German Lebensraum
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel visited North America beginning in 1873 and saw the effects of American manifest destiny. Ratzel sympathized with the results of "manifest destiny", but he never used the term. Instead he relied on the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. Ratzel promoted overseas colonies for Germany in Asia and Africa, but not an expansion into Slavic lands. Later German publicists misinterpreted Ratzel to argue for the right of the German race to expand within Europe; that notion was later incorporated into Nazi ideology, as Lebensraum. Harriet Wanklyn, (1961) argues that Ratzel's theory was designed to advance science, and that politicians distorted it for political goals.
Read more about this topic: Manifest Destiny
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“Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long- winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans—forgive me the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when there still was a “German taste”Ma rococo taste in moribus et artibus.”
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