Fatherland

This article treats the fatherland as a concept in the sense of home . For other meanings, mostly derived from it, see Fatherland (disambiguation) .

“Fatherland, only you!” The slogan of the Swiss gymnastics movement on a pedestal on the Zurich lake promenade

Fatherland is a country you come from, whose people or nation you feel you belong to; Synonyms are country of birth, homeland or homeland. The term has been sacralized since the late 18th century. Men were required to sacrifice their lives in his name if necessary. Since the Second World War , the fatherland has rarely been ascribed an identity-forming effect.

etymology

The Middle High German word vaterlant is documented for the first time towards the end of the 11th century in the Summarium Henrici , a shortened version of the Etymologiae . It is a translation of the Latin word patria . The basic meaning was "(paternal) property ". The word only acquired its present-day meaning in humanism .

ideology

The "Invention of the Nation"

The word only acquired a geographical, but eminently political meaning with the "invention of the nation" ( Benedict Anderson ) in the second half of the 18th century. Before that it could also mean eternal life in heaven , for example in Friedrich Spee's Advent song O Savior, Tear Open the Heavens from the year 1622, in the sixth stanza of which Jesus Christ is asked: “Oh come, lead us with a strong hand / from misery to the fatherland ”. Martin Opitz had already written a similar poem about Christ, “who leads our souls to our fatherland / since he sits in God's hand / sits, rules and rules”. In 1784 Friedrich Schiller had his protagonist Ferdinand exclaim in Kabale und Liebe : "My fatherland is where Luise loves me!"

Ernst Moritz Arndt's poem Des Deutschen Vaterland from 1813 shows that the definition of the fatherland was by no means self-evident. It repeatedly asked what “of the German fatherland” actually was until the answer was finally given in the seventh verse becomes: The German fatherland is equated in the sense of the cultural nation with the German-speaking area : "As far as the German tongue sounds / and God in heaven sings songs, / that's it!"

Previously, other political entities had been referred to as fatherland (or Latin patria ): In the early modern period, the name was initially given to one's own town, the home region, the individual German territorial states , in times of external threat and internal disputes such as during the Turkish wars or in the thirties Also war the whole Holy Roman Empire or Latin Christianity . In 1644 Emperor Friedrich III had it . called “our beloved fatherland of the German nation” in a circular . The Enlightenment had integrated the term into cosmopolitanism : The magazine Der Patriot defined a patriot in 1724 as someone who understood “the whole world as his fatherland, even as a single city”.

In 1761, on the other hand , the philosopher Thomas Abbt referred to Prussia as his fatherland. In 1813 the Landwehr Cross was donated there, whose motto was: " With God for King and Fatherland ". Here too, as with Arndt, the whole of Germany was not meant, but Prussia. The idea that the mother tongue creates the fatherland and that Prussia is not a nation-state was only fully accepted in Germany with the revolution of 1848. The idea of ​​a common German fatherland overpowered that of different fatherlands in the individual territories, but did not suppress it.

In 1814, the historian Heinrich Luden ethnicized the concept of fatherland: for him, the borders of the people and the state had to coincide, otherwise one could not speak of a fatherland. As a counterexample, he cited what seemed to him to be the homeless Jews whom he stigmatized as pitiful . The assertion that Jews had no fatherland was expanded into the conspiracy theory of a "Jewish International" in the course of the 19th century . This designation, with which the derogatory characteristics “un-German”, “without a fatherland” and “subversive” were associated, later found its way into Nazi propaganda . Finally, the anti-Semitic journalist Paul de Lagarde considered the fatherland to be neither a cultural nor a political nor an ethnic matter. In 1875 he defined it morally as “the entirety of all Germans who feel German, think German, want German”. It is the duty of every individual to feel personally responsible for the existence, happiness and future of the fatherland every moment of their life. A fatherland understood in this way is almost "on the way to eternal life".

When this appreciation of the fatherland took place is disputed in research. Against the common thesis that this only happened during the Wars of Liberation , the historian Ute Planert takes the view that since the time of the Seven Years' War 1756–1763, the fatherland had been constructed as an “exclusive and homogeneous community ” that could claim to be of higher rank than other communities such as religion or family and which was henceforth the highest authority of legitimation .

French Revolution

Nicolas-Guy Brenet: Louis XVI. swears allegiance to the constitution at the altar of the fatherland. Painting, from around 1790

This revaluation of the fatherland began in revolutionary France . In 1748, the enlightener Charles de Montesquieu, in his Esprit des lois, described love for the fatherland as a virtue of self-denial for a republic alone . On the other hand, the driving moral-psychological force in monarchies is honor . Even before it was abolished, la patrie became the central anchor of identity . From 1789 onwards it made higher demands on the individual as a village community, class awareness , ecclesiastical, regional or dynastic roots. This can be seen, for example, at the federation festival on the anniversary of the storm on the Bastille , when Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord celebrated a Holy Mass in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators on July 14, 1790 at the "Altar of the Fatherland" and King Louis XVI. Had to swear by the Constitution . After the outbreak of the First Coalition War , the Legislative National Assembly passed the Declaration La Patrie en Danger (“The Fatherland is in Danger”) on July 11, 1792, calling on citizens to volunteer. 15,000 French responded to this call. In the Marseillaise , a war song from 1792, which was declared the French national anthem in 1795, the French are addressed as "enfants de la Patrie" ("Children of the Fatherland"), their love for them is described as "holy" (" amour sacré de la Patrie ”). In contrast to Germany, the fatherland was not defined culturally or ethnically, but republican as a state nation in which the citizens defend their common freedom.

