Siegfried Passarge

Siegfried Passarge was born in Königsberg, the son of travel writer {{ill|Ludwig Passarge|de}}. He attended Collegium Fridericianum, and after graduation studied geography in Berlin and Jena. He also trained in medicine, and worked as a doctor during his military service.

In 1894 Passarge took part in an expedition to Adamawa, at the northern boundary of the former German colony of Cameroon.{{cite book|last=Davis|first=Christian|title=Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany}}, p.66 From 1896 to 1899 Passarge worked as a geologist and surveyor for the British West Charterland Company in South Africa, during which time he made extensive ethnographic studies of the Khoisan and Bantu.{{cite magazine|title=The Kalahari Ethnographies (1896–98) of Siegfried Passarge: nineteenth-century Khoisan- and Bantu-speaking peoples. (Review)|url=http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-61823463.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070225095110/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-61823463.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=25 February 2007|magazine=Africa Magazine |via =HighBeam Research |access-date=25 May 2012|date=22 September 1999|author=Guenther, Matthias}} In 1901–1902 he took part in an expedition to the Orinoco, followed by travel in Algeria in 1906 and 1907. His travel memoirs record his experiences, including the violences he committed whilst in Africa.

From 1904–1905 Passarge held the post of Associate Professor of Geography in Berlin and in 1905 he became Professor of Geography in Breslau. In 1908 he joined the Colonial Institute in Hamburg, where he worked until 1936. He theorised that it should be possible for geographers to set up a taxonomic system for landforms, in much the same way as the biological sciences,{{cite book|title=Delineation, Characterization, and Classification of Topographic Eminences|last=Sinha|first=Gaurav|isbn=9780549370550|year=2008|page=27}} although he favoured an empirical, descriptive system rather than a genetic one.{{cite book|page=[https://archive.org/details/allpossibleworld0000jame/page/181 181]|last1=James|first1=Preston Everett|last2=Martin|first2=Geoffrey J.|title=All possible worlds: a history of geographical ideas|url=https://archive.org/details/allpossibleworld0000jame|url-access=registration|publisher=Wiley|year=1981|isbn=9780471061212}}

Passarge's theories of racial geography (expounded in the 1920s in Das Judentum als landschaftskundlich-ethnologisches Problem) were embraced by the Nazi Party after 1933.{{cite book|last=Wegner|first=Gregory Paul|title=Anti-Semitism and Schooling Under the Third Reich|pages=147–148|publisher=Routledge|isbn=9780815339434|year=2002}} On 11 November 1933, he was among the signatories of the commitment of the professors at German universities and colleges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state.{{cite book|title=Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich|last=Klee|first=Ernst|publisher=Fischer Taschenbuch|year=2005|page=451}}

• Die Kalahari, 1904
• Südafrika, 1908
• Physiologische Morphologie, 1912
• Die Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde, 3 Bde. 1919–1920
• Die Landschaftsgürtel der Erde, Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt 1923
• Das Buch vom Kahal, 2 Bände. Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag 1928
• Das Judentum als landschaftskundlich-ethnologisches Problem, München: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag 1929
• Geographische Völkerkunde, Berlin: Safari-Verlag 1951

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{{botanist|Passarge}}

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Category:1866 births

Category:1958 deaths

Category:German geographers

Category:German geomorphologists

Category:Academic staff of the University of Breslau

Category:Academic staff of the University of Hamburg

Category:Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences

Category:Scientists from Königsberg