The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Ritter, Karl

Born Aug. 7, 1779, in Quedlinburg; died Sept. 28, 1859, in Berlin. German geographer. Professor at the University of Berlin from 1820. Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1822.

Ritter was the author of the vast work Erdkunde (Geography), which constituted an attempt to integrate materials on individual regions of the earth; 19 volumes, devoted to Asia and Africa, were published during his lifetime. Erdkunde (Ritter introduced the term in geography) defined geography as an “explanatory” science, and it contained a delineation and description of natural regions based on natural, primarily orographic, characteristics.

In Ritter’s view, the object of geography is to learn about relationships between different forms of matter on the earth’s surface and to study individual geographic areas. Using the comparative method, Ritter attempted to classify and explain many natural phenomena and came very close to the concept of landscape, which he considered as an indivisible unit. In his interpretation of the interrelations between nature and the elements of civilization and culture, he followed geographic determinism. Many of the positions he took in his works found their support in idealist teleology. Ritter attempted to prove that nature has a determining influence on the fortunes of man, which promoted the development of geopolitics. His ideas in many ways shaped the development of geographic thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A mountain range in the Nan Shan system was named in honor of Ritter (seeDAKEN-DABAN).

WORKS

Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte der Menschen, vols. 1-19. Berlin, 1822-59.
Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie. Berlin, 1852.
Geschichte der Erdkunde und der Entdeckungen. Berlin, 1861.
In Russian translation:
Zemlevedenie Azii, parts 1-5. St. Petersburg, 1856-79. (Translated and supplemented by P. P. Semenov.)
Obshchee zemlevedenie. Moscow, 1864.

A. IU. RETEIUM

References in periodicals archive

He was also directly involved in the production of a Karl Ritter film about the Spanish Civil War, In Battle Versus the World Enemy: German Volunteers in Spain (1939), but it was of course his sponsoring of Leni Riefenstahl and her Nazi Party Rally films that demonstrate most clearly Hitler's propagandistic agenda to produce films of high artistic quality and still convey ideology, as Niven notes: "Politics, then, must find expression in culture, and culture must be imbued with politics; the two were intertwined, for Hitler, in a reciprocal relationship" (59).

Hitler and Film: The Fuhrer's Hidden Passion

Karl Ritter von Frisch, the Austro-German biologist best known for his work on the senses and communication of honeybees during the early 1930s, was interested in the question of whether fish can hear.

Schreckstoff--the fear hormone

In September 1934, Brundage went to Germany to investigate the Jewish athletes' situation 'in situ.' In connection with an IAAF meeting in Sweden directly prior to the Berlin Games, Brundage met in Stockholm with Edstrom, Karl Ritter von Halt, the German IOC member who had joined the German Nazi party early in 1933 (22) and who was a very close personal friend of Edstrom's.

Karl Ritter von Halt pointed out to Edstrom that the Germans had a number of "jewish boys in the preparatory teams." (24) However, doubts arose in Edstrom's mind late in the summer of 1935.

Besides Brundage, Karl Ritter von Halt was without doubt the person who was closest to Edstrom.

Karl Ritter von Halt was eventually released and acquitted in a war crimes trial.

Questions of propriety: J. Sigfrid Edstrom, anti-semitism, and the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Camera (color, DV 8), Bruch; editor; Mona Willi; music, Karl Ritter, Otto Lechner, Wolfgang Mitterer, Werner Puntigam, Peter Kaizar, Andy Leikauf, Donald Kodritsch, Vincenz Witzelsberger; sound (Dolby), Torsten Heinemann.

Handbikemovie