To die for the fatherland

"With God for Prince and Fatherland". War memorial for the fallen of both world wars in Hammerstedt , Thuringia

In the nationalism that developed in the 19th century, the fatherland played a central role. It was considered one of the highest values ​​of all and could even claim to give one's life for it. Thomas Abbt had provided an initial formulation of this claim during the Seven Years' War with his work Vom Tode für das Vaterland (Vom Tode für das Vaterland) , even describing the willingness to do so as a decisive condition for belonging to a state, whether one was born in it or had decided to do so later : "Then I will call this state my fatherland". 1800 celebrated Friedrich Hölderlin in an ode to death for his country . Often this claim was justified with a reinterpretation of the Ode Angustam amice by the Roman poet Horace , which contains the famous line: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (German: "It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland.") Militarization the concept of fatherland was also evident in Max Schneckenburger's Die Wacht am Rhein from 1840: The fact that the “dear fatherland” of the refrain wanted to “be quiet” was thanks to the military who kept watch.

The glorification of the soldier's death for the fatherland no longer seemed credible in view of the millions of deaths in the First World War : the British poet Wilfred Owen , who himself died in 1918, described it outright as one in his Dulce et Decorum est , a poem written in 1917 about a poison gas attack "Old lie". Nevertheless, Horace's dictum was still used on funeral ceremonies and memorial plaques.

In Portugal , the national anthem A Portuguesa (1890) ends with the words: “pela Patria lutar, contra os canhões marchar, marchar!” (“Fight for the fatherland, march against the cannons, march!”)

Labor movement

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticized the fatherland ideology of the 19th century from a different perspective . In their Communist Party manifesto from 1848, they stipulated: "The workers have no fatherland". For them, states were not a given community of fate, but instruments of one class for the exploitation of another. In this respect, the solidarity of the exploited does not have to apply to their exploiters, who happened to belong to their own nation, but to the other exploited, whether in their country or in another. This contributed to the fact that the Social Democrats in the German Empire were seen as patriotic journeymen . In order to defend itself against this accusation, the SPD parliamentary group in the German Reichstag approved the war credits at the beginning of the First World War : "We will not abandon the fatherland in the hour of danger". After the October Revolution , the Soviet Union declared itself the “fatherland of all working people”.

National Socialism

In the era of National Socialism , the term was used for propaganda the claim to power of the Nazi party and their blood and soil to support. BDM girls were brought up to “do service to the people and fatherland”. As a result, they would be “detached from their self-attachment [...] and bound by the law that imposed their membership in this German blood and soil”. In school lessons the children were impressed with "the law of blood and soil", which includes all natural laws and "binds the individual inseparably to his people and fatherland". In truth, the ethnic racial fantasies went far beyond the traditional notion of a united fatherland. In one of his last speeches, Adolf Hitler declared that “Fatherland” had become “an empty concept”.

After 1945

After the Second World War, the idea of ​​a fatherland played less of a role. The GDR declined from 1970 to the claim, not to represent Germany. When it was founded, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl had declared that he did not want to come to terms with “the division of our fatherland”. The GDR's national anthem, Risen from the Ruins , spoke of "Germany, united fatherland". However, her text was not sung after 1972. In the Federal Republic of Germany the reunification requirement of the Basic Law was adhered to and the German national anthem was sung , which wishes the “German fatherland” a blossom. But generally a certain “patriotic bloodlessness” was lamented: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, referred in 1992 to the decades-long “lack of patriotism ”, as demonstrated in the sober, distant dictum of the later Federal President Gustav Heinemann that he loved no states, he loved his Woman. When he took office on July 1, 1969, he described Germany as a “difficult fatherland”, but because you live here, you want to “make your contribution to one human race with and through this our country”. An exception was made by Chancellor Helmut Kohl , who ended his annual New Year's address with the sentence: "God bless our German fatherland!"

In general, organizations such as NATO and, from the 1990s onwards, increasing globalization had made the emotional attachment to one's own nation appear increasingly obsolete in the West . An attempt to stop this process came from the call of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962 to create a Europe of fatherlands : Cooperation on the continent should not be supranational , but intergovernmental , without affecting the sovereign rights of the member states. This model found little support outside of France.

Today it is propagated by the parties of the extreme right . The alternative for Germany also advocates a Europe of fatherlands.

