Kiel 1969: Ein quellenkritischer Blick auf Tradierungsprozesse als "Arbeit am Mythos"

Abstract

The contribution uses the example of the 1969 Congress of German Geographers in Kiel to illustrate how traditions are born and passed on in German-speaking geography. By means of hermeneutic source criticism, it investigates how the events of „Kiel 1969“ gave rise to a myth. It concludes that the congress’s participants experienced „Kiel 1969“ as the site of an enormously dense social interaction within their science. Most importantly, participants’ suggestive oral reports in the aftermath of the congress turned it into the „myth of Kiel“, which became an essential driving force of German-speaking geography’s modernization.

Biographical Note

Ute Wardenga (SFB 1199 & Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany)

Ute Wardenga is an honorary professor of global studies at Leipzig University (Germany) and serves on the executive boards of the Centre for Area Studies and the Graduate School Global and Area Studies. Since 2012, she has been the deputy director of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig where she coordinates the research group “History and Geography”. Ute Wardenga’s current research interests focus on geography as a space-related practice in the process of globalization and in this regard leads the SFB project C1, which compares international histories of geographical societies since the early 19th century. Most recently, she has co-directed the research project entitled “Digital Atlas of Geopolitical Imaginaries of Eastern Central Europe”, which explored the impact of cartographic and mass media representations of space in Eastern Central Europe since 1989.