This paper addresses recent scholarly debates in historical geography, the history of science, and Enlightenment studies to explore questions of eighteenth-century German geographical education. The paper particularly investigates what the ‘learned’ public considered fundamental in geographical education and suggests that content, scope, and method of geographical instruction differed in relation to different ‘learning’ publics.

Geography’s place in eighteenth-century public education has been shown for different European contexts, most notably Britain and France (Mayhew 1998, Withers 1998, Godlewska 1999, Withers and Mayhew 2002, Heffernan 2005), and America (Brückner 2006). Studies on geographical instruction addressing the eighteenth-century German context have focused on key geographical centres, especially Göttingen, and prominent people, such as Immanuel Kant (Kühn 1939, Plewe 1986, Elden and Mendieta 2011). This paper shows that particularly during the last third of the eighteenth century, geography was considered fundamental for ‘enlightening’ the German public in private homes, schools, and universities.

The paper argues that authors of geographical textbooks imagined a general ‘learning’ public which was further differentiated by various criteria: age, gender, place, time, and future profession. Drawing on my study of eighteenth-century German geographical textbooks, education speeches, and articles, this paper demonstrates that the increasing concern for geographical education resulted in a vibrant discourse around the geographical method of learning (‘geographische Lehrmethode’) and the production of print addressing the state of the art, purpose, content, and methods of geographical instruction for different ‘learning’ publics.