Folklore

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Volkstum is the essence or the peculiarity of a people as it is expressed in its life, its culture . It describes all the expressions of life of a people or an ethnic minority as an expression of a common "people's character". The term was coined by German nationalists in the context of the wars of freedom as a contrast to the ideals of the French Revolution , the universal human rights , and used by the National Socialists in connection with the national movement to justify their national politics .

Folkism has also been used synonymously with folklore , and the science of folklore has been equated with folklore .

origin

In the age of the Enlightenment , the adjective popular mostly denoted the cultural achievements of uneducated Germans as well as the popular . The "popular poetry" was thus distinguished from "fine" literature of the culture of the educated and partly elitist devalued, partly idealized. So the term was not yet linked to a specific nation and specific peculiarities ascribed to it.

In Justus Möser (1720–1794), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), and subsequently among the German Romantics , the term became stronger with ideas of a primitive, organic, personally closed and eternal “people's character” charged and turned against the monarchies that ruled Germany. As the "father of folklore ", Möser already delimited Germanism from the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and from the French Revolution.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn ( "Deutsches Volksthum" ) is considered to be the inventor of the noun. He translated the foreign word nation with it and referred it to an "unnameable something" in every people. Like Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), the German nationality was now a revolutionary source of renewal against the Napoleonic foreign rule by the French, but also against dynasts and the church. This had less and less in common with Enlightenment word usage.

Empire

The founding of the German Empire in 1871 as a small German solution under the rule of Prussia fulfilled only part of the goals of German nationalists who had wanted and fought for the unification of all German speakers in a common nation state .

The concept of ethnicity became all the more part of a nationalist ideology and political propaganda . It often served as a patriotic binding agent to cover up or visionarily overcome the real contradictions inside and outside the German Empire : for example, by invoking a national struggle, an agrarian-corporate national body or an ideal national community as decisive characteristics of nationality that actually do not gave. On the one hand, the term became a conceptually indefinable, irrational, preconscious sense of unity; on the other hand, it could be used not only against external, but also “internal enemies of the Reich”.

While the Brothers Grimm had not yet made a distinction between community and society , Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) compared them in his work Community and Society 1887 as mutually exclusive: He defined "community" as a form of mutual affirmation of people in which they each other understand themselves as their means, their respective communities (e.g. their family) but as an end - in contrast to the mutual affirmation form “society”, in which the individual sees himself as the end, but the respective society (e.g. a stock corporation) as his means. The former is perceived from childhood on as "the permanent and real" compared to the "temporary and apparent coexistence" of society. This was also directed against the Marxism of the Social Democrats , whose “scientifically” founded ideal of a classless society he considered to be unfeasible in reality. He was extremely skeptical of a concept such as “Volksgemeinschaft”. In the political field, he considered the ancient polis or the medieval Hanseatic city to be the most pronounced form of a communalized people, hardly to be expected in the advanced modern age .

During the war, the “German Volkstum” or “Deutschtum” was exaggerated again, especially at the universities, in the sense of a chauvinism . In the German speeches in difficult times by 35 Berlin professors there was much talk of “ degeneracy ” and “foreign nationals”; the world war was interpreted as a “cleansing bath” and “well room of a new culture”. Gustav Roethe z. B. saw the "flame of holy faith in the world-historical mission of the German people against barbarism and overculture" rise from the mass murder .

Weimar Republic

After the defeat of the war and the November Revolution , which ended with a bloody civil war , the concept of ethnicity took on the character of a utopia that expressed the longing for a supposedly original, now destroyed unity. Paul de Lagarde , who had linked German nationality with an alleged Aryan race since 1890 , complained after 1918: The German people, "whom we love and desire to see, never existed and may never exist."

In his notes , the Austrian Hugo von Hofmannsthal also mourned the fact that the German people “have lost their wholeness and the intellectual elite have lost their closeness to the people just as finally as paradise ”.

