Life
Walter Christaller was born to Erdmann Gottreich and Helene Christaller an author of Christian-themed children's novels at Berneck in Germany. His maternal grandfather Johann Gottlieb Christaller was a linguist and a Christian missionary in West Africa.
Before 1914, Christaller began studies in philosophy and political economics and subsequently served in the German army during World War I. He was homeschooled and educated at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich. During the 1920s he pursued a variety of occupations. In 1929 he resumed graduate studies that led to his famous dissertation on Central Place Theory, which he published as the Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (The Central Places in Southern Germany), in 1933.
At the end of the 1930s he held a short-lived academic appointment, but then joined the Nazi Party in 1940. He moved into government service, in Himmler's SS-Planning and Soil Office, during the Second World War. Christaller’s task was to draw up plans for reconfiguring the economic geography of Germany's eastern conquests ("General plan of the East") – primarily Czechoslovakia and Poland, and if successful, Russia itself. Christaller was given special charge of planning occupied Poland, and he did so using his central place theory as an explicit guide.
After the War he joined the Communist Party and became politically active. In addition, he devoted himself to the geography of tourism. From 1950 forward, his Central Place Theory was used to restructure municipal relationships and boundaries in the Federal Republic of Germany and the system is still in place today.
In 1950 Walter Christaller founded together with Paul Gauss and Emil Meynen the German Association of Applied Geography (DVAG). The Walter Christaller Award for Applied Geography is named after him.
He died in Jugenheim, Germany on March 9, 1969.
Read more about this topic: Walter Christaller
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Life is the desert, life the solitude,
Death joins us to the great majority.”
—Edward Young (1683–1765)
“I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.”
—Fidel Castro (b. 1926)