Background
Walter Christaller was born on April 21, 1893 Berneck, Wurttemberg, Germany. He was a son of Erdmann Gottreich and Helene Christaller.
Walter Christaller was born on April 21, 1893 Berneck, Wurttemberg, Germany. He was a son of Erdmann Gottreich and Helene Christaller.
From 1913 to 1914 he studied at the University of Heidelberg. In 1933 he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Erlangen.
Before 1914, Christaller began studies in philosophy and political economics and subsequently served in the German army during World War I. He was homeschooled and educated at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich. During the 1920s he pursued a variety of occupations.
In 1929 he resumed graduate studies that led to his famous dissertation on Central Place Theory, which he published as the Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (The Central Places in Southern Germany), in 1933.
At the end of the 1930s he held a short-lived academic appointment, but then joined the Nazi Party in 1940. He moved into government service, in Himmler"s Steamship-Planning and Soil Office, during the Second World War.
Christaller’s task was to draw up plans for reconfiguring the economic geography of Germany"s eastern conquests (Generalplan Ost) – primarily Czechoslovakia and Poland, and if successful, Russia itself. Christaller was given special charge of planning occupied Poland, and he did so using his central place theory as an explicit guide.
In addition, he devoted himself to the geography of tourism. From 1950 forward, his Central Place Theory was used to restructure municipal relationships and boundaries in the Federal Republic of Germany and the system is still in place today. In 1950 Walter Christaller founded together with Paul Gauss and Emil Meynen the German Association of Applied Geography (DVAG).