ABSTRACT
Politics in the German countryside was intensely local, framed by deep social, economic and historical causality. 1 It was driven by a complex dialectic of actors and events working across a historically differentiated and physically diverse landscape. GIS enables us to understand this landscape in all its nuance and complexity by using space (in the form of polygons, lines and points) as a tool for collating and correlating this mass of complex, interacting data in ways not possible in earlier statistical studies. Harnessing the power of a GIS based on village census data and election returns, I have been able to analyze variables in a way impossible at a higher level of spatial abstraction – the county – than has been the norm for German election studies. 2 In my work on rural politics and anti-Semitism, to be published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Press, I have attempted to disentangle the complex, intersecting variables that governed political behavior in the German countryside, asking how differently situated people responded politically to events, change and crisis and how their reaction to macro events was refracted in different ways through the prism of past local political experience.
