people

La liberté guidant le peuple (German "Freedom leads the people"). Painting by Eugène Delacroix (1830)

The word people is generally used to denote (large) groups of people who are grouped together into a distinguishable unit through cultural similarities, real or fictitious common descent or a politically and legally organized group of people. There is no binding definition.

The term encompasses a wide range of meanings of different sociological , ethnic , national and pre-national political , democratic-theoretical and constitutional shades. Since the 18th century, he is emotionally highly charged and becomes the legitimacy of revolutions , wars and various forms of rule used. In the process, inclusion and exclusion are regularly contested, i.e. the question of who belongs to the people in the defined sense and who does not. Today it is assumed that a people does not exist objectively, but is a construct, which means that it only emerges through external and self-attribution of the members in the discourse .

Related terms with partly overlapping meanings are ethnicity , nation , population and state people .

etymology

The expression people (via Middle High German volc from Old High German folc , this from ancient Germanic fulka "the war band ") is first documented in the 8th century. It is based on the same Indo-European word root from which the words full and many can be derived. The original meaning was warhost , warrior pile . This is indicated by the Slavic root word pulk- out generally as early borrowing from Germanic applies, and later into German with special meaning as a bunch has been returned borrowed. A root relationship with the Latin word plebs for “crowd” (from Latin plere “to fill”) is possible.

Spectrum of meaning

There is no fixed definition of the term. According to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, the various shades of meaning can be divided diachronically through time into an "above-below relation" and an "inside-outside relation". In the first sense, the people are delimited at the top (from the nobility , the upper class, the elites) or below (from slaves , metics , lower classes ), in the second sense from the foreigners who do not live in the same place and do not form part of the same political unit belong. In the doctrine of the state , a distinction is made between the pre-state, i.e. the sociological-ethnological-political concept of the people and the state constituted people, in order to be able to classify the concept in a constitutional context.

The political scientist Karl W. Deutsch (1912–1992) defined: “A people is an extensive all-purpose communication network of people. It is a collection of individuals who can communicate with one another quickly and effectively across distances and on different topics and facts. ”The prerequisite for this are a common language and culture: meanings and memories are shared, which makes it likely that the people belonging people would share preferences and perceptions in the near future and would be similar or complement each other in habits and character traits.

According to the Austrian-American sociologist Emerich K. Francis (1906-1994) is among people each lasting through a common " cultural heritage marked, numerous relationship Associations (kinship groups) summary to a distinct unit society as a whole to consider. “Kinship association” should mean: a social structure based on actual or fictitious descent , connecting numerous families both simultaneously and in chronological order to form a unity ”. He makes a distinction between the demos, the people of the state, and ethnos, the community of descent.

The legal scholar Reinhold Zippelius also differentiates between two popular terms: He defines the state people as "the entirety of people under one state authority ". It is not necessarily identical with the people in the sociological sense, that is, the "totality of people [...] who see themselves primarily through tribal affinities , common culture (especially language and religion ), common history and as a political community of fate ". The minority problem arises from the difference between the two concepts . The objective characteristics of the sociological concept of the people need not all be fulfilled, rather there is scope for meaning. The "ethnic togetherness" is always important.

The sociologists Günter Hartfiel and Karl-Heinz Hillmann see seven meanings of the word: it could mean the population in a certain cultural area, an ethnically determined group of people, a political collective personality that is presented as an ideal unit, the entirety of citizens in a democratic constitutional state , the the broad mass of the population as an antithesis to the elite or upper class , a pre-national community or, in a Marxist interpretation, the social classes that have a supposedly objective interest in social progress .

The sociologist Friedrich Heckmann defines Volk as "the most comprehensive ethnic collective, which is characterized by a belief in a common origin, similarities in culture and history, and a certain sense of identity and togetherness". The word stands for both mere ideas and real relationships that could be cooperative or conflicting, and offers opportunities for collective action by those who feel they belonged.

The historian Peter Brandt names three meanings of the word in current usage: “1. the inhabitants of a state, namely the holders of sovereignty in a democracy, 2. the members of an ethnic group with a common origin, language and culture or a large group that understands itself as a non-state people, 3. the 'simple' members or lower strata of a society " .

According to the definition of the ethnologist Dieter Haller , "peoples are connected to one another through ancestry and culture and have a form of organization that does not necessarily have to be state-owned."

People is an emotionally and politically ideologically charged term and is used as a political catchphrase in various contexts . It is a flag word , that is, an expression of great symbolic power , under which groups of people can come together in political competition or even struggle and which thus creates identity. Its ambiguity predestines it for demagogic statements and demands. Who belongs to the people and who doesn't are fought over again and again and often bloody. The historian Peter Walkenhorst calls people and nation “collective terms that draw boundaries to denote one's own […] community”. According to the sociologist Lutz Hoffmann, Volk defines a group as relevant and thus legitimizes it. People are always thought of as a totality , never as part of something greater. Those who do not belong, i.e. are irrelevant, lose sight of the fact that they do not need to be talked about. To what extent women also belong to the people was an open question well into the 20th century. Often the so-called we-group only meant men . Women were considered affiliated or owned by the people or their husbands. In Germany that only changed with the introduction of women's suffrage in 1918.

The term people is used, sometimes with the addition of “simple”, to denote the “broad masses” of a society.

A people in the sense of state people , on the other hand, consists of the total number of citizens and persons who are equal to them under constitutional law. The word always has a subjective component in “professing oneself” to a people. Then in particular made Ernest Renan (1823-1892), Gustav Rümelin (1815-1889) and Hermann Heller (1891-1933) carefully. The ethnic origin of the citizens of a state is irrelevant under international law . A people in the ethnic sense, on the other hand, does not necessarily have to have its own state in which it forms the majority of the population (→  multi-ethnic state ).

In ethnology , the term ethnicity has largely replaced the term people (in the singular ) since the middle of the 20th century. Otherwise, the specialist literature only speaks of peoples (in the plural ) when special groups are named (e.g. shepherd peoples, indigenous peoples , Siberian peoples, etc.). In the singular, however, the word (in the sense of one 's own people ) denotes the subject of folklore . Where ethnologists speak of ethnic groups , according to the ethnologist M. Krischke Ramaswamy, mainly historians use the term peoples , sociologists use societies or social structures , political scientists use states or nations and geographers use the term populations .

Concept history

Antiquity

The ancient names for people ( ancient Greek ἔθνος éthnos , δῆμος, démos , Latin gens , populus , natio ) primarily designate political units, i.e. something that would be called a state in modern language understanding. The Athens polis was often called οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, hoi Athenaíoi ("the Athenians"), the state name of the Roman Empire was Senatus Populusque Romanus - " Senate and people of Rome ". Démos was alongside the Indianapolis residents with civil rights and their subset from the lower classes call for which there ὄχλος the names ochlos and πλῆθος, plethos gave. In Rome, the lower class was originally called plebs . Since the class struggles , this word, often synonymous with populus , has been used for all Roman citizens (with the exception of the patricians ).

The ancient doctrine of the forms of the state distinguished monarchy as the rule of an individual, aristocracy as the rule of the nobility and democracy as the rule of the people. Depending on the political position of the author, demos were understood partly as a totality of all citizens, partly pejoratively as a lower people or mob . The church father Augustine of Hippo (354-430), on the other hand, emphasized that a people must necessarily also have a moral quality, not just a formal legal order . In an earthly state, a civitas terrena , there is only an arbitrarily mixed set (multitudo) . Only justice makes a people out of it (populus) .

