The political concept of ‘living space’ can be traced back, in substance, to Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) late 18th-century political metaphors.^[1] With the emergence of organicist conceptions of the state, which conceived of the state as an organism developing in accordance with natural laws, the idea of ‘Lebensraum’ took on its first political contours. From then on, in Germany, efforts towards national unification, the rise of industrial capitalism and colonial expansionist interests were among the decisive factors that promoted the establishment of the term. From the end of the 19th century onwards, the interlinking of political concepts of territoriality with the experiential category of a space shrinking as a result of modernisation and industrialisation processes soon came to be organised, both scientifically and semantically, around the concept of ‘Lebensraum’. The notion of ‘Lebensraum’ was closely linked to the establishment of the then still fledgling subject of geography and to its development into ‘political geography’. As geographical knowledge became increasingly biologised, organicist conceptions of the state and territoriality were imbued with a physiological and biological vocabulary, which was intended to enable imperial policy to be scientifically legitimised and, above all, predicted on the basis of spatial laws. The most prominent proponent of this conception of space, based on evolutionary and migration theory, was the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), who was probably the first to use the concept of ‘Lebensraum’ explicitly and, in doing so, transferred the dynamics of densification—which were significant for the 19th century—into the political sphere of state transformation processes.^[2]

Ratzel conceived a ‘biogeography’ that bridged the gap between the geosciences and the life sciences; through this, he no longer understood ‘Lebensraum’ merely as a form of life, but rather transformed the concept into a category of life itself and thus into a category of substance. Ratzel effected this transfer by means of a geographically grounded theory of movement, in which he naturalised the forces of the capitalist-industrial world market as dynamics of life and thus began to conceive of world history as natural history. Since this evolutionary spatial mechanics was intended primarily to legitimise colonial land grabs, ‘Lebensraum’ soon became part of the core vocabulary of imperial discourses of justification.

Although the term took on a distinctly German character through Friedrich Ratzel, the French colonial discourse also recognised the concept of ‘espace vital’. Furthermore, after the turn of the century, a global geopolitical discourse took hold, featuring internationally renowned scholars such as the British geographer Halford J. Mackinder (1861–1947), the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) and the US Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), a global geopolitical discourse emerged which, whilst employing quite different conceptual frameworks and interpretations, generally drew upon Ratzel’s *Political Geography* as a foundational school of thought.^[3]

Whilst geostrategic thinking on a large-scale basis dominated internationally, the political discourse on territory in Germany became more radicalised and remained, from then on, fixated on the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The delegitimisation of Germany’s own concepts of territory was one of the key experiences shaping research into German identity as it took shape in the 1920s. Having lost not only the war but also the peace, politicians and academics were faced with the challenge of developing robust concepts of territorial constitution that would allow Germany to be conceived beyond its current borders. Under the banner of the ‘German Space’ and with explicit reference to Ratzel’s work *Der Lebensraum*^[4], geopolitical theories, concepts and ideas emerged that propagated various scenarios beyond the territorial order established internationally since 1919. The theory of ‘Volks- und Kulturboden’ (ethnic and cultural territory) — presented as a narrative of progress — as advocated by, amongst others, Albrecht Penck (1858–1945) and Wilhelm Volz (1870–1958), made it possible, for example, to justify territorial claims relatively independently of the current settlement patterns. In doing so, it became part of the political discourse on border regions and the German diaspora abroad and lent itself to a revisionist foreign policy that was nonetheless adapted to the prevailing political balance of power. The political discourse on space during the Weimar Republic differed strikingly from the imperial claims of the German Empire, as ‘Lebensraum’ had now become radicalised into an existential concept. The prevailing perception was that Germany was suffering from an intolerable lack of space. At the same time, the territorial losses since 1919 coincided with experiences of economic overcrowding and fostered a claustrophobic sense of existence that became symptomatic of the discourse on space in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, an existential sense of threat transformed into an ideologised emotion, which ultimately escalated into a kind of historical phantom pain under the slogan‘a people without space’. ^5]

Hitler’s *Mein Kampf* also belongs within the context of this völkisch-racial transformation process, which was anchored in the geopolitical discourse on space during the Weimar Republic. Admittedly, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) initially avoided the concept of ‘Lebensraum’ because of its geopolitical and bourgeois connotations, and instead propagated a National Socialist land policy. However, these nuances did little to alter the racial homogenisation of the ‘Lebensraum’ ideology that began immediately after 1933. Whilst the term ‘Boden’ tended to remain focused on the meaning of an agrarian ‘Germanisation’ of existing and later conquered territories (‘blood-and-soil ideology’), ‘Lebensraum’ evolved into a concept of social order homogenised according to racial-biological criteria, primarily geared towards the conquest, settlement and domination of large regions. Instead of colonial conquests in Africa or Asia, the aim was now to compensate for the loss of territory—which had been ideologically inflamed by war-induced territorial cessions—by conquering new ‘Lebensraum’ in Eastern Europe. The German counterpart to India or Algeria was not Cameroon; rather, drawing on medieval settlement patterns, attention turned to the states that had emerged in Eastern, Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe following the First World War. The resources deemed indispensable for the further development of the ‘Nordic race’ were to be obtained in the East, thereby guaranteeing the racial advancement and further development of the ‘Aryan people’.

