In 1940, Nazi agronomist and SS-Oberführer Konrad Meyer set up an institution to devise the ‘rational’ plans of ‘colonizing the East’ in order to create an ideal landscape for settler colonists of an imperial German-Aryan race by wiping Eastern Europe from all ‘lesser’ races. The Generalplan Ost (‘General Plan East’), as it was called, was the spatial plan of the Holocaust. It followed an expansionist German colonial vision of Lebensraum, which imagined ‘Slavic lands’ as an Aryan colonial frontier comparable to that of North America. The main architect behind these plans was German geographer Walter Christaller. Generalplan Ost was the first large-scale application of his ‘central place theory’ (CPT), a mathematical spatial economic theory on the ideal, ‘rational’ hexagonic layout and hierarchical structure of settlements with their catchment regions (Christaller 1933). During the war, Americans and Soviets raced to get their hands on Nazi technology, plans, maps and experts. Meyer’s institution was evacuated by the Americans in Operation Dustbin, and a controversial ‘denazification’ found the team not guilty of war crimes. Later on, CPT-based regional planning thrived in both Germanies. In the West, Christaller became widely acclaimed as one of the pioneer and most influential theorists in quantitative geography, urban theory, regional science and planning. Christaller’s Nazi activities were made public only in the late 1970s, but the controversial technoscientific continuities were only researched from the 1990s onwards. My book project shows how the ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography relied on globalizing CPT through the networks of American knowledge hegemony in the 1960s, while the wider geographies of the Generalplan Ost remain an unacknowledged ‘dark condition’ of this American-led technoscientific ‘revolution’. The expansive Nazi plans had a Dutch side embedded in previous plans for polderization and new settlements, and were copied by Spanish internal colonization projects in the Franco era. Japanese planners visited Meyer’s office in 1941, and returned with the plans with great enthusiasm. Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, formerly educated in Germany and working on regional plans for Marshall Plan reconstruction, established an urban planning company to globalize CPT through export projects in Africa and the Middle East in the 1960s. Yet more strikingly, Jewish Zionist settlers from Germany and Eastern Europe who established Israel based their ‘rational’ regional plans for new settlements on CPT in the 1950s. In Poland, postwar reconstruction led geographers and urban theorists to develop new regional plans for their country, inspired by CPT and former Nazi planning, in the National Office of Spatial Planning (1946–48). Although shut down by the communists, Polish planners could later use their acquaintance with CPT-based technoscience in export projects, such as in the Baghdad Plan in Iraq, and in entering American-led knowledge networks in the 1950s. This paper argues for globalizing the Generalplan Ost through the transcolonial histories of Christaller’s CPT. It discusses how various colonial projects were interlinked through ‘transcolonial technosciences’, but these global histories were 1) compartmentalized into discrete national stories, 2) biased by Eurocentrism, 3) contained by Holocaust memory politics, and 4) conditioned by the Westcentric hegemonic structures and politics of knowledge.
Abstract for the conference ‘The Postcolonial Perspective in the Study of Polish History‘.
Zoltán Ginelli 