The Romans used the term gentes for the foreign peoples . Since the extension of civil rights to all free residents of the empire in the 3rd century, it was used to describe the " barbarians " on the fringes and outside the empire. The Germanic and other peoples who destroyed the Western Roman Empire in the so-called migration of peoples during late antiquity , formed their own empires and thus created the conditions for the development of the European Middle Ages , only emerged during their migration ( ethnogenesis ).

Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: People as a demarcation from the elite

People in the common sense of simple people comprised a range of meanings from an indefinite number of people ("mass [s]") to the heterogeneous mass of members of the lower classes in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period - here generally with the emphasis on poverty (daz poor people) - right up to the diversely structured " traveling people " who are regarded as "the 'real' lower class", excluded from the medieval and early modern feudal order . The word was also used for religious communities ("das Judisch volck", "das Christian volck") and for military groups ("war people"). Originally, people meant a group that had come together in a short-term situation, possibly by chance or for a specific purpose. In the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation , the nation component only referred to the high nobility . Nation and people were opposites, not synonyms. At the end of the English Civil War , the term was first affirmatively revalued when the Declaration of Parliament in 1649 stipulated that the "first establishment of the office of the king through the consent of the people" had taken place.

The enlightenment and the emergence of the idea of ​​popular sovereignty

In the age of the Enlightenment the term people experienced a considerable revaluation. In 1765, Louis de Jaucourt (1704–1779) was unable to bring peuple to the French encyclopédie and described it as a “ collective name that is difficult to define ”. In the text of the article, he then went into the magistrate elections and votes in the ancient popular assemblies and quoted his contemporary Gabriel-François Coyer, who tried to prevent craftsmen and liberal professions from being counted among the people, and emphasized that if you can make farmers and workers better socially the kings would have more loyal subjects .

In the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, the idea of popular sovereignty was developed, i.e. the idea that all power in the state emanates from the people. As early as the 17th century, for example, the so-called monarchists were spreading the idea that the people had a right to resist unjust rulers. The English poet and philosopher John Milton (1608–1674) developed this idea further into the idea that from time to time it should decide who rules it. As early as 1603, the state theorist Johannes Althusius had granted the people priority over their prince, whom he described as a mandate appointed by agreement . The people thought Althusius corporately , not from the point of view of the individual, and tied in with religious ideas of a covenant between people and God. He also remained stuck with the early modern conception of people as a broad mass, because he described it as inconsistent and gullible. In this respect it cannot be seen as a forerunner of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty.

In dispute with Thomas Hobbes and Republican dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell who developed thinkers of the Enlightenment , John Locke (1632-1704) in the second of his Two Treatises of Government get the idea that the people of natural law , (although not constitutionally ) Supream Power to which supreme power in the state. In a contract with the - elected or hereditary monarchical - head of state it should agree that the power in the state will be divided between a parliament , which is regularly elected by it as the sum of the individuals, and the executive branch . Even if its wellbeing is the real purpose of the state, the people cannot have a share in it, because an identity between the state and individuals would destroy freedom. Locke recommended a constitutional monarchy in which the representatives of the people, the representatives of the nobility and the king shared power ( King in Parliament ).

The actual founder of the idea of ​​popular sovereignty is considered to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In his work On Social Contract or Principles of State Law in 1762, he stated that individuals concluded a contract with one another to protect their interests as a community. Only then would they become a people. He alone has constitutional sovereignty , which Rousseau thought as indivisible and not delegable. Therefore, he rejected representative systems as well as a separation of powers. The will of the people as a common will, as a volonté générale, must be realized in direct democracy . Since Rousseau thought the volonté générale as consistent, inalienable and always right, the historian Michael Wildt calls him the founder of the “ myth of the unity and homogeneity of the people”.

Similarly, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) assumed that a people would only be constituted through the voluntaristic conclusion of a social contract:

"The actus, since the multitude makes a people through their union, [...] already constitutes a sovereign power, which they transfer to someone by a law."

Kant called a state that came into being republican if it was oriented towards the common good and freedom. This also includes monarchies in which there is a separation of powers. He calls states in which this is not the case despotic . This can also apply to radical popular rule, as Rousseau suggested. The people sharply demarcated Kant from his non-law-abiding subset, the “rabble [...], whose illegal association is the Rottiren (agere per turbas); behavior that excludes him from the quality of a citizen ”.

Foundation of the USA

The founding fathers of the United States took up Locke's theory. In their declaration of independence on July 4, 1776, they stated that it was “the right of the people” to “change or abolish” their form of government as soon as it “becomes perishable for their real purposes, namely the guarantee of human rights , [...] and to set up a new government based on such principles, and whose power and authority are formed in such a way as they consider most appropriate for the preservation of their security and happiness ”. In the ensuing War of Independence , the unity of the "American people" was invoked again and again in order to cover up the thoroughly divergent particular interests of the thirteen colonies . In this sense, the introductory text was Constitution of the United States to understand: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union ..." The so-touted people but was referring neither women nor slaves nor the indigenous population with a . It was only a minority.

The American idea of ​​popular sovereignty found its classic expression in the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln in 1863 . In it he defined democracy as "government of the people, by the people, for the people". That means that in it rule emerges from the people ( of ), it is exercised by the people ( by ) and in their interest ( for ).

French Revolution

The Federation Festival . Painting by Charles Thévenin (1790). Members of all strata of the French people are hugging in the foreground.

The French Revolution was significant for the elevation of the word people to a value concept . Previously, French peuple was mainly used in the plural to denote the population of France . In the singular it appeared for the first time during the pre-revolutionary crisis in the Cahiers de Doléances , whereby it was paternalistic as the band of children of King Louis XVI. was put down. That changed after the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, when its author was now portrayed as "the people" in newspapers and leaflets. Since then, the formula “ In the name of the people ” has been used as a counter-formulation to the still widespread “In the name of God”.

The word people was connoted with unity and brotherhood in the French Revolution . This performance reached a climax at the federation festival for the one-year anniversary of the Bastille storm and was shown, for example, in the song Ah! Ça ira : Here the united and resolute acting people stand against the aristocrats , who are thus excluded from the people. In the period that followed, the meaning of the word shifted more in the direction of petit peuple , i.e. the lower classes and the sans-culottes who actively supported the revolution. Anyone who did not do this was not an ami du peuple (as Jean Paul Marat's newspaper was called ) and made himself suspicious. This began a dialectic of unity and exclusion: while on the one hand the solidarity and identity of interests within the French people continued to be emphasized (following Rousseau) , the number of those who were considered enemies of the people because of their (really or supposedly) anti-revolutionary activity increased , as “ennemis du peuple”: priests who refused to oath, emigrants, royalists, Girondists etc. This exclusion reached its climax in the reign of terror in 1793/94, thousands were guillotined . Peuple now competed with the previously preferred vocabulary nation : in the constitution of 1793 , unlike in the declaration of human and civil rights of August 26, 1789, sovereignty no longer comes from the nation but from the people. In the Thermidor and under the Directory , unity within the people was emphasized again, which, however, obscured the real social conditions, because social inequality grew.

Popular Enlightenment, Romanticism and Idealism in Germany

Peoples table . Styria , 18th century. National costumes and stereotypes as well as supposed folk characters are depicted .

In Germany, since the 1770s, popular enlighteners like Rudolph Zacharias Becker hoped to make the education of the people an engine of progress . They saw their own role in being educators of the nation that had yet to be founded with the means of culture and in this context ennobled the concept of the people. Nevertheless, he remained connoted with rawness and a lack of education. The popular enlighteners did not regard the people as an acting subject .

