Cartography of (Eco)systems: Black Edition

Summary: When the work Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape by the British cultural geographer and historian Denis Cosgrove was first published in the mid-1980s,¹ it caused a stir in many fields of study. Although the ideas contained in the work were not entirely new,² Cosgrove's text soon became the missing foundation on which the intellectual and ideological current dealing with the issue of landscape and space, which had so far stood rather in the background, relied.

In the humanities, the idea of collective identities, collective or historical memories, and in general the notion of collectively shared, more or less instrumentalized imaginaries referring primarily to a commonly conceived past, has long been promoted in various modifications. The conjunctural notion of the “place of memory,” nevertheless, in spite of slowly becoming a fixed phrase, offers in itself, without further explanation, the substantive ambiguity of the connection between memory (history) and localization.

In contrast to the Czechs, who have relatively stable notions of “own” space or landscape,¹¹ German imaginaries consist of a larger number of rather independent closed worlds.12 In addition to the specific intertwining of Czech-German identity with the mountain landscape, components of all-German landscape imagery permeated the language of Czech-German nationalists. Among the most classical of these is the correlation with a dense, wild and unrestrained wooded landscape.²³ However, all these images — ideas about the “German” landscape in Bohemia had no objective geomorphological, environmental or urban anchor. They were purely imaginative. Imaginative just like the entire Czech-German identity. And, in fact, as much as any other identity.