Germany德国

Wolfgang Aschauer

This review assesses volume 4 “Bevölkerung” of the Nationalatlas Bundesrepublik Deutschland, published by the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography. The volume presents demographic data through 46 chapters combining maps, diagrams, and explanatory texts, covering population distribution, structure, socioeconomic features, natural change, and migration. Despite the seeming anachronism of a national atlas in an era of European integration, the project is justified by national scientific organization and post-reunification statehood. The atlas is praised for its comprehensive content and high-quality cartography, but criticized for inconsistent glossary criteria, some misleading maps, and limited accessibility for non-geographers, including risks of ecological fallacy. Overall, it is a successful reference work, though its price restricts wider distribution.

Konrad Großer; Christian Hanewinkel; Sabine Tzschaschel

This article provides an overview of the National Atlas of the Federal Republic of Germany (NAD) project, which was completed in 2007 with the publication of an index volume. It first reviews the project's prehistory: following German reunification, an open working group of East and West German geographers and cartographers was established in 1990; after an initial proposal failed due to excessive costs, in 1995 three responsible associations commissioned the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig to revise the concept and publish the atlas, with a pilot volume in 1997 testing the editorial, organizational, content, and technical approaches. The atlas comprises 12 thematic volumes and one index volume, each volume being available in both print

Alexander Wolodtschenko

This paper examines the index volume of the *National Atlas of Germany* from the perspectives of semiotics and onomastics. Published in 2007 as the concluding part of a 13-volume atlas project, this volume provides access to over 600 thematic essays, maps, and diagrams. The analysis treats the index volume as an information modular/ontological structure related to the table of contents, as well as a systematic compilation of names. Its structure is divided into auxiliary and foundational blocks; the foundational blocks include a regional index with index maps, a systematic thematic index, an alphabetical thematic index, and a list of authors, accounting for approximately 95% of the volume. Among the five semiotic modules of information, text constitutes 90.4%, followed by maps, title pages, legends, and pictograms. The regional index contains 710 landscape names; the systematic thematic index, comprising about half of the volume, categorizes approximately 5,500 entries into eight thematic groups, reflecting the ontological classification of the atlas's content. The alphabetical thematic index includes roughly 6,669 common nouns and 48 personal names; the author list contains 596 names, with a male-to-female ratio of about 4:1, and 97.3% of authors hail from Germany, with Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, as well as Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig making notable contributions. The study concludes that the atlas's index volume is not merely a retrieval tool but a semiotically constructed collection of names, which can be regarded as a "name portrait" of authors reflecting the spatial distribution of cartographic scientific labor.