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) understood peoples to be collective individualities that would differ from one another through their own languages, souls and characters. Poetry and language would only constitute a people as a spiritual community: For Herder, ethnicity was rooted in the mother tongue . With him there are also the first approaches of the exclusion function of the concept of the people: Nature has separated the peoples as distinct entities by language, manners and customs, every mixture appeared unnatural in this view and should be rejected. The special emphasis on language and, for other German authors, on descent to define ethnicity, was due to the fact that in Germany, unlike in France, a people was constructed before a corresponding state existed. Thus other, non-political membership criteria were necessary. Herder also tried to recharge the concept of the people religiously: "Anyone who is ashamed of their nation and their language has torn the religion of their people, that is, the bond that ties them to the nation", he wrote in 1802. He had a "national religion". in the spirit of Martin Luther . With this idea, which aimed at the exclusion of both Jews and Catholics , Herder did not prevail.

Herder was followed by the Romantics , who saw a naturalness worth preserving in the expressions of the people, their authentic, unaffected language, their stories and songs. Partly large-scale collections of folk culture were started ( Grimm's fairy tales and German dictionary , Des Knaben Wunderhorn ). This romantic construction of the people , their supposedly unspoilt character, their "unadulterated soul" and their, as it was assumed, millennia-old tradition, contradicted the values ​​of the Enlightenment, which assigned inalienable rights to the individual as such and not just as a member of a people and questioned all traditional social ties. The Romantics, on the other hand, understood the people as a “living social organism” that should not be changed abruptly or forcibly. In this sense, the romantic popular term was later used by conservatives as an argument against reforms and against a revolution . Because the political fragmentation of Germany meant that a popular concept like the one in France, which was based on a community of free citizens, could not be formed, German intellectuals instead constructed culture as a unifying bond. It was an intermediate stage before all Germans understood in this way were grouped together in one state. That this would include all members of the cultural nation , as Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) later called this concept, was unlikely in view of the German-speaking scattered settlement in Eastern Europe . The concept was also suitable for ostensibly excluding foreigners (such as Prussian Poles or German Jews ), and, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler noted, it was compatible with all political systems , whether democratic, monarchical or dictatorial .

Even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) believed, following Herder, nations are entities, each with individual characteristics. In his philosophy of history they appear just like the great individuals as “means and tools of the world spirit ”, who, precisely by pursuing their own interests (the proverbial ruse of reason ), contribute to the end purpose of the world, namely the increasing awareness of the spirit of his freedom. Since this can only be achieved for the peoples in one state, Hegel differentiated the value of the peoples according to their statehood, from the barbaric peoples without a state to the civilized nations up to the "world-historical people" developed to full statehood. In its epoch this was the "bearer of the present stage of development of the world spirit". The spirits of the other peoples have no rights against him.

Wars of Liberation and early German nationalism

The end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 helped establish people as a term under which the populations of the individual German states can be subsumed and delimited from others. It represents a compensation term for the French nation , because a German nation or a German people did not yet exist around 1800, even if its existence was projected back into the Middle Ages or into antiquity and mythologized in the later histories .

In the parlance of the national movements of the 19th century, the word people became the central political catchphrase, the trope of the newly emerging nationalism. During the Wars of Liberation , the people were conceived as an acting unit, whereby the emancipatory content worked out in the Enlightenment was now directed against the "usurper" Napoleon Bonaparte : "The people stand up, the storm breaks", wrote Theodor Körner (1791–1813 , for example ).

The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) outlined in his speeches to the German nation in 1808 the idea that peoples would be constituted by their language as immiscible beings . "What speaks the same language" is closely linked to one another "through mere nature" in the most varied of ways:

“It belongs together and is, of course, one and an inseparable whole. Such a people cannot take up and want to mix with themselves and want to mix with them, without at least for the first time getting confused and mightily disturbing the steady progress of their education. "

The Germans are the "primitive people": Fichte assigned them a program for all of humanity in an almost cosmopolitan sense. At the same time, the idea of nationality was intended to mobilize against the French occupation. The French people appear to him as carriers of the principle of evil . Similar to Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), who called against them to “hatred of people” as a means of national self-discovery: “This hatred glowed as the religion of the German people, as a holy madness, in all hearts”. In Arndt consequential war propaganda, the nations of the world manichean one ran in either good or bad, the internal identity of the people and aggression enforcement entered into a seemingly inseparable unit outward. Arndt's concept of the people was antisemitically charged: He contrasted the Jews as a separate, strange people with the German people and polemicized in particular against the immigration of Eastern Jews , which as an "unclean flood from the east" would contaminate the "Germanic tribe".

In connection with the Napoleonic wars , the people also acquired a new military meaning: unlike in the cabinet wars of the early modern period, they had potential that could be mobilized at any time. As Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) analyzed, the war became “again a matter for the whole people”: it became a people's war .

The popular term, as it was developed around 1800, had a great influence on the various European national movements, especially in the east and north of the continent. In the Russian Empire, for example, there was evidence of a similar emphatic exaggeration of the people as in Herder and the Romantics. In Russia, the word Russian Народ narod (people) was used in various ways from around 1800. Folk songs and other products of folk culture were increasingly edited, intellectuals refined the word in their search for a Russian identity and for the emancipatory potential of the lower classes. The social movement of the Narodniki grew out of this in the second half of the century . In the 20th century, the concept of the people was adopted by Zionism , Arab and Turkish nationalism .

The revolution of 1848

In the pre-March period and in the revolution of 1848/49 the word was further enhanced. The Democrats saw the people as the source of all legitimate rule. The Offenburg program , which had been formulated by Gustav Struve (1805–1870) and Friedrich Hecker (1811–1881), among others , called for “representation of the people in the German Confederation , […] a voice in its affairs . Justice and freedom at home, a firm position abroad ”. A republic has not yet been called for. This did not happen until March 31, 1848 in the Frankfurt pre-parliament , when Struwe solemnly declared that “all ties” had been “broken which the German people had tied to the previous so-called order of things”. From now on, the Democrats called for the hereditary monarchy to be abolished, for parliaments should be freely elected, which should together form a federal republic with an elected president at the head. They spoke out in favor of popular sovereignty, as it had been for decades in the United States. In the Frankfurt National Assembly they could not get through. This was shown for example in Poland debate, as the deputy Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904) on 24 July 1848 a "healthy people egoism demanded", "which the welfare and honor of the motherland in all matters above hires". The democrat Robert Blum (1807–1848), on the other hand, advised that the Poles should also be granted a right to a nation- state, and was defeated in the vote with 342 to 31 votes. The Paulskirche constitution also showed, apart from the universal suffrage , no traces of democratic thinking: Germany was to become a constitutional monarchy under a hereditary emperor, the German people were not called sovereign . Rather, the National Assembly figured as the constitution. It was she who, according to the preamble , passed and promulgated the imperial constitution. In terms of the definition of German citizenship , too , the Paulskirche assembly fell short of democratic standards. For the chairman of the constitutional committee Georg Beseler , the people did not represent a mass of individuals, but demanded the legal consideration of “customs” and “needs” of the individual German “tribes”: Therefore, federal states should each retain their own citizenship rights. Ethnically non-Germans were granted equal rights as nationals of the federal states, but, he emphasized, they had to “gratefully acknowledge this”. Section 131 of the Paulskirche constitution stipulated that the German people consisted of the members of the states that formed the German Reich.

Labor movement

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) tied in with Hegel's philosophy of history, but attached only minor importance to the peoples in relation to changes in economic conditions. In the Communist Manifesto , they diagnosed the dwindling differences between the peoples as a result of the development of global capitalism and predicted: “The rule of the proletariat will make them disappear even more.” They used people less nationally than sociologically. Often they used the people or the masses as a synonym for the proletariat: they considered the people to be the bearers of the coming revolution. In this sense, Marx also called religion the " opium of the people ". Instead of this “illusory happiness”, it is important to demand “the real happiness” of the people. In the Marxist-Leninist theory was developed further: Only the socialist revolution will bring a "socially united people" as the basis of real popular rule out. Democracy was understood as a transitional phenomenon in the proletariat's seizure and assertion of power. Georg Lukács (1885–1971) coined the term “democratic dictatorship”. It was assumed that democracy would only expand its functional circle to include the whole people in a later phase and would wither away in communist society.