In the youth movement of the 1920s, the popular ideal found an apolitical expression with recourse to romantic traditions. The communal experience was intended to compensate for the turmoil and differentiation of industrial mass society and its anonymous state institutions, over which one believed that they had little influence.

In the emerging German fascism , the unified nationality, which abolished individual freedom and self-realization, then again became a demand for political action with the aim of a national revolution . Hans Freyer wrote in 1925 in Revolution von Rechts :

“Here people become more than the great immediate existence out of which the formations of history arise, more than the mysterious ground in which we are all rooted. Here the people become a selection and a categorical imperative. It becomes the front of all truly revolutionary forces, the front against the principle of industrial society. "

He combined this with the call for the Führer principle :

“The Führer creates a classless, but multi-layered, domination-free, but strictly composed structure of the people. To be a people means to become a people, under the hand of the leader. "

Wilhelm Stapel explained Hegel's view , according to which people must gradually overcome their nationality in favor of unification in the common humanity, in anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism in 1928 for “strange misconceptions, from which only those who have a sense of reality are protected”.

The Versailles Peace Treaty initially excluded German claims to areas lost in the war. But in the Leipzig Foundation for Folk and Cultivated Soil Research “folkish” young historians such as Walter Frank , Hermann Aubin , Hans Rothfels , Werner Conze , Theodor Schieder , the agricultural and population scientist Theodor Oberländer u. a. a field of activity. Away from the universities, where such attempts were hardly of any interest, they constructed a “folk history” which was devoted to questions of the ethnic affiliation of “ethnic Germans” and thus actively participated in the revision policy from the Weimar period. Concepts of “Volkstum” with “Volksboden” and “ Lebensraum ” were combined, and “resettlement” and “Germanization” plans were developed.

Since 1929, this group of researchers has also openly advocated the “ National Revolution ” and a change of policy towards the ethnic reorganization of Europe. In doing so, they identified large parts of Eastern Europe as a zone of Germanic-German cultural radiation - also on two historians' days.

time of the nationalsocialism

In National Socialism , ethnicity was interpreted aggressively. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler equated ethnicity with race , "since nationalism, or better still race, is not in language, but in blood."

After the “ seizure of power ”, various national and non-university departments with a focus on national and national politics merged to form interdisciplinary “research communities”. In particular, the North and East German Research Association (NOFG), in which “People's History” and “ East Research ” were integrated, was closely associated with the NS state and the NSDAP . Their programs, which were previously viewed as special disciplines, received government support and opportunities to develop. The term “independent nationality” was divided into “national comrades” and “enemies of the people” to be removed; The previously conceived revision policy was thus oriented more towards racist and warlike solutions. National Socialists switched the important organizations Volksbund for Germanness Abroad and the German Foreign Institute in Stuttgart into line.

Above all, the Prussian archivist Albert Brackmann advocated and directed the coordination of the Northeast German Research Association. This centrally steered the East German historical studies and controlled numerous projects on questions of demarcation and population policy. The Königsberg young historians supported the Ostpolitik of the NSDAP, which itself had not yet developed an academic elite. After 1937, the combined North and East German Research Association was finally funded by the state as a major research institution. Because for the National Socialist " Volkstumsppolitik " in the territories of Eastern Europe conquered from 1939 onwards, the expertise of the Volkstum historians about " ethnic groups " was decisive. On behalf of the state, they wrote numerous maps and statistics that served the Nazi planning staff as the basis of its settlement and population policy in Poland , the Baltic States , Ukraine and Belarus .

The policy of “Germanization” propagated and legitimized by folk historians, which saw so-called Germans as culturally and ethnically superior, also favored the Holocaust , even if they did not conceive it and were not directly involved in it.

