During much of the twentieth century, up to the early 1960s, geologists in Germany regarded themselves as “Earth-historians” working mainly on local stratigraphical problems delineating the geological history of a given landscape by means of elementary fieldwork; i.e. geological mapping equipped with hammer and walking boots.

Thin sections, mineralogical and chemical analysis, however, were no regular part of a geologist’s toolbox. Such instrument- and laboratory-based methods were regarded as the province of mineralogists, who dealt with ahistorical, geological processes.

This distinction in working styles became ideologized from 1936 onwards with an increasing influence of nationalistic propaganda in Nazi Germany, leading not only to a disconnection of geology in Germany from the international scientific community but even to the attempt to develop a distinct ‘German Geology,’ which by definition was declared to be superior to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or the ‘Christian-Jewish’ styles of geology supposedly being practised elsewhere.

Even though the attempt of bringing geology in line with Nazi ideology was the effort of few individuals, their arguments crept into the mainstream, stealthily influencing contemporaneous debates such as the ‘Ries problem.’

Since ‘German Geology’ denounced uniformitarianism as an ‘Anglo-Saxon corruption of geology’ and hailed the geological history of landscapes in Germany as unique, it favoured non-actualistic models and shunned process-oriented comparisons with other, similar structures elsewhere on Earth.

The deficiency of this methodology became apparent, when the ‘Ries problem’ was solved in the early 1960s by US-American mineralogists, who successfully interpreted the structure as an impact crater and thus as wholly unconnected with the geological pre-history of the location.