However, this understanding of the people did not dominate the entire discourse of the labor movement. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), for example, often argued with the democratic or the national sense of the word. In the very first point of the Eisenach program , the Social Democratic Workers' Party set itself the goal of "establishing the free people's state " in 1869 . During the German Empire , however, the German Social Democrats did not succeed in developing a consensus-based concept from the tension between the economic-internationalist and liberal-democratic understanding of the terms people and nation . This repeatedly led to internal party controversies, around 1896 over the question of whether the population of Alsace-Lorraine (1889) or the Polish people should be granted a right of self-determination . To continue for fear as " unpatriotic to be excluded," which voted SPD fraction in the German parliament at the beginning of the First World War, the majority of the war credits to: "For our people and their liberal future" stand too much at stake, it said in the explanatory statement.

In the November Revolution of 1918, the Social Democrats updated both the sociological and the constitutional concept of the people. The people as the bearers of the revolution appeared in terms such as people's defense and advice of people's representatives . In 1921, in the Görlitz program , the SPD presented itself as the “party of the working people in town and country”. In the Weimar Constitution , which was largely supported by the Social Democrats, the principle of popular sovereignty was first implemented in Germany in 1919. Her preamble read:

"The German people, united in their tribes and inspired by the will to renew and consolidate their empire in freedom and justice, to serve internal and external peace and to promote social progress, has given itself this constitution."

But the Social Democrats also resorted to the national popular term: In the debate about the Versailles Peace Treaty , on June 22, 1919 , the SPD MP Paul Löbe demanded a unification of Germany with Austria, including the Sudetenland and South Tyrol, before the Weimar National Assembly and confessed that “that we stand by our people with full loyalty to the International and that we are ready to stand up for our people and sacrifice everything to them ”.

From the Volkish Movement to National Socialism

In the last third of the 19th century, popular concepts emerged that took the supposedly common descent as the basis of the concept of the people. In the course of social Darwinist ideas, this term was embedded in racial theories . The völkisch movement practiced a real cult around the racist German people. Keywords here were above all Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) and Julius Langbehn (1851–1907). In his book Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890), he defined the people in contrast to the rabble or the masses as “multicolored crowd according to certain laws”. To these laws he counted the leader principle , an order of estates and the "indigenous earth character of the German people". Both represented a decided racial anti-Semitism. Lagarde claimed in 1855 that it was “the right of every people to be master of their own territory, to live for themselves, not for strangers”, and advocated the “removal” of alien elements.

In 1894 the Pan-German Association called for a “national summary of the entire German Volkstum in Central Europe , i. H. the eventual production of Greater Germany ”. This was to become the core of an overseas colonial empire . Heinrich Claß , who took over the chairmanship of the association in 1908, further radicalized its propaganda, which had to be oriented "solely to the needs of the German people". In doing so, he also envisaged “ ethnic cleansing”. The ethnicization of the concept of the people by the national movement made it impossible for minorities such as Jews or Poles to assimilate . Völkisch publicists like Willibald Hentschel (1858–1947) developed the myth of a master race that was formed in a long process of selection , selection and adaptation to the environment: the Aryans . This myth was later taken up by the National Socialists.

From 1914 to 1945, in German political parlance , the people functioned as the designation of a political, social and historical final instance: The term was central to both awareness-raising and the structure of action: all parties had to refer to it when legitimizing their politics; there was no renunciation possible. Accordingly, the term was manipulated for propaganda purposes. The majority of the parties founded at the end of the empire and at the beginning of the Weimar Republic used Volk or a modification as part of the name, whereby the intended meaning differed significantly in each case ( German National People's Party , German People's Party , Bavarian People's Party, German Democratic Party , Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , Christian -Social People's Service , Conservative People's Party ).

Due to the territorial changes of the Versailles Treaty , which came into force in 1920, many Germans became citizens of other states. In order to understand the legal position of these so-called ethnic Germans , the concept of ethnicity was coined . As a result, as the historian Dieter Gosewinkel analyzes, the multitude of meanings of the word people was " narrowed down to a substance concept of ethnic-cultural homogeneity". People and citizenship have thereby been reduced to nationality.

The language of National Socialism was based on the emphatically excessive use of the word, which was common across party lines in the Weimar Republic. The National Socialists constructed the people as an organic whole of culture, history and race, with the latter being the decisive component of “ethnic” substance for them. In their 25-point program of 1920, they played off ethnicity against citizenship and narrowed the concept of citizenship to “ Volksgenossen ”, that is, to people “of German blood” . Jews were explicitly excluded from this, they should be placed under "foreign legislation" . The central chapter of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is “People and Race”. Here Hitler developed a racist and radically anti-Semitic popular term on a social Darwinian basis .

Advertisement for the National Socialist magazine Neues Volk , around 1937

Nevertheless, Volk was by no means the highest value of the National Socialists. The breed ranked higher . This term was suitable to split up the people once thought of inwardly in solidarity and to treat its members differently depending on their supposed racial value, as Hitler had already laid down in Mein Kampf : He described the “most valuable treasure for our future” as “ even today in our German national body [...] unmixed stocks of Nordic-Germanic people ”. The “mission of the German people” is the formation of a state which is solely dedicated to “maintaining and promoting the most intact, noble elements of our nationality, indeed all of humanity”. He dismissed all other Germans as “general racial porridge of the unified people”.

The term people was frequently used as a central term in Nazi ideology during the Nazi era . The term also appeared in numerous compositions such as “ Volksgenosse ”, “ Volksgemeinschaft ” or “Volksgesundheit”, “Volksführer” and “Volksbewegung”. Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared on November 15, 1933: "The meaning of the revolution that we have made is the national development of the German nation". In the Nuremberg Laws , especially in the Reich Citizenship Act of September 15, 1935, the ethnic understanding of the people as a “blood community” was also legally codified: Jews were denied the status of “Reich Citizens” with equal rights, they were only nationals of the German Reich without political rights . With the utopia of a “healthy national community”, the National Socialists justified the discrimination , disenfranchisement and murder of German Jews , “ gypsies ”, “ anti-social ”, “ hereditary diseases ” or oppositionists who allegedly impaired the homogeneity of the national body. During the Second World War , the SS operated in science and practice with the concept of Umvolkung : This meant the attempt to drive the Slavs out of the areas conquered in East Central and Eastern Europe in order to (re) colonize them with Germans and so on to give a German cultural identity . With this re-population, processes of “de-Germanization” in these areas, which the nationalist and folkish discourse had lamented since the 19th century, were to be reversed. After 1945 the word disappeared from the serious discourse.

After the Second World War

Because of the misuse under National Socialism , the term people was used less often in political language after the Second World War. The Lord Mayor of Berlin , Ernst Reuter (1889–1953), used it in his famous speech on September 9, 1948 to the “peoples of the world” for the population of his city as a whole.

Both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR used people to legitimize their respective domestic constitutions. In the preamble of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany , the "German people" is ascribed "constituent power" ( pouvoir constituant ) in line with the doctrine of popular sovereignty . In fact, it was never allowed to vote on the Basic Law , which is why this formulation is considered fiction . Overall, the Basic Law broadened the concept of the German people in three ways: In addition to the western federal states , to which the scope of the Basic Law was initially limited, it also included the citizens of the GDR , for whom it claimed to act on behalf. Thirdly, according to Article 116 of the Basic Law, it also extends to refugees and displaced persons of German ethnicity as well as all emigrants after 1933, provided they agree to it.

