Nationalatlanten: Vorschläge zu ihrer vervollkommnung

Summary

This article reviews the emergence, development, achievements, and deficiencies of national atlases and proposes systematic principles for their improvement. A national atlas is defined as a comprehensive geographical work synthesizing contemporary knowledge of a country’s physical environment, population, economy, culture, and political organization. Beginning with the Atlas of Finland of 1899, the author traces the expansion of atlas production after the two world wars. The creation of new states, economic planning, the search for domestic resources, colonial exploitation, postwar reconstruction, and decolonization all increased demand for geographically integrated information. By the late 1950s, national atlases had appeared or were being prepared across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Soviet republics. These works are regarded not only as practical instruments for planning and resource development but also as major expressions of national culture and geographical scholarship. Their compilation promotes cooperation among geographical disciplines, reveals gaps in knowledge, facilitates comparison and verification of data, and stimulates advances in cartographic methods. Nevertheless, existing atlases display recurrent weaknesses: insufficient attention to practical needs; imbalance among sections; omission or inadequate treatment of important subjects; inconsistencies between overlapping maps; defective generalization; poorly founded indicators; unsuitable representation techniques; and uneven scientific or technical quality. The author therefore advocates coordinated standards without imposing a rigid universal template. Atlas design should reflect each country’s territory, natural conditions, socioeconomic system, level of development, and intended users, while preserving comparability and internal coherence. Maps should be scientifically reliable, mutually consistent, appropriately generalized, clearly legible, and supported by well-selected quantitative indicators. The proposed model organizes atlas content into major divisions. The physical-geographical section should include geology, relief, climate, inland waters and oceanography, soils, vegetation, fauna, natural resources, and physical-geographical regionalization. The population section should address distribution, density, demographic dynamics, sex and age structure, social and occupational composition, ethnicity, language, religion, anthropology, and settlement types. The economic section should map industry, agriculture, transport, communications, trade, finance, national income, investment, and economic regions, while adapting themes such as ownership, foreign capital, or collectivization to capitalist or socialist systems. Additional divisions should cover education, science, cultural institutions, living conditions, health care, sport, tourism, protected areas, cultural monuments, administrative divisions, state institutions, and political parties where relevant. Overall, the national atlas is presented as an integrated scientific and practical system rather than a miscellaneous collection of maps; its improvement requires balanced thematic coverage, interdisciplinary synthesis, methodological rigor, and close alignment with national planning and public needs.