close relationship with his doctoral supervisor, a geographer and medical scientist, who was awarded a chair in Marburg because of his membership in the Nazi party. Kanter recruited several convinced national socialists during his professorship, and an interest in Africa and Libya linked him with his student, Schiffers.⁴ Years later, Schiffers thanked Kanter in his preface to Libya: Burning Desert (1975, p. 12).

The focus of Schiffers’ dissertation was an explanation of the nature of the Ténéré, a desert region in the South Sahara, “based on the region”. The work clearly has an anti-French tenor, speaking out against “Europeans alien to the region” or “elements”, as he calls them in some passages (1944, p. 136). The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: “Mental maps: geographical and historical perspectives”
• 1 Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa
• 2 Palestine, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank: the muddled mental maps of French and Israeli students
• 3 Mental maps of global regions: identifying and characterizing “hard” and “soft” regions
• 4 Changing mental maps of the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean regions
• 5 The mental maps of Italian entrepreneurs: a quali-quantitative approach
• 6 Creative Mappings: Some reflections on mental maps
• Index