According to the historian Dirk van Laak , the word people became “completely devoid of contours” after 1945 and in some cases even assumed revisionist and revanchist connotations. Due to the immigration of millions of foreigners , who were only reluctantly granted German citizenship, it is hardly suitable as a standard criterion. Since the 1960s it has been used less often in journalism and politics in the Federal Republic. In Germany policy after 1969, instead, the nation was mostly used. In 1973 the Federal Constitutional Court, in its ruling on the basic treaty with the GDR, insisted that an “ all-German nation” should continue to exist. It was followed by Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt , who viewed the Germans as members of a people, according to which both states in Germany were “not foreign to one another ”.

In the GDR, German unity was initially retained and the term people was used in a very similar way to that in the Federal Republic. In contrast to the Basic Law, the constitution of the GDR of 1949 described the people as the object and addressee of state action: "The republic decides on all matters that are essential for the existence and development of the German people as a whole," it said in Article 1. This meant the government of the GDR under the control of the SED . In the 1950s there was more talk of the “working people” in the GDR's political discourse. Capitalists could no longer be subsumed under this class concept. In the constitutions of 1968 and 1974 there was talk of a “people of the GDR”. The idea of ​​a unified German people was abandoned.

Commemorative plaque of the Dresden Revolutionary Path 1989 on Prager Strasse for the demonstration on October 8, 1989 and the group of 20

That changed during the peaceful revolution in the GDR : The slogan “ We are the people ”, which was shouted at the Monday demonstrations and other rallies by the opposition , marked a shift from the class-struggle to the democratic-constitutional concept of the people: instead of the working masses and theirs Party should be decided by the people of the state. In 1990 the slogan changed to “ We are one people ” and thus to the demand for the reunification of Germany .

The New Right has been using the popular term ethnopluralistically since the 1970s . The French publicist Alain de Benoist, for example, explained that the “diversity of the world” lies in the fact that “every people, every culture has its own norms - each culture being a self-sufficient structure”. In this way of thinking, the general validity of human rights , for example , is contested in a culturally relativistic way . Each people has its own culture and its values, which apply only to itself, the differences between the people are insurmountable. Culture is thought of as ethnic and homogeneous, a comprehensive concept of meaning for the people that is set in an authoritarian manner . The individual can neither individually reinterpret nor otherwise withdraw from the respective myths of ancestry, language, and history of the people into which he was born. They represented the collective fate of a people.

present

In the current social sciences, the unanimous opinion is that peoples in the sense of ethnic or religious communities are "imagined orders" or "imagined communities". Niklas Luhmann wrote that people are “only a construct with which political theory achieves unity. Or to put it another way: who would notice if there were no people at all? ”According to Jörg Echternkamp and Oliver Müller, the substantialist assumption that a people is an“ essential social body ”is necessarily misleading. This does not mean that peoples are fictions , made up out of nothing, as it were. Rather, demarcations from other peoples are based on already existing ideas and have an effect on them. At the same time, as ideologues of integration and legitimation , they were and are of considerable effectiveness. The subjective feeling of belonging is seen as decisive. According to the sociologist Friedrich Heckmann, the “reality of large ethnic collectives” is rooted, among other things, in the “belief” that they have common ancestors and in the “awareness” that they belong together and have a common identity. In the opinion of the sociologist Lutz Hoffmann, this leads to a circular definition : “'People' is what their 'people' are for people”. The subjective idea that one has certain similarities with certain other people constitutes the "people" as the sum of all people with the same ethnicity. In a secondary process, the objective characteristics on which the idea of ​​a common people is based would be produced; they do not precede it.

This contrasts with the understanding of the people in populism , which is becoming increasingly popular in the present. Here the problem of inclusion and exclusion, which is inherent in the concept of the people, is denied, as is its constructive nature. Contrasts of interests within the people, which are numerous in modern societies, do not appear in the populist use of the word. Populists exaggerate the people as “honest”, “hardworking” and “reasonable” and contrast them with the elites and the establishment . They accuse them of not advocating the will of the people, which is imagined as a single entity, decisively enough or not at all. When asked what they mean by the people , populists answer differently depending on their ideological orientation. While left-wing populists address workers or the unemployed , i.e. rather tie in with a sociological popular term, right- wing populists primarily mean national identity . Regardless of this, all populists present the particular interests of their presumptive voters as the will of the people and call for more direct democratic elements in the constitution. They often want to implement this assumed popular will with a charismatic leader who is in direct contact with the people, bypassing the intermediary authorities. That is why right-wing populists are directed not only against “the others”, for example against Muslims , but always against the ruling class and representative democracy . Typically simplifying complex problems in a globalized world, populists tend to prefer national solo efforts over international solutions. Examples of this are Brexit or the announcement by American President Donald Trump that he will stop illegal immigration .

In the 21st century the words people (in the folkish understanding of the word) and Umvolung were taken up again by right-wing extremists and right-wing populists . In 2016, the designation of the people's traitor , with which supporters of Pegida and the AfD demeaned democratic politicians, was chosen as the bad word of the year in Germany . As a justification, the jury stated, among other things, that the word “ people” was meant in a similarly exclusive sense as during the time of National Socialism.

In order not to come under suspicion of populist demagogy and to avoid the pathos associated with the word, German politicians currently only rarely use the word people . The racist charge of the word by the National Socialists also plays a role. As an alternative, we are talking about the “fellow citizens”, the “people out in the country”, the “little man” or the “population”. In her address on the Day of German Unity on October 3, 2016, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel took away the concept of any pathos and rejected all attempts to privilege membership of the people by saying: "All are the people".

Differentiation from other terms

State people

→ Main article : State people

Inscription Dem Deutschen Volke on the Reichstag building (1916)

People in the sense of state people refers to the nationals of a subject under international law . The people of the state are one of the three constitutive elements of a state , along with the territory and power of the state . In a democracy, the people are the “origin and legal basis of all state authority”. The constitutional lawyer Karl Brinkmann uses the term population for this , since for him it is irrelevant whether the people belonging to a state “belong to a people or not”.

In doing so, he sets himself apart from the anti-liberal constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt , who had stipulated in his constitutional doctrine in 1928: “The subject of the definition of the state is the people”. As early as 1923, Schmitt had referred to the "homogeneity and identity of the people with themselves" as the basis of the state in recording Rousseau's ideas of identity . But that means "with inevitable consequence" that one knows "to remove or keep away the foreign and unequal, the homogeneity threatening". For Schmitt, exclusion from the people of the state based on ethnic criteria was a condition of success for “every real democracy”. In 1939 Schmitt developed the concept of the people as the opposite of that of the state and sketched a “popular urban order carried by the people [...], which could only be based on the concept of the Reich ”.

The state people ideally corresponds to the demos, which Emerich K. Francis conceptually differentiated from ethnos in 1965. In resuming this theory, the sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius (1928–2014) declares that “the basis for a civil society of democratic self-legitimation” is to recognize the various tensions between the two: One equates demos as bearers of political sovereignty with a specific ethnos, leaders that for the suppression or forced assimilation of ethnic, cultural, religious or socio-economic minorities. The status of the citizen is defined in its origin by natural law and individually and applies equally to everyone. It should not be tied to material characteristics that gave the parts of the population defined by them different rights of participation. As negative examples of this, Lepsius cites the Germanization of ethnic Poles , Alsatians and Lorraine people and the discrimination against social democrats and Catholics in the German Empire. In reality, however, in many states, especially those of the former Eastern Bloc , an ethnic definition of the nation applies . In this context - against the background of their own historical conflict experiences - the lack of tolerance towards ethnic minorities is viewed and justified by the majority of the population as the price for their survival as an ethnic group. In return , according to Gerhard Seewann, this leads to "socially and politically marginalization of all ethnic groups from the titular nation ". The Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha coined the term ethnic democracy for multiethnic democratic systems in which one ethnic group is constitutionally preferred . Examples of ethnic democracies are Israel, Estonia , Latvia , Slovakia and Malaysia .

