Six German atlases

The chief source of this book is an ingrained habit of gazing at maps, and much of my material had been imbibed unconsciously in this way long before the war broke out and I sat down to write. My conscious debts are to Stieler’s Hand-Atlas of the contemporary world, and to the wonderful Historical Atlas created by Karl Spruner and Theodor Menke his apostle. Both of these I have consulted continuously while writing the book and compiling my own maps that accompany it, and I have also derived much profit from the little Alldeutscher Atlas published under the auspices of the Alldeutsche Verband by Justus Perthes, which plots out the distribution of languages in Central Europe with admirable exactitude, though it combines scientific execution with chauvinistic inspiration in a characteristically German fashion. The reader will note in passing that the other atlases cited are also of German authorship, and that conclusions based on their evidence are not likely to be biassed to Germany’s disadvantage.

The German world-historical atlas in my library is Westermann (1956; my edition 1985).

The old, two-volume Penguin Atlas of World History (1974 and 1978), which I also have, is a translation of the two-volume German dtv-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte (1964 and 1966).

I was obsessed as a kid with the Große Shell-Atlas, a road-atlas of Germany and, in less detail, of other parts of Europe.

Old atlases online.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915