The compound word is made up of the individual words ‘culture’ (from the Latin ‘cultura’ = cultivation, tilling, care; ‘colere’ = to cultivate, to till, to care for) and ‘landscapes’.

A widely recognised definition of the term ‘cultural landscapes’ is taken from the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention, or International Convention for the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage ^[1] and the Operational Guidelines adopted in 1992 by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, in which ‘cultural landscapes’ are described as ‘combined works of nature and man’. A distinction is made between the following three categories, which are relevant not only to cultural geographers but also to cultural studies scholars and historians:

1. landscapes that have been intentionally designed and created by humans,
2. landscapes that have developed organically (organically evolved landscapes), with a distinction being made between ‘relict [or fossil] landscapes’ and ‘continuing landscapes’, and
3. associative cultural landscapes, in which artistic, religious or other cultural attributions take centre stage.^[2]

The term is primarily used as a technical term in academic circles, but is also found in popular science or journalistic writings.

English: cultural landscape; French: paysage culturel; Italian: paesaggio culturale; Polish: krajobraz kulturowy; Czech: kulturní krajina; Russian: культурный ландшафт [kul’turnyj landšaft].

In his popular work *Views of Nature *, the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) explored the ‘physiognomic character of the landscape’.^[3] Humboldt had in mind both natural scientific and human-cultural aspects. The French ethnologist Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), the founder of what is known as anthropogeography, drew on his work. In contrast to German geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), he developed a theory which, in the interaction between humans and the landscape – referred to by Vidal de la Blache in French as the ‘pays’ – did not perceive any geodeterminism, but merely a potential capacity for adaptation. He viewed a landscape as a ‘reservoir’ in which ‘energies lie dormant, the seeds of which nature has sown, but the use of which depends on humankind’. Through the ‘interrelated influence of local circumstances’, a ‘connection between scattered characteristics’ is established; as a result, a landscape becomes more distinct and differentiated, and ‘in the long run, becomes like a medal bearing the image of a people’.^[4] The Königsberg geographer Siegfried Passarge (1866–1958) also advanced research through his systematisation of certain landscape types, distinguishing between ‘normal landscape types’ (virtual, morphographic, morphological) and ‘modification types’ (wet, dry, warm, cold, those resulting from mechanical destruction, and cultural).^[5]

An explanation of ‘cultural landscapes’ that remains accepted to this day was provided in 1925 by the geographer Carl O. Sauer (1889–1975), who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in his essay *The Morphology of Landscape*:

The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing over time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases, and probably reaching the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different—that is, alien—culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscapes sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed upon the remnants of an older one. The natural landscape is, of course, of fundamental importance, for it provides the materials from which the cultural landscape is formed. The shaping force, however, lies in culture itself.^[6]

This postulated – in contrast to the geodeterministic model of Ratzel and his pupils – the constant transformation of landscapes, which are continually adapted to new ideas and needs. Sauer saw ideologies, customs and traditions, as well as the everyday lives of the people living and working within a landscape, as the driving forces behind this.

In historically multi-ethnic regions of Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe, multilingual ‘linguistic landscapes’ can in themselves be evidence of a complex cultural landscape. This begins with multilingual town entrance signs (such as‘Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg’in Transylvania, Romania) and continues with street signs, shop signs, monuments and information panels. Equally telling are traces of a multi-religious or multi-denominational past. In numerous towns and villages across South-Eastern Europe, mosques, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches exist side by side; indeed, in the appearance of Prussian-Silesian villages and towns, the coexistence of Catholic and Protestant churches was a lived reality. The existence of several ethnically associated institutions in close proximity can be both an expression of mutual tolerance and a sign of rivalry, as in the case of the Turnerheim (the German Gymnastics Club) and the ‘Sokolovna’ (the hall of the Czech gymnastics association Sokol) in the South Moravian city of Brno, both of which are situated on the Ringstraße.

In past discourses – some of which continue to have an impact today – an essentialist understanding of ‘cultural landscapes’, which can be traced back to the geodeterministic school mentioned above, has proved problematic. In particular, the exclusive conception of culture as ‘high culture’ and ‘one’s own culture’—in contrast to a supposedly inferior and ‘foreign’ culture—has led to colonialist notions of hierarchy. When this was further linked to discourses on ethnic exclusivity, it gave rise to worrying notions of segregation. For example, in German ‘völkisch’ accounts of Bohemian or Silesian history, the argument was frequently put forward that the medieval German iron plough had penetrated deep into the soil whilst ploughing and had turned it over during cultivation, whereas the Slavic wooden plough had merely scratched the surface. From this alleged technological superiority, a claim by the Germans to the land was derived.