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas diagnosed in 1992 that the contradictions inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty had not yet been resolved:

“The people, from whom all state-organized violence is supposed to proceed, does not form a subject with will and consciousness. It occurs only in the plural, as a people it is on the whole neither capable of making decisions nor of taking action. "

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier took up this formulation in his speech on the 30th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in the GDR. In a democracy, the people only exist in the plural, which is why it is the difficult task of politics to develop a common line from this polyphony. Never again should an individual or a group claim to speak for the "real people".

The exclusivity of this state people, which is shown, for example, in the fact that foreigners are refused the right to vote , is justified by their qualified solidarity: whoever supports the state together should be inseparably linked to it in a political community. The definition of nationality is based on the constitution of the respective state. It is granted according to the principle of descent ( ius sanguinis ) or according to the principle of location ( ius soli ). Most states have a combination of the two. Belonging to a nation can also take place through naturalization . It has the purpose "that a tendency towards congruence of national territory and national people is preserved".

The law requires the existence ahead of nations as a given basic social fact; However, it does not know a uniform popular term, but sees in the people as a legal term a persistent association of persons. If, as stipulated in Article 20, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law , the state authority “comes from the people”, one speaks of popular sovereignty in the constitutional theoretical sense. According to this principle, from the point of view of international law it is above all decisive that the people are constitutionally regarded as the actual holder of state power and therefore as pouvoir constituant . The self-determination and popular sovereignty, which has emerged from a legal rule since the second half of the 20th century, form a unit.

See also : citizenship

nation

→ Main article : Nation

Hermann Knackfuß : Peoples of Europe, preserve your most sacred goods (1895). The Archangel Michael warns the national allegories of the major European powers (including Germania , Mother Russia , Marianne and Britannia ) of the "yellow danger" .

People in the sense of nation is used in political terms such as international law or the League of Nations . The words Volk and Nation are semantically not clearly delimited from one another in German and consequently cannot be clearly distinguished. The legal scholar Thilo Ramm sees the difference between the two terms in that nation is less ambiguous. It is clearly connoted with internal and external independence and freedom , the nation is "the sovereign people". The American sociologist Michael Banton defines the German word people as a “cultural group” and “would-be nation”.

In the question of what defines a nation, people is ideally the opposite term to state nation : In this concept, as in French state thinking, for example, it is assumed that belonging to a nation is based on a subjective act of will (→  nation of will ). In political discourse in Germany and elsewhere is, however long followed the concept of People's Nation : This is based on the membership of the people to whom therefore an objective substance was assumed, adopted given as a pre-political. Since ethnic homogeneity is difficult to make plausible due to the seldom or nonexistent external physical characteristics of a common ancestry, people's nations were also defined by cultural characteristics such as religion, language or community of fate. If the people defined in this way did not settle in a compact settlement block, but rather geographically dispersed, the concept of the people's nation repeatedly resulted in difficulties for members of other ethnic groups who were discriminated against as a minority. This was regularly the case in Central and Southeastern Europe . The appeal to supposedly objectively predetermined regulations of a people is itself the result of a subjective act of will. The German emphatic terms Volk , Volksgeist , völkisch or volklich are largely equated with the terms nation , nationalité , esprit national and national in French .

The historian Dieter Langewiesche points to mediaeval research according to which ethnogenesis follows the formation of rule, not precedes it. Nations therefore arise in states, they are younger than these. The idea that the people are “eternal” and only become a nation that creates a state in the course of its development is a myth.

A political system that, unlike the ethnically and culturally defined nation state, is made up of several peoples is called a multi-ethnic state . Examples of multiethnic states are Austria-Hungary , the Soviet Union , Yugoslavia , the United States, Canada and Switzerland . The individual peoples of such states are also referred to as nationalities . Multiethnic states have a special potential for conflict if the rights of participation of the nationalities are unevenly distributed. Possible solutions for this are multiculturalism , federalism or secession .

Since the Stalin era, attempts have been made in the Soviet Union to solve this problem with a “Soviet patriotism ” that should override any cultural collective consciousness. The Soviet Union itself acted as nation or fatherland , as in "Great Patriotic War" ( Russian Великая Отечественная война , Velikaya otetschestwennaja wojna ), the propaganda term for the German-Soviet War 1941-1945, which involved ethnic and linguistic groups were called nations . The terms nations or nationalities were avoided for them. Education and management policy contributed to the development of an integrated general state consciousness. The Russian hegemony was escaped in the metaphor "brother peoples", with the Russians being the "older brothers".

In the People's Republic of China there has been officially only one Chinese nationality (中华民族, Zhōnghuá Mínzú ) since the 1980s . Since then, all the peoples of China are less independent peoples of a multi-ethnic state, but more like ethnic groups of a common nationality, including the Han people . However, this common nationality, which is dominated by the Han Chinese, is perceived by Tibetans , Uyghurs and Mongols as a degradation, since they consider themselves peoples with a right to self-determination .

population

→ Main article : Population

In contrast to people, the word population means the people who actually reside in a certain territory at a certain time, regardless of their ascribed or self-defined group membership. As early as 1935, the German writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) warned that instead of speaking of the people, it was better to speak of the people: Then support “a lot of lies” and take away the word's “lazy mysticism ”. In a population, unlike in a people, there are always different, sometimes diverging interests. This truth is suppressed through the use of the word people .

The numbers of the population and the people often differ significantly. In the 1990s, a significant proportion of the German population (in some large cities up to 20%) had no right to vote and no opportunity to participate in politics. The so-called guest workers and their descendants were denied naturalization; their interests were instead looked after by commissioners for foreigners .

In 2000, the concept artist Hans Haacke installed his work of art The Population in white neon light letters in the inner courtyard of the Reichstag building on the decision of the German Bundestag . It corresponds to the inscription Dem deutscher Volke on the architrave of the west portal and is intended to stimulate “reflection and discussion about the role and self-image of parliament ”.

Ethnicity

→ Main article : Ethnicity

The term people is sometimes used parallel to that of the ethnic group ( ancient Greek ἔθνος éthnos ) in the sense of an ethnic community . Attempts to officially determine whether people from outside belong to a “people” in the ethnic sense are often rejected today in the course of the recognition of national minorities . The German-Danish agreement of March 29, 1955 says: "The commitment to German nationality and German culture is free and may not be disputed or checked ex officio." And in the law on the rights of the Sorbs in the Free State of Saxony : “Whoever professes to be part of the Sorbian people. Confession is free. It may neither be disputed nor verified. This avowal must not lead to any disadvantages. ”In other countries it is customary to ask about ethnicity in censuses , for example in Israel, Canada and the USA. In the US census, the self-assessment of the race as well as origin and language are queried in order to be able to categorize someone as Hispanic . The Hispanist Jennifer Leeman speaks of an "ethnic-racial classification" ( clasificación etnoracial ).

In some of the successor states of the Soviet Union , nationalities other than citizenship are still listed in official personal documents. For the area of ​​today's Russia the previous, z. For example, ethnicity based on parentage was replaced in 1991 by a place-of-residence-based regulation. As a result, the naturalization of people from the successor states was restricted, although some of them also saw themselves as ethnic Russians.

