REMAKING MAP OF GERMANY

Wanganui Chronicle, 3 October 1949, Page 5

REMAKING MAP OF GERMANY

It Is A Most Exasperating Job

(By Alan Dreyfuss, a Reuter Correspondent in Frankfurt). Somewhere in Germany ther e may be a man with a more exasperating job than 57 year-old Ernst Ravenstein —but it seems unlikely. In a decade When the shape of countries has changed almost as often as Paris fashions and their colours have switched with the confusing rapidity of a chameleon, Herr Ravenstein, one of his country’s leading mapmakers, is trying to keep up with the changes. As the third generation head of the famous mapmaking firm which bears his name, this grey-haired bespectacled cartographer is carrying on a tradition which began in 1830 when his grandfather August Ravenstein, obtained a contract to turn out a small map card showing the routes covered by the mail coaches of the postal monopoly in the seventeenth century. In their 149-year history, the Ravensteins have turned out maps of everything from a relief map of Terra del Fuego to a city plan of Rome. Up to the beginning of World War 11, the company had made a total of 364 different maps, with some editions running to more than 250,000 copies. Today, having almost completely recovered from the effects of five bomb hits on their Frankfurt. plant, the company is again producing maps for the public, after a two-year period in which its output was requisitioned chiefly by the Military Government. To any map-maker, changes in the politico-geographical face of the world are things to be normally expected, but the alterations in boundaries, names, colonies, protectorates, and political affiliations in the last ten years are something which Ravenstein can only describe as “unprecedented.”

Sitting in his large old-fashioned office, whose walls are covered with pictures of his bearded grand-father and pre-war maps made for the nowdefunct Hamburg-America Steamship Line and other commercial firms, Ernst Ravenstein says that at probably no time in history have mapmakers had to revise their handiwork so frequently. Ravenstein, who saw the creeping tide of Nazi aggression across Europe translated into constant alterations of the borders of Hitler’s Reich on his maps, found that he had to reshape frontiers as soon as the trend of battle changed direction. Countries whose map colours became the dark yellow of Germany as goose-stepping German troops conquered them, regained their pre-war identifying hues as the Allied liberation armies drove out th e Germans. The Frankfurt cartographer recalls that during the height of the war, border changes and battle fronts were so unstable that some maps wer e already obsolete when they came off the presses. No sooner had the last shot been fired than Germany’s pre-war possessions became historical memories, colonies and territories of world powers acquired independence, territorial demands on defeated Germany and Italy re-shaped some of their boundaries. Many of the cities which the Red Army had captured in Eastern Europe were renamed. If the face of Europe changed with

war, her complexion, too, had visibly altered. Entire railway lines disappeared, bridges collapsed beneath bombs and dynamite and well-known sections of German and European cities became little more than shapeless rubble heaps. Ravenstein had to attempt to assess the postwar conditions of roads, railways, canals, ports and flying fields. With the help of newspapers, reports from travellers, and advices from chambers of commerce and geographical societies, he had been fairly successful.

In reconstructing the available postwar travelling routes in Europe the area that gave him the most difficulty was that behind the "Iron Curtain." But today, except for a few airfields, he has been able to map most of the usable roads and railways by relying on time-tables and other reports. Some of the maps which Ravenstein made in pre-war days ,for school-aged geography students carried representations of minerals and natural resources in the regions in which they were found. While this is still possible with Western Europe, Ravenstein says that it is virtually impossible to obtain from sources in Communist-controlled countries the site of such commodities as gold or other precious ores. Ernst Ravenstein’s 26-year-old son Helmut is working in the firm preparing to carry on as the fourth generation, of this famous map-making family. Some of th e company’s 56 employees have been working with the firm for over 50 years. Before the war, almost all of Germany's mapmakers studied at a School of Cartography which is now in the Soviet sector of Berlin, but at the instigation of Ernst Ravenstein and his colleagues, a Cartography Institute was established in Frankfurt in 1947 and there West Germany's future makers of maps may now learn their trade.

Ravenstein, whose long, delicate lingers have helped fashion maps of almost every corner of the globe, has travelled through most of Western Europe and parts of the near east. Gazing somewhat wistfully at the old maps which surround him, he explained “if the war had not come, I should by now have seen the whole world.”

So ingrained is his love for maps, that the 57-year-old German makes it a practice to take with him a map of any town or city which he may be called upon to visit, whether it is 30 or 300 miles away, “and I have never been lost” h e added triumphantly. The map colours of the centres of Europe, except during occupation, have remained the same for scores ot years, he said. Great Britain is traditionally pink, France is violet, Germany is yellow and Russia is green. On one score, Ravenstein can claim an awareness which Hitler did not possess. "I looked at th e map,” he said, “when Germany entered that huge green mass of Russia —and I said to myself: ‘This is impossible.’ ” Although constant change is anathema to any map-maker, Ravenstein does not expect the face of Europe to remain as it is today. "When I look at the map, I can see that Russia had already made considerable progress—and I am afraid that it will make more,” he declared.