Geographica Helvetica 

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.