National body

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On the one hand, the people's body is a term used in German population science that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and was increasingly defined in terms of racial biology until the Nazi era . After 1945 the term was used largely synonymously with “ population ” or “ population ”. On the other hand, people's bodies served as a metaphor in political parlance , expressing an organicistic and biologic understanding of “ people ” and society . It was used in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in anti-Semitic and racial hygiene texts, in order to semantically differentiate the "people", which was conceived as a biological and racial unit, from so-called " parasites ", " pests " and " diseases ". In this naturalistic sense, the “excretion” was justified in such a way as elements of the population declared to be pathogenic. The metaphor of the people's body was therefore closely related to the National Socialist race and euthanasia policy during National Socialism .

Body metaphors in political language

The metaphorical transfer of medical terms and language to the areas of society, politics and history can be traced back to antiquity . In Politeia and Timaeus, for example, Plato understands the human body as an image of the state. Aristotle uses the comparison of organisms to explain the structure of society. Titus Livius tells in connection with the secession of the plebeians in 494 BC The fable of the belly and the rebellious members who refuse to serve the belly and are therefore no longer nourished.

A circulation metaphor emerged from the medical blood circulation model developed by William Harvey in the 16th century, which had a great impact in political texts. Already Thomas Hobbes attacked the Leviathan to the circulation model, while the circulation metaphor in the 18th century saw a boom. Body metaphors then gained special importance in the French Revolution . Especially representatives of the Third Estate took up metaphors of the blood circulation and medical vitalism in order to formulate new ideals of social equality.

Folk body in the 19th century

In this form, the concept of the people's body also appeared in the German language . The German dictionary, for example, traces the term back to the history of the French Revolution by Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann , who wrote of the “people as a living organism”: “a healthy state principle ... at the same time refreshes the blood circulation in the entire national body”.

Reference term of anti-Semitism

Under the influence of evolutionary theory and social Darwinism , the metaphor of the folk body became increasingly naturalistic in the last third of the 19th century . On the one hand, this was intended to express an unconditional dependence of different social groups on one another. On the other hand, authors and publicists pathologized what they particularly rejected. The term was initially used primarily by anti-Semites to justify the need to “exclude” Jews from society as allegedly “harmful elements”.

The court preacher Adolf Stoecker put it as follows:

“Modern Judaism is a foreign blood drop in our national body; it is a perishable , only perishable power. "

- Adolf Stoecker : Speech (1880)

In this way the “German people”, but also the “Jewish people”, were declared to be an organic whole and the existence of one people in the other was impossible.

National bodies in population sciences

The national body was not only a political metaphor, but also found its way into scientific linguistic usage. Especially in disciplines such as population statistics , population theory and genealogy , which, so to speak, formed the hard core of the diffuse discipline “population science”, the question of the economic “ human value ” has been raised since the middle of the 19th century . In this context the “people's body” was not necessarily linked to the selectionist aspects of social Darwinism. Rudolf Goldscheid's powerful concept of “human economy”, for example, defined the human being as “biological capital ” and explicitly cited “reproductive hygiene” as a means of upgrading the quality of the “national body”. In addition, however, he counted above all a “productivity policy” such as child protection , maternity protection , youth welfare , maternity insurance, etc. and rejected selectionist measures in the sense of a “ selection ”.

Towards the end of the 19th century and especially after the First World War , however, the population policy approach that advocated such negative measures became radicalized. Racial hygiene also took up the concept of the people's body. Wilhelm Schallmayer, for example, defined “hereditary hygiene” as a science that had to manage “the hereditary constitution of the national body”. He argued:

“When looking at politics from a scientific point of view , its ultimate goal appears to be the creation of the conditions for the most permanent possible preservation and possibly also a flourishing growth of the national body. The competitiveness of peoples and states depends on the one hand on their inherited qualities, on the other hand on the disposition of those means of power that culture provides, which can only be transferred from generation to generation through tradition. From this it obviously follows that not only the latter, the cultural goods, but also the generative human hereditary values ​​are the subject of politics, at least of a prudent and far-sighted policy. "

- Wilhelm Schallmayer : Contributions to a national biology (1905)

National body after the First World War

The First World War and its immediate consequences represented a turning point in the use of organic topoi . While the great power of the German “people's body” has been described up to now, the national state during the Weimar Republic was mainly interpreted in terms of illness and recovery . Politicians like Theodor Lewald called for compulsory sport to be introduced as a replacement for the lost conscription in order to strengthen the national body . In 1932, the statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer , in his book People without Youth , summarized the widespread concern about the “progressive aging and aging of our national body” in the dramatic words: “The German people are biologically driving towards the abyss.” The Transylvanian Johann Bredt coined the title of his book Folk body research , published in 1930 in Breslau, a term that found imitators.

