The Concept of Landscape in Landscape-Related Sciences

Abstract

If the development of landscape research in the German-speaking world is to be explained along the lines of its classics, then this combination of ‘landscape research’ and ‘classics’ needs to be explained. If it is possible to speak of ‘classics’ in a meaningful way, then in view of one of the “most important principles of science or scientific production”, which generally applies to all sciences: Scientists “never start from scratch in their work, but always stand in a tradition – often unconsciously, because certain figures of argumentation have almost automatically entered their thinking”. This also applies to landscape research, which is not only in the current conventional sense of research on ‘landscape’ as an object-level physical phenomenon or metastatic reflexive way of looking at or speaking, but also in the sense of the knowledge and consideration of texts and testimonies reaching far into the past, which thematise and describe spatial phenomena that we are prepared to grasp today under the term ‘landscape’, although such a subsequent attribution to these phenomena is often historically or factually inappropriate.