This article represents an attempt to analyse the political desiderata underlying the activities of East Central European geographers during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath. These scholars, drawing on the achievements of German and French geographical studies, and who were frequently graduates from western European universities, employed sophisticated research tools and arguments in the service of legitimising national interests. The apogee of the political impact of their intellectual concepts came during the peace negotiations in Paris, but indirect evidence of the efficacy of this generation of geographers in the region can also be seen in the fact that they were to become points of reference and arsenals of knowledge utilized by the interwar revisionist propaganda of Germany and Hungary.
The author analyses professional geographical narratives centered upon the borders in East Central and Southeast Europe in the context of the First World War. It is argued that they represent a regional equivalent of nationalistic mobilization of intellectuals’ characteristic for Western Europe and broadly referred to as ‘spiritual war’ (Krieg der Geister). Typically, they tended to employ the newest methodological trends (notably anthropogeography) together with inspirations from the tradition of national characterology (or ethnopsychology). They also participated in the international discussions on the question of ‘natural’ borders. The main fronts of ‘the war of maps’ spread mostly around territorial claims in the region: the German expansion to the East, the conflict between Bulgaria and Serbia in Macedonia, the Polish-Ukrainian border conflict, hostilities between Italy and Serbia etc. The expertise of the East Central and Southeast European geographers was, then, instrumental for the reshaping of the region following the decisions of the Peace Conference. Finally, professional techniques and modes of argumentation used by the region’s geographers inspired interwar revisionist campaigns in Hungary and Germany.
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