National body in National Socialism

Under National Socialism, these different lines of development were combined, "people's body" was often synonymous with the "racial" structure of a "people". In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler used the concept of the people's body in both anti-Semitic and racial hygiene and anti-Marxist contexts as a reference for alleged illness and poisoning. The law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring was founded with the "will of the government" to "purify the national body and gradually eradicate the pathological genetic makeup."

Population scientists like Friedrich Burgdörfer understood the people's bodies during National Socialism explicitly in a folkish sense, i.e. not just as "population":

“This 'people' is not - like the 'population' - an amorphous sum of individuals, but an organic structure, an organism. We speak rightly and deliberately of a people's body, a people's body, the cells of which are not the individual individuals in their isolation, but the families who belong to the same people in terms of blood and race as well as language, customs and culture . [...] Thus the people does not just consist of the sum of the current living comrades , but everything that was, is and will be of the same blood belongs to it. "

- Friedrich Burgdörfer : Demographic Statistics and Population Policy (1940)

Overall, the concept of the people's body became an omnipresent metaphor during the Nazi era to describe the German population as a biological-racial unit that protects against various types of threats, or that heals and cleanses from various diseases, pests and parasites would. Thorsten Hallig, Julia Schäfer and Jörg Vögele stated that “the scientific foundations or lines of tradition and the intellectual climate within which the eugenic extermination policy of the National Socialists […] could take place were already in the political debates about the degeneration of the 'People's body' of the Weimar Republic was laid. "

This is how Hans Asperger used the term to deport unwanted children to the Am Spiegelgrund killing center in Vienna :

“In the new Germany, we doctors have taken on an abundance of new duties in addition to our old ones. Just as the doctor often has to make painful incisions when treating the individual, we have to make incisions in the body of the people out of great responsibility. We must ensure that what is sick and what would pass this disease on to future generations, to the disaster of the individual and the people, is prevented from passing on the sick genetic make-up. "

- Asperger's : 1939

The relationship of German population science to the racial foundation of "national body research" under National Socialism is controversial. The sociologist Carsten Klingemann, for example, has argued that the population scientists, who are mostly trained in sociological thinking, have always understood the “breakdown of the national body” in terms of social statistics and are less interested in the supposed homogeneity of a race than in what is called the stratification of the population in the sociological sense could. The historian Axel Flügel, on the other hand, has criticized such an overly “formal view” that overlooks conceptual breaks in the use of the respective vocabulary. Using the example of Gunther Ipsen's “ folk history ” , he points out that this form of population research “has fallen behind the differentiated state of population science that weighs a large number of regional, social and cultural factors”.

Semantic restructuring after 1945

It was first and foremost Gunther Ipsen who continued to use the concept of the people's body after 1945, albeit rebuilding it semantically. In 1933, he defined the national body still as "the whole of the organic constitution of a particular racial existence as the origin of the generic process." This, in turn, is "the process by which the genus the duration of their kind guaranteed by blows by the sex, the limitations of individual existence . ”In his article“ Volkskörper ”for the Große Brockhaus (16th edition) from 1957, he defined it as“ the totality of a population, broken down by gender, age group, age group, marital status, occupation, etc. a. ”In 1960 he equated“ people's body ”with“ population ”as the“ form of existence of a crowd connected by commercium and connubium . Here commercium means the handling of services (that is, in the broadest sense, the circle of business people); connubium the unification of the genus in the total of marriage circles, marriages, families, relatives and gender. "

The concept of the people's body largely disappeared from political language after 1945. Thomas Dehler wanted to describe the DGB in a radio address in 1951 as a "malicious tumor in the German national body", but after the manuscript became known and the DGB intervened with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he decided not to use this formulation. In the German population historiography, which was shaped by Gunther Ipsen, but also by Gerhard Mackenroth , the concept of the people's body remained present until the 1970s. Wolfgang Köllmann, for example, consciously tied in with his teacher Ipsen when he used “people's body” as an analytical term in his population history of 1972.