In sociological or ethnological classification, ethnic groups are now considered to be the smallest unit and peoples as the superordinate unit: people can therefore be used as a classifying umbrella term for several ethnic groups that understand themselves as a society as a whole. While the ethnic group is based on an “intuitive self-conception of a common identity”, for the people it is more a “will-dependent self-conception of a common historical identity”, which can find its legal expression in nationality. However, the term is also criticized because it reimports the long-deconstructed ideas of a “folk spirit” or a “folkish peculiarity” as supposedly empirical realities into the social science discourse.

The concept of cultural areas offers a rough overview of the peoples of the earth in the ethnic-cultural sense . Non-existent peoples can be found in sagas and mythology .

society

Similar to people , the term society can also refer to people who live together permanently in one place in order to satisfy individual and common needs. Francis therefore used it in his definition of people . On the other hand, Friedrich Heckmann objects that in the present it would refer to state-owned companies. In contrast to this, however, the relations between people and state could be very different. There are peoples who live in several societies as a whole and not just in one.

The idea of ​​a people as a society contradicts the idea of ​​the national community, which was widespread not only among the National Socialists, but also among German liberals such as Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919) and Swedish Social Democrats ( Folkhemmet ) until the 1930s . It ties in with the distinction between community and society that the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) had developed in 1887.

Subject of international law

→ Main article : Subject of international law

Contrary to what the misleading name suggests, international law is not concerned with legal relationships between peoples, but with those between states and other subjects who are the bearers of rights and obligations under international law. Nations themselves are not subjects of international law, even if the criminal offense of genocide, which has been anchored in international criminal law since 1948, points in this direction. Whether the right of peoples to self-determination guaranteed in the Charter of the United Nations and other international treaties grants a legal right to autonomy or secession or whether it is merely a political guideline is a matter of dispute in the specialist literature.

religion

In the religious sense, people can be used as in the expressions “ chosen people ” or “ people of God ”. As a rule, there are strong overlaps with sacred variants of the ethnic-cultural and the ethnic-biological versions.

In the Conservative Revolution and under National Socialism, these ideas were tied to and the Germans identified as a people chosen by God. People thus became the object of a political religion . Such ethnic religions only existed in the German-speaking regions of the 19th and 20th centuries. The young conservative theorist Edgar Julius Jung found in his program publication The Rule of the Inferior that the German people in particular felt “the gentle wafting of a new ' Holy Spirit ' most vividly”. In this way of thinking, as Koselleck analyzes, the people must not experience themselves as a political subject; rather, they are assigned the role of an object of salvation history , as a transcendent factor that prevents the individual from becoming a self-determined citizen. This becomes clear in the National Socialist catchphrase: “You are nothing, your people are everything”.

In German Protestantism , after the First World War, the term people moved to the center of theological thought. Paul Althaus , Emanuel Hirsch and Friedrich Gogarten . Under the motto “God and people” the salvation of the people took the place of the redemption of the individual.

literature

• Peter Brandt : People . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 11, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2001, pp. 1080-1090 ( online ).
• Franz-Josef Deiters : On the scene of the "people". Strategies of self-ascription of intellectual identity from Herder to Büchner and beyond. Rombach Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau / Berlin / Vienna 2006.
• Emerich K. Francis : Ethnos and Demos. Sociological contributions to popular theory. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin (West) 1965.
• Patrick J. Geary : European Peoples in the Early Middle Ages. To the legend of the becoming of the nations. Frankfurt am Main 2002.
• Fritz Gschnitzer, Reinhart Koselleck , Karl Ferdinand Werner: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner , Werner Conze , Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 141-431.
• M. Rainer Lepsius : "Ethnos" or "Demos". On the application of two categories by Emerich Francis to the national self-image of the Federal Republic and to European unification. In: Ders .: Interests, Ideas and Institutions , Opladen 1990, pp. 247–255.
• Martin Schaffner : Fear of the people. Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2020, ISBN 978-3-7965-4003-5 .
• Reinhard Stauber and Florian Kerschbaumer: People . In: Encyclopedia of Modern Times . Vol. 14: Father – Economic Growth . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 376-384 ( online ).
• Michael Wildt : People, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-86-854309-4 .

