Geographica Helvetica 

The authors of this editorial call for a more consistent opening of population geography in epistemological, methodological and theoretical respects. They want to point out possibilities of connection to debates that have already found a firm place in other fields of human geography. At the same time, it is a concern to emphasize the necessity of continuously subjecting the discussion of the phenomenon of population to critical scrutiny, both within (human) geography and outside of it.

Halford J. Mackinder's heartland theory became one of the most popular and cited geopolitical concepts in the 20th century. Through a complex process of trans- and international reception and adaption, the theory lost its attachment to its original geographical and historical parameters. Its translation from text into a simplified representation in maps accompanied the process of popularization and made the theory an instrument of legitimizing political actions in the public sphere.

Scientific freedom involves three aspects: Freedom as power and privilege, freedom as a right of defence, and freedom as autonomy for self-regulation. But how to decide in science when science itself has marked all scientific criteria as contingent? At this point, the article proposes to acknowledge the decision-making challenges in science, to engage in theory-theoretical dialogues and thus to preserve autonomy.

At the end of XIXth century, French authors shared a posture that mixed admiration and criticism toward German science. Reference to Ratzel was used both for structuring human geography and feeding a struggle between geographers and other social scientists. Divergences with Ratzel’s work deepened during the war and lead geographers to revisit his key notion, Raum, by giving it a pragmatic sense in the light of pangermanism and interpreting it not as mere expanse but as a process of enlargement.

The cultural memory of Aleida and Jan Assmann has received little recognition in international geography. However, by focusing on the concerns of a geographical study of places of memory, it is possible to develop a spatially oriented conception of cultural memory spaces based on the assumption that places of memory cannot be a storage, but only an anchor for memories.