See also

• Motherland

Web links

Wikiquote: Fatherland  - Quotes

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

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich Kluge : Etymological dictionary of the German language . 7th edition, edited by Walther Mitzka . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1957, ISBN 978-3-11-154374-1 , p. 812 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
2. ↑ ^{a b} fatherland, n. Patria . In: German dictionary online, accessed December 19, 2019.
3. ↑ Duden Etymology. Bibliographical Institute, Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1963, p. 735.
4. ↑ Christian Jansen with Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 92–98 a. ö.
5. ↑ Quoted from Peter Zudeick : Heimat. People. Fatherland .: A challenge to the right. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-86489-109-0 , p. 179, note 1.
6. ^ Juliane Fiedler: Construction and Fiction of the Nation: Literature from Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the second half of the 19th century . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 18.
7. ↑ Alexander Schmidt : A fatherland without patriots? The crisis of imperial patriotism in the 18th century . in: Georg Schmidt (Ed.): The German Nation in Early Modern Europe. Political order and cultural identity? Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-59740-0 , pp. 35–63, here p. 37 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
8. ↑ Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Ferdinand Werner : People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass . In: Otto Brunner , Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 150 and 297.
9. ↑ Holger Böning : The "people" in the patriotism of the German Enlightenment . In: Otto Dann , Miroslav Hroch and Johannes Koll (eds.): Patriotism and nation building at the end of the Holy Roman Empire . SH-Verlag, Cologne 2003, pp. 63–98, quoted here from the [www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/epoche/boening_volk.pdf online version on goethezeitportal.de], p. 4, accessed on 10. July 2020
10. ^ Heinrich August Winkler : The long way to the west , Vol. 1: German history from the end of the Old Empire to the fall of the Weimar Republic . CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 47 f.
11. ↑ Christian Jansen with Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 58 f.
12. ↑ Reinhart Koselleck: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass. In: the same, Otto Brunner and Werner Conze (eds.): Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 150.
13. ↑ Christian Jansen with Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 45 f.
14. ^ Svetlana Burmistr: Jewish International . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Volume 3: Concepts, ideologies, theories. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-24074-4 , p. 164 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
15. ^ Ina Ulrike Paul: Paul Anton de Lagarde . In: Uwe Puschner , Walter Schmitz, Justus H. Ulbricht (eds.): Handbook on the “Völkische Movement” 1871–1918 . Κ. G. Saur, Munich / New Providence / London / Paris 1996, ISBN 978-3-11-096424-0 , pp. 45–93, here p. 59 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
16. ↑ Ute Planert: When does “modern” German nationalism begin? Plea for a national saddle time . In: Jörg Echternkamp and Oliver Müller: (Ed.): The politics of the nation. German nationalism in war and crises 1760 to 1960 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-486-56652-0 , pp. 25–60, the quotation p. 51 (accessed via De Gruyter Online)
17. ↑ Alexander Schmidt: A fatherland without patriots? The crisis of imperial patriotism in the 18th century . In: Georg Schmidt (Hrsg.): The German nation in early modern Europe. Political order and cultural identity? Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, pp. 35–63, here p. 41 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
18. ↑ Albert Soboul : The Great French Revolution. An outline of their history (1789–1799) . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1983, p. 227.
19. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer : The French Revolution . CH Beck, Munich 2004, p. 58.
20. ↑ Michel Vovelle : The Marseillaise. War or Peace. In: Pierre Nora (ed.): Places of memory of France. CH Beck, Munich 2005, pp. 63-112.
21. ↑ Christian Jansen with Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 92–98 a. ö.
22. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass . In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 311 f.
23. ^ Peter Zudeick: Heimat. People. Fatherland .: A challenge to the right. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-86489-109-0 , p. 78.
24. ↑ Joachim Dingel : Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Changed morality as a provocation of philology. In: Gerhard Lohse (Hrsg.): Updating of antiquity and epoch consciousness. First Bruno Snell Symposium . Κ. G. Saur, Munich / Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-598-77807-4 , pp. 389-401, here p. 391 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
25. ↑ 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.
26. ↑ Christian Jansen with Henning Borggräfe: Nation - Nationality - nationalism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 67.
27. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass . In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 380.
28. ^ Raina Zimmering : Myths in the Politics of the GDR. A contribution to the exploration of political myths. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2000, p. 175.
29. ↑ Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-092864-8 , pp. 88 and 112 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
30. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass . In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 402.
31. ↑ Bernd Schönemann: People, Nation, Nationalism, Mass . In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Basic historical concepts . Vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, p. 426.
32. ^ Sylvia and Martin Greiffenhagen : A difficult fatherland. On the political culture in the united Germany. List, Munich / Leipzig 1993, p. 18 f.
33. ^ Peter Zudeick: Heimat. People. Fatherland .: A challenge to the right. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-86489-109-0 , p. 69.
34. ↑ Hagen Schulze : Europe: Nation and nation state in transition. In: Werner Weidenfeld (ed.): Europe manual. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2002, pp. 41–65, here p. 60.
35. ↑ Fabian Virchow : Against civilism. International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 122 f.
36. ^ Hubert Kleinert: The AfD and its members. An analysis with evaluation of an exemplary member survey of Hessian district associations. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2018, p. 37.