Mar 27, 2025
Thematic Mapping in 18th to 19th century Germany
- 18:00 to 21:00
- External/Cooperation Event
- Dept. III
- Several Speakers
- Marta Hanson
- Nils Güttler
- Felix de Montety
- Ute Tintemann
From the language maps of Gottfried Hensel’s “Europa Polyglotta” (1741) and Julius Klaproth’s “Asia Polyglotta” (1823) to Oscar Drude’s global vegetational maps of the 1880s, German scholars made distribution maps on new subjects for new analytical ends.
This session sets up a dialogue between two historians, Felix de Montety and Nils Güttler, based on their respective research on some of the earliest examples anywhere of thematic mapping that were created in mid-18th through 19th-century Germany.
Contact and Registration
Registration is required, for more information click here.
For further information contact: Franziska Urban franziska.urban@bbaw.de
Visit the Einstein Center Chronoi here
About This Series
Maps belong to the oldest forms of human communication and thus represent an important historical record of space. Yet, maps are much more than just a visual presentation of a territory during a certain period of time, but a reflection on historical, political, religious and cultural contexts in which they were compiled.
This series of lectures invites a critical and fresh view on mapping, its role in the global circulation of knowledge, influence on state sovereignty and royal authority, colonialism, imperialism, national identities throughout history.
Berlin is an apt place for this topic. It has historically been a meeting point of mapping practices from all over the world. The city played a key role in the genesis of the history of cartography as a distinct branch of the history of science. It hosts a huge variety of the material culture of mapping across many institutions that illustrate how a map is strongly conditioned by space and time in which it was created (historical context), by people who created it (mapmakers), and by the audience and purpose for which it was intended (users). Map is, therefore, understood as a complex social construct representing a power of knowledge.
Germany is now a major repository of mapping efforts through history, making Berlin a perfect setting for this lecture series.
The lecture series is jointly organised by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.