Since 1945

After 1945 the term in its political sense was avoided in Germany as an expression of nationalist ideology and replaced by terms such as “ population ”. However , the term is still used in nationality laws . According to Section 6 of the Federal Expellees Act (BVFG), a commitment to German ethnicity is a prerequisite for being assigned German nationality. Bertolt Brecht formulated the departure from the concept of Volkstum as follows: The people are not foolish. In the GDR , the term “people” - without “-tum” - was supposed to express the alleged agreement of the population with the SED and the state , for example in the word combinations People's Democracy , People's Police , People's Army . The slogan of the opposition “ We are the people ” was later directed against this .

In Austria, the term is only used in individual legal texts, for example in the National Minorities Act 1976 to define the term ethnic group in the sense of national minority , in accordance with the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe . It no longer occurs in everyday language.

When ratifying the Framework Convention, the Swiss legislature declared Volkstum to be "inspired by the will [...] to preserve together that which defines their common identity, in particular their culture, their traditions, their religion or their language." Regulations today, Volkstum is primarily used as an expression of the self-perception of a population group.

In the folklore sense, the term continues to appear occasionally in Germany to describe regional customs (folklore of the Danube Swabians , Sorbs , Frisians, etc.).

See also

• Folk spirit
• folkish
• Volkish movement

literature

• Wolfgang Emmerich : To the criticism of the popular ideology. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971 (Edition Suhrkamp Vol. 502).
• Hermann Bausinger: Folk ideology and folk research. In: Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 61, 1965, pp. 177–204.
• Hermann Bausinger: Folklore and Volkstumsarbeit in National Socialism. In: Helge Gerndt (Ed.): Folklore and National Socialism. Munich 1987.
• Hermann Bausinger: People and Volkstum. 1. Sociological. In: Kurt Galling (Hrsg.): The religion in past and present. VI. Volume, 3rd edition., JCB Mohr, Tübingen 1962, Sp. 1434f.
• Hans Hohlwein: Völkische movement. In: Kurt Galling (Hrsg.): The religion in past and present. VI. Volume, 3rd edition. JCB Mohr. Tübingen 1962, column 1424 ff.
• Ingo Haar : Historian under National Socialism. 2nd Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, ISBN 3-525-35942-X .
• Wilhelm Schwartz: Folksy way of thinking. In: Zeitschrift des Verein für Volkskunde 1 (1891), pp. 17–36, 220 and 279–292; 2 (1892), p. 245 ff.
• Ulrich Prehn : Max Hildebert Boehm . Radical orderly thinking from the First World War to the Federal Republic . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1304-0 .

Web links

• Wilhelm Prasse: People and Volkstum in Protestant Ethics 1918–1966 (bibliography). In: wp.hpol.de. Own website, accessed on June 14, 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Duden : Volkstum .
2. ^ Max Döllner : History of the development of the city of Neustadt an der Aisch until 1933. Ph. CW Schmidt, Neustadt ad Aisch 1950, p. 685.
3. ^ Online edition Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Deutsches Volksthum , 1810 Accessed on August 7, 2010.
4. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich: On the critique of Volkstumideologie. P. 98.
5. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich: On the critique of Volkstumideologie. P. 98 ff.
6. ^ Ferdinand Tönnies: Community and Society. 8th edition. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft [1887] 2006, as well as Geist der Neuzeit , Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, [1935] 1998, in: TG , Vol. 22.
7. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich: On the critique of Volkstumideologie. P. 102.
8. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich: On the critique of Volkstumideologie. P. 105.
9. ↑ Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf . 1925/27: (428): Wrong notions of "Germanization"
10. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Research for the «Volkstumskampf» : Reviews of Ingo Haars book Historians in National Socialism
11. ↑ Political and cultural-political tendencies towards permanent domination and state incorporation of regions on the north-western and western borders of the empire, after a hoped-for final victory, are represented by the lemmas of western research and national socialist plans for Europe .
12. ↑ § 6 BVFG in full
13. ↑ Legal information system of the Republic of Austria : Entire legal regulation for the national minority law
14. ↑ SR 0.441.1 , admin.ch