Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Eduard Brückner’s Klimaschwankungen und Völkerwanderungen (1913)

Schwiedland’s brief review presents Brückner’s 1912 lecture as an explanation of migration through the regional agricultural effects of climatic fluctuations. Its argument proceeds from recurrent temperature cycles, through rainfall and harvest yields, to transatlantic emigration and earlier population movements. Schwiedland reports these connections affirmatively, without developing an independent critique.

The crucial conceptual move is to distinguish broadly shared climatic fluctuations from their opposed regional consequences:

Feuchte Jahre bringen uns schlechte, Nordamerika dagegen gute Jahre; trockene Jahre bewirken bei uns gute, in Nordamerika dagegen schlechte Jahre, und auch Südrussland und Vorderindien haben ihre Mißernten in Jahren der Dürre.

English translation: Wet years bring us bad years, but North America good ones; dry years produce good years with us, but bad ones in North America, and southern Russia and India too have their crop failures in years of drought.

This geographical asymmetry supplies the mechanism linking climate to migration. Schwiedland reports that Brückner correlates rainfall and grain yields over five-year periods: poor harvest years in central and western Europe coincide with favorable North American conditions, stimulating European emigration. The changing origins of migrants after 1900 likewise fit the argument. Dry conditions favoring oceanic Europe damage Russian harvests, helping explain increased migration from eastern and southern Europe alongside a decline in what the review calls “germanischen” immigration. Settlement in the American West offers another instance: expansion coincides with abundant rainfall, agricultural retreat with successive dry years.

The review then extends the explanation backward, suggesting that climate exerted still greater influence before modern transport. It invokes the destruction of settlements near the end of the third century and the subsequent migrations into central and western Europe, as well as Asian drought preceding the Mongol invasions. Schwiedland summarizes Brückner’s general claim:

Somit zeige sich für die Gegenwart, wie für die Völkerwanderungen der Vorzeit, daß dem Ebben und Fluten der Völkerwellen große Klimaschwankungen den Rhythmus aufprägen.

English translation: Thus it appears, for the present as for the migrations of peoples in ancient times, that great fluctuations of climate impress their rhythm upon the ebb and flow of the waves of peoples.

The review’s relevance lies in its compact presentation of an environmental explanation mediated by agricultural livelihoods. Its final qualification preserves the distinction between a broad historical rhythm and a specific contemporary cause: climate-induced harvest failures are an important cause of migration, rather than an explicitly exclusive explanation.