literature

  • Antoine de Baecque: Le Corps de l'histoire. Métaphores et politique (1770-1800). Paris 1993.
  • Thomas Bryant: The German "national body" in the field of tension between "public health" and "widespread disease". Population-scientific pathologization paradigms and biopolitical medicalization strategies for demographic aging in the 20th century, in Virus. Contributions to the social history of medicine 9, 2010, Ed. Association for the social history of medicine, Vienna. Leipziger Universitätsverlag ISSN  1605-7066 pp. 11–24 Issue content (PDF).
  • Moritz Föllmer: The "Sick People's Body". Industrial, high officials and the discourse of national regeneration in the Weimar Republic . In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, 2001, pp. 41–67.
  • Rainer Guldin: body metaphors. On the relationship between politics and medicine. Wuerzburg 2000.
  • Thorsten Halling, Julia Schäfer, Jörg Vögele: People, national bodies, national economy - population issues in research and teaching of economics and medicine. In: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke (eds.): The construct “population” before, during and after the “Third Reich” . Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 388-428.
  • Boaz Neumann: The Phenomenology of the German People's Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body. In: New German Critique 36 (2009), pp. 149-181.
  • Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism. Berlin 1998.
  • Justus H. Ulbricht: “French disease” or: Political dangers to the “German national body”. Discourses on the disease of the epoch in the ideological literature of Wilhelminism. In: Scientific journal of the Technical University of Dresden 47, Issue 3, 1998, pp. 59–64.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In summary, Klaus Bergdolt : Microcosm and Macrocosm. The human body as a state-theoretical model. In: Otto Depenheuer (ed.): State and beauty. Possibilities and perspectives of a state calokagathy. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 131-144 .
  2. ↑ national body. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 26 : Vesche – Vulkanisch - (XII, 2nd section). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1951, Sp. 486 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  3. ^ Adolf Stöcker: Christian Social. Speeches and essays. 2nd Edition. Berlin 1890, p. 399.
  4. ↑ Klaus Holz : The anti-Semitic construction of the “third” and the national order of the world. In: Christina von Braun, Eva-Maria Ziege (ed.): The “movable” prejudice. Aspects of international anti-Semitism. Würzburg 2004, pp. 57-61.
  5. ↑ Hallig, Schäfer u. Vögele: people, national body, national economy. P. 388 f.
  6. ^ Wilhelm Schallmayer: Contributions to a national biology. In addition to a criticism of the methodological objections and an appendix on scientific criticism. Hermann Costenoble, Jena 1905, p. 88.
  7. ^ Wilhelm Schallmayer: Contributions to a national biology. In addition to a criticism of the methodological objections and an appendix on scientific criticism. Hermann Costenoble, Jena 1905, p. 65.
  8. ^ Theodor Lewald: Sport, German economy and public health: a contribution to the economic program of the Reich government. Lecture given to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Berlin on March 2, 1926; see. Arnd Krüger , Rolf Pfeiffer: Theodor Lewald and the instrumentalization of physical exercise and sport. Uwe Wick, Andreas Höfer (ed.): Willibald Gebhardt and his successors (= series of publications by the Willibald Gebhardt Institute, Volume 14). Meyer & Meyer, Aachen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89899-723-2 , pp. 120-145.
  9. ^ Friedrich Burgdörfer: People without youth. Birth loss and aging of the German national body. A problem of the national economy - the social policy of the national future. Berlin 1932, pp. 218, 143.
  10. ↑ Examples in Schmitz-Berning: Vokabular , p. 668.
  11. ↑ Arthur Gütt , Ernst Rüdin , Falk Alfred Ruttke : Law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring. Munich 1934, p. 5.
  12. ↑ Quote from Thomas Bryant: "People without youth" as a "demographic drama". The population statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer in the interplay between scientific journalism and popularized science (1909–1933) . In: Patrick Krassnitzer, Petra Overath (Ed.): Population issues. Processes of knowledge transfer in Germany and France (1870–1939). Berlin / Cologne / Weimar 2007, p. 52.
  13. ↑ Hallig, Schäfer u. Vögele: people, national body, national economy. P. 389.
  14. ↑ By “new Germany” he means Austria. Quoted from Herwig Czech: National Socialism and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna. In: Molecular Autism , Volume 9, 2018, pp. 29 ff., Doi: 10.1186 / s13229-018-0208-6
  15. ^ Carsten Klingemann: Concept and practice of social science population science in its relationship to spatial research and geopolitics in the Third Reich . In: Ders .: Sociology and Politics. Social science expert knowledge in the Third Reich and in the early West German post-war period. Wiesbaden 2009, pp. 165–191.
  16. ↑ Axel Flügel: Ambivalent innovation. Notes on folk history. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft , 26, 2000, pp. 653–671, here p. 669.
  17. ↑ Quoted from Carsten Klingemann: Sociology and Politics. Social science expert knowledge in the Third Reich and in the early West German post-war period. Wiesbaden 2009, p. 376.
  18. ↑ Quoted from Christian Sehested von Gyldenfeldt: Gunther Ipsen on people and land. Attempt on the basics of real sociology in his work. Münster 2008, pp. 257, 325 ff.
  19. ^ Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography. Munich 1997, p. 191.
  20. ↑ Jörn Sieglerschmidt: Population history. In: Günther Schulz et al. (Ed.): Social and economic history. Areas of work - problems - perspectives. 100 years quarterly for social and economic history. Stuttgart 2004, p. 259 f.