Maciej Górny's Drawing Fatherlands is a milestone contribution to the study of map production and geographical investigation in their relationship with nation-building and bordering processes. Górny's analysis evolves along the path opened by Steven Seegel's Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (2018), which investigated the role of academic geographers in contributing to international politics, especially during and after World War I. According to this approach, geographical theories and maps should not be merely understood as instruments at the disposal of governmental authorities to justify their power politics. On the contrary, academic geographers with their biographical and educational background and—thanks to their international networks, which fostered the circulation of geographical ideas—actively contributed to politics and diplomacy in the making of the new European political map in the first half of the twentieth century.
Górny's book focuses on a broad network of Eastern European academic geographers who, in the first half of the twentieth century, committed their investigation to the field of political geography, particularly related to the issues of establishing and developing new national states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, such as Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia. The study begins in the decades before World War I, when these territories were mostly part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Russian Empire. Despite their interest in political geography, which implied a significant contribution to nation-building processes in their respective countries, geographers such as the Polish Eugeniusz Romer (1871–1954), the Serbian Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927), and the Ukrainian Stepan Rudnyzkyj (1877–1937), among the many others whose works are analyzed in the book, were firstly interested in physical geography and geomorphology. This aspect is also related to the legacy of German geographer Albrecht Penk (1858–1945), a mentor for this generation of geographers. Penk maintained a close relationship with most of them, while some—such as Jovan Cvijić—could be regarded as among his favorite students. Related to this aspect is also the coeval debate on geomorphological mechanisms that counterposed Penk's investigations with the theories developed by the other protagonist of the late nineteenth-century scientific debate, the American William Morris Davis (1850–1934), thus also stimulating both admiration and resistance between their students.
The motivating factor of these geographers toward human and political geography was the arrival of the war. On the one hand, expansionism required a geographical knowledge about different regions beyond their merely physical/natural features. On the other hand, the media dynamics related to the war implied the production of images—and especially maps—to locate where the conflict was taking place. Map production and the exploitation of maps in political discourse were then implemented during peace negotiations, in which geographers played a significant role in sustaining certain visions.
Chapter 1 focuses on the lead-up to World War I, when the education of these scholars under the mentorship of German geographers such as Penk took place. This chapter is richly detailed but would perhaps have benefited from biographical sketches of these different figures: the presence of many names—some of them not so well-known—occasionally renders the narrative difficult to follow. The following two chapters are dedicated to the war and postwar period, investigating the geographers’ contributions to wartime narratives and especially to the construction of a new European postwar order. In this context, the reconstruction of networks between academic geographers, politicians, and diplomats is particularly interesting, especially regarding the network around the American geographer Isaiah Bowman, who served as a territorial specialist in the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.
Chapters 4 and 5 reflect on the postwar scenario and related scientific and political issues that arose because of the differences—emerging soon after the peace negotiation—between the imagined national community and the physical territory of the new nation-states. These discrepancies were mainly related to the fact that these national territories were conceptualized and drafted on maps while ignoring the reality of complex, stratified multicultural and multilingual contexts. Here, geographers again played a role in trying to substantiate the idea of a unified, homogeneous nation-state territory with its community, based on specific morphological and biogeographical elements beyond human geography.
The last chapter reflects on these scholars’ legacy in the decades that followed their demise. Here, the author stresses the difficulty in separating the scientific value of their research and map production from the political bias and instrumentalization of their work. Regarding this issue, a more in-depth reflection about the theoretical framework of such research would have been helpful, particularly in differentiating the relationship between the methodologies of natural sciences and earth sciences adopted by these geographers and their application to human geographical research. This topic emerges in the last chapter with reference to the conceptualization of landscape, which occurred since the 1920s as a scientific tool aimed at understanding the mutual influences between land and humans.
This, however, is quite a minor shortcoming of this work. Its main objective is to understand the scientific network, the circulation of geographical ideas, and the very significant relation of the academic world with the political one in relation to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the author accomplishes this through impressive and unprecedented research in archives across several languages (German, Polish, Serbian, and English). Thanks to this rich source base, the book provides a very transnational and multifaceted account of the circulation of maps and geographical ideas in the first half of the twentieth century.
