[A-List] Yugoslavia: forwarded from Néstor

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

L. Proyect wrote, summing up D. Johnstone:

"This policy was pursued not only by Hitler, but by the "enlightened" Weimar
Republic that preceded it. In neighboring Poland and Denmark, 30 million
Reichsmarks were spent to buy up real estate and businesses that were
ultimately used on behalf of German 'Volksgruppen' in what the Foreign
Ministry called 'Kampf um den Boden' (struggle for land)."

It should be noted, also, that the theoretical foundations for the
blueprints of the German expansion to the East were laid under the Weimar
Republic, not under Hitler, by such noted geographers as Walter Christaller,
the social meaning of whose work can be best described as an effort to give
"scientific" foundations to the restructuring of economic, social and
administrative space on an "isotropic plain" (can you imagine something more
resembling an "isotropic plain" than Poland?) where towns are considered as
the centers that dominate the countryside around them.

Christaller, who worked for the Weimar Republic in planning
institutions -and has been said to have further worked within State
institutions at least during the first stages of the Third Reich-, provides
his framework on his famous study of "Central Places in South Western
Germany". Though the theses have been proved not to be easily tested against
most environments, they fitted (hand in glove) the goal of establishing a
Herrenvolk placed in the towns over an ocean of Slav peasants.

Also, the famous Hitlerian network of high speed roads had been designed by
planners in the Weimar Republic.

I guess that the adoption of Christaller by the American bourgeoisie and its
organic intellectuals as a mainstay of geographic thought during the late
50s and early 60s cannot be severed from the adoption of the American
network of high speed roads by the same time. In fact, the first name of the
network included the word "Defense highways", or something to the effect, in
its official denomination.

The American "military-industrial complex" worked fast to adopt every useful
innovation provided by the German military-industrial complex of the 30s.
Maybe we are facing another situation where the "vanquished" colonize the
"victors", such as was the case with Rome and Greece...