The outbreak of the Second World War marked a certain turning point in this dynamic: with the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939, not only did the geographical scope of Nazi and Stalinist policies of conquest begin to take shape, but ‘living space’ now came to characterise the totality of a will to destroy and reorganise, which no longer viewed the conquered territories in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe as ‘empty’ in the colonial sense, but intended to empty and reorganise them in the spirit of racial selection. In concrete terms, this programme was already being implemented during the territorial annexation of western Poland between 1939 and 1941. Racially homogeneous areas, such as those sought by the German occupiers, could not be created by the mere drawing of borders. The territories incorporated into the Reich were therefore to be ‘Germanised’ immediately through population exchange. From the very outset, this fundamental territorial principle linked the resettlement of so-called‘ethnic Germans’– as agreed in the Hitler–Stalin Pact – with the practices of resettlement and expulsion in western Poland. Caught between a racially-biological selection process, a policy of political and cultural assimilation and Germanisation directed at sections of the non--Jewish population, war-induced mobilisation of labour, and the establishment of an ethno-national social order, a ‘living space’ organisation aimed at segregation took shape; its failure represented one of the most fateful steps on the path to the Holocaust.

With the reworking of international law into a ‘völkisch’ organisation of greater regions, the Second World War marked the beginning of both the semantic and factual transition from a legally guaranteed territorial order to a biological-racial concept of ‘living space’, which guided the actions of National Socialist policy on greater regions. The homogenisation of the former Polish territory served as a testing ground; from June 1941 onwards, the planning staff applied the existing principle of ‘ethnic replacement’, with certain modifications, to the newly occupied‘Eastern territories’as well. The racial homogenisation of the conquered ‘living space’ remained, at its core, the territorial mission statement of Nazi expansionist policy, even though the geographical conditions in the Soviet Union necessitated certain transitional approaches and racial selection of the local populations could not be enforced across the board. Yet despite such adjustments, it remained a defining feature of Nazi expansionist and extermination policies that the resettlement, expulsion and murder of racially and politically undesirable population groups were not a consequence, but rather the purpose and objective of the ‘living space’ policy in the conquered East. It was no coincidence that the decision to carry out the systematic mass murder of European Jews was taken at precisely the historical moment when the policies of settlement and conquest were reaching scales previously unimaginable. The transition to systematic mass murder was complete when all other spatial reorganisation concepts had failed and genocide gained cynical persuasive force as a supposedly necessary, if not inevitable, solution to the question of living space.

After the Second World War, the concept of ‘habitat’ was regarded as ideologically tainted and lost almost all of its political dimension. Apart from its historical context and a few marginal attempts at revival, the term has since been reduced to its biological and geographical meaning and is, in practical terms, synonymous with terms such as ‘biotope’ or ‘biosphere’.

• Irene Diekmann, Peter Krüger, Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Geopolitics – Crossing Borders in the Zeitgeist. 2 vols. Potsdam 2000.
• Ulrike Jureit: The Organisation of Spaces. Territory and Living Space in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Hamburg 2012.
• Werner Köster: The Discourse on Space – On the Semantic Development of a German Concept. Heidelberg 2002 (Studies in the History of Science and Universities 1).
• Karl Lange: The Term ‘Lebensraum’ in Hitler’s *Mein Kampf*. In: *Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte* 13 (1965), pp. 426–437.
• Mechthild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher, Cordula Tollmien (eds.): The ‘General Plan East’ – Main Lines of National Socialist Planning and Extermination Policy. Berlin 1993 (Publications of the Hamburg Foundation for the Social History of the 20th Century).
• Heinz-Dietrich Schultz: Friedrich Ratzel – A bellicose spatial theorist with a love of nature, or a forerunner of Nazi ‘living space’ policy? In: Claus Deimel, Sebastian Lentz, Bernhard Streck (eds.): In Search of Diversity – Ethnography and Geography in Leipzig. Leipzig 2009, pp. 125–142.
• Rainer Sprengel: A Critique of Geopolitics – A German Discourse 1914–1944. Berlin 1996.

[1] See Johann Gottfried Herder: *Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind* (1782–1788), Berlin edition, Berlin 2013 (1st ed. 1784–1791). Online: www.zeno.org/Lesesaal/N/9781482559736?page=2 (accessed 20 December 2021).

[2] Friedrich Ratzel: Political Geography. 3rd ed. Munich 1923 (1st ed. 1897).

[3] E.g. Rudolf Kjellén: The State as a Form of Life (1916), German edition, Berlin 1924.

[4] Friedrich Ratzel: Lebensraum – A Biogeographical Study (1901). Reprint, Darmstadt 1966.

[5] Cf. Hans Grimm: A People Without Space, single-volume edition, Munich 1926.

Ulrike Jureit: Lebensraum. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2016. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32732 (accessed 20 December 2021).