Web links

Wikiquote: People  - Quotes

Wiktionary: People  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich Kluge : Etymological Dictionary of the German Language , 24th edition; Digital dictionary of the German language ( online ).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Reinhard Stauber and Florian Kerschbaumer: Volk . In: Encyclopedia of Modern Times , Vol. 14: Father – Economic Growth . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 376-384 ( online , accessed June 14, 2020).
3. ↑ Lutz Mackensen : Origin of Words. The etymological dictionary of the German language . Updated new edition, Bassermann, Munich 2013, pp. 313 and 431.
4. ↑ Duden , Vol. 7: Etymology . Bibliographical Institute, Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1963, p. 747.
5. ↑ Reinhart Koselleck: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner and Werner Conze (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 145 f.
6. ^ Rolf Grawert : State people and citizenship. In: Josef Isensee , Paul Kirchhof (ed.): Handbook of the constitutional law of the Federal Republic of Germany , Volume I: Historical bases . CF Müller, Heidelberg 1987, pp. 663-691, here p. 664 Rn.  2.
7. ^ Karl W. Deutsch: Development process of the nations. Some recurring patterns of political and social integration. In: same: nation building - nation state - integration. Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 204. Quoted from Friedrich Heckmann : Ethnic minorities, people and nation. Sociology of Inter-Ethnic Relations . Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-432-99971-2 , p. 49 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
8. ^ Emerich K. Francis: Ethnos and Demos. Sociological contributions to popular theory. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1965, the quotation p. 196.
9. ↑ Reinhold Zippelius: Allgemeine Staatslehre. Political science. A study book . CH Beck, Munich 1969, cited here from the 16th edition 2010, pp. 63–67.
10. ^ Günter Hartfiel and Karl-Heinz Hillmann : Dictionary of Sociology. 3rd, revised and supplemented edition, Kröner, Stuttgart 1982, p. 794.
11. ^ Friedrich Heckmann: Ethnic minorities, people and nation. Sociology of Inter-Ethnic Relations . Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-432-99971-2 , p. 50 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
12. ^ Peter Brandt: People . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 11, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2001, ( online , accessed June 24, 2020); these three aspects also with Jörn Retterath: “What is the people?” People and community concepts of the political center in Germany 1917–1924 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046454-2 , p. 64 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online).
13. ↑ Dieter Haller (text), Bernd Rodekohr (illustrations): dtv-Atlas Ethnologie. 2nd, completely revised and corrected edition, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-03259-9 , p. 95.
14. ↑ ^{a b c} Georg Elwert : People . In: Walter Hirschberg (greeting), Wolfgang Müller (red.): Dictionary of Ethnology. New edition, 2nd edition, Reimer, Berlin 2005, p. 400.
15. ↑ Clemens Knobloch : “Folk Linguistic Research”. Studies on the restructuring of linguistics in Germany between 1918 and 1945. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-484-31257-2 , pp. 2, 15, 59 u. ö. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
16. ↑ Michael Wildt : People, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, pp. 12, 15 and 122 f.
17. ↑ Peter Walkenhorst: Nation - People - Race. Radical nationalism in the German Empire 1890–1914 (=  Critical Studies in History , Volume 176). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, p. 81.
18. ^ Lutz Hoffmann: The 'people'. On the ideological structure of an inevitable term . In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 20, Heft 3 (1991), pp. 191–208, here p. 194 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
19. ↑ Walter Hirschberg (Gre.), Wolfgang Müller (Red.): Dictionary of Ethnology. New edition, 2nd edition, Reimer, Berlin 2005, p. 400.
20. ^ Ulrich Vosgerau : State . In: Burkhard Schöbener (Ed.), Völkerrecht. Lexicon of central terms and topics , CF Müller, Heidelberg 2014, p. 396.
21. ^ Ulrich Vosgerau: The right to self-determination in the world community . In: Josef Isensee / Paul Kirchhof (eds.), Handbook of Constitutional Law of the Federal Republic of Germany , Volume XI: Internationale Bezüge , 3rd edition, CF Müller, Heidelberg 2013, p. 98.
22. ↑ Dieter Haller (text), Bernd Rodekohr (illustrations): dtv-Atlas Ethnologie. 2nd, completely revised and corrected edition, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-03259-9 , p. 95; Bettina Beer : Culture and Ethnicity . In: the same and Hans Fischer (ed.): Ethnology. An introduction. 7th, revised and expanded edition, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 2012, p. 62 f.
23. ^ Hans Fischer: Ethnology as a scientific discipline . In: the same and Bettina Beer: Ethnology. An introduction. 7th edition, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 2012, p. 22.
24. ↑ M. Krischke Ramaswamy: Ethnology for beginners. An introduction from a development perspective . Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 1985, p. 16.
25. ^ Fritz Gschnitzer : People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 151 f.
26. ↑ Walter Eder : People. In: Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (eds.): Der Neue Pauly , Volume 12/2. JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, column 300.
27. ↑ Wilfried Nippel : Political Theories of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present . Federal Agency for Civic Education , 2nd edition, Bonn 1993, pp. 17–46, here p. 27.
28. ↑ Augustine: De civitate Dei XIX, 21, based on Otto Kallscheuer : Communitarism . In: Dieter Nohlen (Ed.): Lexicon of Politics, Volume 1: Political Theories. Directmedia, Berlin 2004, p. 258.
29. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Peter Brandt : Volk . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 11, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2001, ( online , accessed June 24, 2020).
30. ↑ Jochen Martin : Spätantike und Völkerwanderung (=  Oldenbourg floor plan of history . Vol. 4). 4th edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-49684-0 , pp. 29, 163 u. ö. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
31. ↑ Bernd Schönemann : People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 279-283 and 299 f.
32. ↑ Jörn Retterath: "What is the people?" People and community concepts of the political center in Germany 1917-1924 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046454-2 , p. 34 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
33. ↑ Peter Berghoff: The death of the political collective. Political religion and dying and killing for people, nation and race . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-002980-3 , p. 21 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
34. ^ "Nom collectif difficile à définir" - Louis de Jaucourt: Peuple, le . In: Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (eds.): Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , 1st edition, vol. 12, Paris 1765, p. 475 ( online on Wikisource , Accessed June 5, 2020); Harvey Chisick: The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes Toward the Education of the Lower Classes in Eighteenth-Century France. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1981, pp. 54 ff.
35. ↑ Alexander Schwan : Political Theories of Rationalism and the Enlightenment . In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1993, pp. 157–258, here p. 193.
36. ↑ Alexander Schwan: Political Theories of Rationalism and the Enlightenment . In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present. Federal Center for Political Education, Bonn 1993, pp. 157–258, here pp. 192 and 199 ff. (Here the second quote); Michaela Rehm : Contract and trust: Locke's legitimation of rule . In: the same and Bernd Ludwig: John Locke: Two treatises on the government . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-05-005076-4 , pp. 95–114, here p. 104 (the first quote) and 111 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
37. ↑ Alexander Schwan: Political Theories of Rationalism and the Enlightenment . In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1993, pp. 157–258, here pp. 219–228; Ingeborg Maus : People and Nation in Enlightenment Thought . In: Blätter for German and international politics , May 1994, sections The “people” of popular sovereignty and Rousseau .
38. ↑ Michael Wildt: People, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, p. 25.
39. ↑ Alexander Schwan: Political Theories of Rationalism and the Enlightenment . In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1993, pp. 157–258, here pp. 248 ff .; Susann Held: Property and Rule with John Locke and Immanuel Kant. A comparison of the history of ideas. Lit Verlag, Münster 2006, p. 260 (here the quote).
40. ↑ Immanuel Kant: About the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but not suitable for practice (1793), cited by Michael Wildt: Volk, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, p. 38.
41. ↑ Alexander Schwan: Political Theories of Rationalism and the Enlightenment . In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.): Political theories from antiquity to the present. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1993, pp. 157–258, here p. 192.
42. ↑ A statement by the representatives of the United States of America, gathered at the Genral Congress . Steiner and Cist, Philadelphia 1776 ( online at Wikisource, accessed June 5, 2020).
43. ↑ Michael Wildt: People, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, p. 31.
44. ↑ Bernd Guggenberger : Democracy / Democracy Theory . In: Dieter Nohlen (Ed.): Lexicon of Politics, Volume 1: Political Theories. Directmedia, Berlin 2004, p. 49.
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46. ↑ Reinhart Koselleck: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 204.
47. ↑ Michel Vovelle: The French Revolution. Social movement and upheaval in mentalities. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 112 f.
48. ↑ Michel Vovelle: The French Revolution. Social movement and upheaval in mentalities. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 114.
49. ↑ Ute Planert : Nation and Nationalism in German History . In: From politics and contemporary history B 39 (2004), pp. 11–18, here p. 15; Peter Brandt: People . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 11, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2001, ( online , accessed June 24, 2020); Christian Jansen , Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - Nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 37 f.
50. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 283.
51. ↑ Christian Jansen, Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 37–40.
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54. ↑ Jörn Retterath: "What is the people?" People and community concepts of the political center in Germany 1917-1924 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046454-2 , p. 52 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online).
55. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler : German history of society , Vol. 3: From the “German double revolution” to the beginning of the First World War 1845 / 49–1914 . CH Beck, Munich 1995, p. 951 f .; Jörn Retterath: “What is the people?” People and community concepts of the political center in Germany 1917–1924 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046454-2 , p. 54 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
56. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 362 f.
57. ↑ Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Ferdinand Werner : People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 149 f. and 238 f.
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60. ↑ Quoted from Peter Berghoff: The death of the political collective. Political religion and dying and killing for people, nation and race . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-002980-3 , p. 37 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
61. ^ Christian Jansen: Ernst Moritz Arndt. In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. Actors, networks, research programs. 2nd edition, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-042989-3 , pp. 39–43, here p. 40 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
62. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 333.
63. ^ Clemens Escher: Arndt, Ernst Moritz. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 2: People. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 34 (here the quote) (accessed via De Gruyter Online); Peter Brandt: People . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 11, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2001 ( online , accessed June 24, 2020).
64. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 337.
65. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 358 ff.
66. ↑ Dieter Gosewinkel : Naturalization and Exclusion. The nationalization of citizenship from the German Confederation to the Federal Republic of Germany . 2nd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, pp. 120–123.
67. ^ Günter Hartfiel and Karl-Heinz Hillmann: Dictionary of Sociology. 3rd revised and supplemented edition, Kröner, Stuttgart 1982, p. 794; Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 363 f.
68. ↑ Karl Marx: On the Critique of Hegel's Right Philosophy , 1844 ( online at Wikisource ).
69. ↑ Bernd Guggenberger: Democracy / Democracy Theory . In: Dieter Nohlen (Ed.): Lexicon of Politics, Volume 1: Political Theories. Directmedia, Berlin 2004, p. 45.
70. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 365 f.
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72. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 378 ff.
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74. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 374 ff.
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76. ↑ Michael Wildt: People, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2017, p. 10 f.
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80. ↑ Dieter Gosewinkel: Naturalization and Exclusion. The nationalization of citizenship from the German Confederation to the Federal Republic of Germany . 2nd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, pp. 361–366 (here the quote).
81. ↑ Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-092864-8 , p. 642 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
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