Theory and practice in German social geography reflect back on thirty years of an arduous search for identity as a discipline. Both its friends and its adversaries are in agreement that this identity has yet to be achieved. The development of the foundation phase of the 1950s -late because of specifically German conditions-led to the rapid growth of several distinctive research lines. Thereafter the pace of development slowed as various concepts were abandoned, accompanied by hesitancy over material questions, especially as some were revealed to be impractical by completed research. Up to the present there appear to be thresholds that cannot be crossed even by informed geographers. Since 1980 social geography in Germany has stagnated, and become absorbed in behavioural research. This article has attempted a balance of the more important contributions that have tried to develop themes dealing with the social complex from the geographical viewpoint.
Compared with other West European countries -notably France, Great Britain and the Netherlands -social geography in German-speaking lands can look back over only a comparatively short period of about thirty years, having a very late beginning. A few reasons for this tardy development may be briefly mentioned. An intensive joint study of geography and sociology, with an exchange of views and materials providing a relevant stimulus to geography, only rarely took place. A wide section of German sociology for decades either worked in a speculative and theoretical rather than empirical field, or lost itself in ideologically-coloured total analyses of societies. These were of practical value to geographical research only when built upon micro-social investigations, as for example studies of sociological units such as selected villages or towns. This road was early followed in the Netherlands, without initially any parallel development taking place in Germany (A.C. de Vooys 1950). Similar bridges were formed between geography and history in France, and between geography and social research in English-speaking lands (P. Clava11964, G. Taylor 1953).
Points of contact between sociology and geography could have resulted from a common research objective such as population, approached from either side. Because of the absence of an empirical approach, and therefore the underdevelopment of quantitative methods in German sociology, no significant contributions were made to demography, * Translated by editor with only a few exceptions -that remain exceptions to this day (G. Mackenroth 1953).
In any case there had never been in German geography -