Based on such notions, Albrecht Penck (1858–1945) developed the concept of the ‘German national and cultural soil’ in 1925 and created a geographical representation of it that had a lasting impact.^[7] For Penck, regions that were either part of German national territory or in which people of German language and culture lived constituted ‘German ethnic territory’, whereas he referred to other areas—which, in his view, were significantly shaped by ‘German culture’ without necessarily still having a German population— ‘German cultural territory’. This theory went beyond a mere reassessment of the territorial losses following 1919, in that it allowed vast swathes of Eastern Europe to be declared ‘German cultural territory’.

In the language used by German expellee organisations after 1945, descriptions of the homelands they had left behind frequently included the argument that even the stones there spoke German,^[8] which was intended to legitimise the continuing claim to the lost‘eastern territories’. However, the then Polish Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (1901–1981), also remarked in a sermon at Wrocław Cathedral in August 1965 that that in Breslau/Wrocław the stones spoke Polish (“we Wroclawiu kamienie mówią po polsku”).^[9] To this day, Polish journalists, drawing a certain analogy with the German discourse on displaced persons with regard to the lost ‘Kresy’, often use the phrase ‘gdzie kamienie mówią po polsku’ [where the stones speak Polish].^[10] This example illustrates how attributions can change over the course of history – from a bilateral, culturally and politically underpinned confrontational stance between ‘lost’ or ‘regained’ territories to the current understanding of a‘shared cultural heritage’that cannot be attributed exclusively to one group.

Kristin Kopp: Germany’s Wild East. Constructing Poland as a Colonial Space. Ann Arbor 2012.

Hansjörg Küster: A History of the Landscape in Central Europe. From the Ice Age to the Present Day. Munich 1995.

Hansjörg Küster: Beautiful Views. A Brief History of the Landscape. Munich 2009.

Simon Schama: Landscape and Memory. New York 1995.

Tobias Weger: Cultural Landscapes – A Concept in Cultural Studies. In: Andrew Demshuk, ed. (eds.): Cultural Landscapes. Transatlantic Perspectives on the Effects and Impacts of German Culture and History in Eastern Europe. Munich 2015 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 52), pp. 17–28.

[1] Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/ (accessed 29 March 2021).

[2] Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, whc.unesco.org/archive/opguide92.pdf (accessed 29 March 2021).

[3] Alexander von Humboldt: Views of Nature. Popular edition with Humboldt’s biography and Humboldt’s portrait. New York 1859, p. 205.

[4] Paul Vidal de la Blache: Tableau de la Géographie de la France. Paris 1905, quoted in German translation in H. Beck: Great Geographers. Pioneers, Outsiders, Scholars. Berlin 1962, p. 301.

[5] Siegfried Passarge: The Fundamentals of Landscape Geography. Breslau 1923 (3 vols.).

[6] Carl O. Sauer: *The Morphology of Landscape*. In: *University of California Publications in Geography* 2/2 (1925), pp. 19–53, here: p. 46.

[7] Albrecht Penck: ‘German Folk and Cultural Soil’. In: K[arl] C[hristian] v. Loesch (ed.): *A People Among Peoples*. Breslau 1925, pp. 62–73.

[8] See, for example, Elisabeth Ruge, Peter Ruge: ‘It Is Not Only the Stones That Speak German: Poland’s German Eastern Territories’. Munich, Vienna 1985. For a critical discussion of this, see Michaela Marek: ‘Can Old Walls Be “German”? On the Problem of German Architectural Monuments in Poland between Nostalgia, Politics and Heritage Conservation’. In: Hans-Jürgen Karp (ed.): German History and Culture in Present-Day Poland. Marburg 1997, pp. 103–117.

[9] Quoted from Fr. Andrzej Dzielak: ‘Gdyby nie kardynał Kominek, nie byłoby Jana Pawła II’. A tribute to Bolesław Kominek and the Message from the Polish bishops to the German bishops [‘Without Cardinal Kominek, there would have been no John Paul II’. Reminiscences of Bolesław Kominek and the Message from the Polish Bishops to the German Bishops]. In: Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej 1 (2011), pp. 195–212, here: p. 206.

[10] *Tam, gdzie kamienie mówią po polsku* [Where the stones speak Polish], for example, was chosen in 2019 as the theme for the Second International Polish Diaspora Literary Competition, organised by the Związek Piłsudczyków RP [Association of Piłsudski Supporters in the Republic of Poland]. See www.patronaty.wzp.pl/patronaty-honorowe-marszalka/listopad-2019/ii-miedzynarodowy-polonijny-konkurs-literacki-tam-gdzie-kamienie-mowia-po-polsku (accessed 29 March 2021).

This article is based on:

Tobias Weger: ‘Cultural Landscapes – a concept in cultural studies’, in: Andrew Demshuk, Tobias Weger (eds.): Cultural Landscapes.Transatlantic Perspectives on the Effects and Impact of German Culture and History in Eastern Europe (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 52). Munich 2015, pp. 17–28.

Tobias Weger: Cultural Landscapes. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2021. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32712 (accessed 17 April 2023).