Völkisch movement

The Völkisch movement (German: Völkische Bewegung [ˌfœlkɪʃə bəˈveːɡʊŋ], English: Folkist movement, also called Völkism) was a Pan-German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through the dissolution of the Third Reich in 1945, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor (Volkskörper, "ethnic body"; literally "body of the people"), and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk ("race" or "folk") from the Germans. After World War II, the Völkisch movement became viewed as a proto-fascist or proto-Nazi phenomenon in the context of German society.

The Völkisch movement was not a homogeneous set of beliefs, but rather a "variegated sub-culture" that rose in opposition to the socio-cultural changes of modernity. The "only denominator common" to all Völkisch theorists was the idea of a national rebirth, inspired by the traditions of the Ancient Germans which had been "reconstructed" on a romantic basis by the adherents of the movement. This proposed rebirth entailed either "Germanizing" Christianity or the comprehensive rejection of Christian heritage in favor of a reconstituted pre-Christian Germanic paganism. In a narrow definition, the term is used to designate only groups that consider human beings essentially preformed by blood, or by inherited characteristics.

The Völkischen are often encompassed in a wider Conservative Revolution by scholars, a German national conservative movement that rose in prominence during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). During the period of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed in and enforced a definition of the German Volk which excluded Jews, the Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and other "foreign elements" living in Germany. Their policies led to these "undesirables" being rounded up and murdered in large numbers, in what became known as the Holocaust.

The adjective Völkisch (pronounced [ˈfœlkɪʃ]) is derived from the German word Volk (cognate with the English "folk"), which has overtones of "nation", "race" or "tribe". While Völkisch has no direct English equivalent, it could be loosely translated as "ethno-nationalist", "ethnic-chauvinist", "ethnic-popular",^{[page needed]} or, closer to its original meaning, as "bio-mystical racialist".

If Völkisch writers used terms like Nordische Rasse ("Nordic race") and Germanentum ("Germanic peoples"), their concept of Volk could, however, also be more flexible, and understood as a Gemeinsame Sprache ("common language"), or as an Ausdruck einer Landschaftsseele ("expression of a landscape's soul"), in the words of geographer Ewald Banse.

The defining idea which the Völkisch movement revolved around was that of a Volkstum, literally the "folkdom" or the "culture of the Volk". Other associated German words include Volksboden (the "Volk's essential substrate"), Volksgeist (the "spirit of the Volk"), Volksgemeinschaft (the "community of the Volk"), as well as Volkstümlich ("folksy" or "traditional") and Volkstümlichkeit (the "popular celebration of the Volkstum").

The Völkisch movement was not unified, instead, according to Petteri Pietikäinen, it was "a cauldron of beliefs, fears and hopes that found expression in various movements and were often articulated in an emotional tone". According to historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Völkisch denoted the "national collectivity inspired by a common creative energy, feelings and sense of individuality. These metaphysical qualities were supposed to define the unique cultural essence of the German people." Journalist Peter Ross Range writes that "Völkisch is very hard to define and almost untranslatable into English. The word has been rendered as popular, populist, people's, racial, racist, ethnic-chauvinist, nationalistic, communitarian (for Germans only), conservative, traditional, Nordic, romantic – and it means, in fact, all of those. The völkisch political ideology ranged from a sense of German superiority to a spiritual resistance to 'the evils of industrialization and the atomization of modern man,' wrote military historian David Jablonsky. But its central component, said Harold J. Gordon, was always racism.

Völkisch thinkers tended to idealize the myth of an "original nation", that still could be found at that time in the rural regions of Germany, a form of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites." The notion of "people" (Volk) subsequently turned into the idea of a "racial essence", and Völkisch thinkers referred to the term as a birth-giving and quasi-eternal entity—in the same way as they would write on "the Nature"—rather than a sociological category.