Volksgemeinschaft

Self-sacrificing cohesion and solidarity among the people was one of the cornerstones of the National Socialist state and society.

Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's" or "national community", a promise of inclusion. The concept of the people as demos, which is characterized by legal association and civic equality, is contrasted with the idea of ​​the people as ethnos, in which communities of descent, shared histories and the unmistakability of common Germanic blood and soil are linked.

History

The word Volksgemeinschaft was probably first used in Gottlob August Tittel's 1791 translation of a text by John Locke. Volksgemeinschaft summed up the phrase “in any [particular] place, generally.” Nineteenth-century scholars who spoke of “national community” include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Carl Theodor Welcker, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Hermann Schulze, Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ferdinand Tönnies.

Community, Helmuth Plessner rightly stated as a cleverly observing contemporary, was the “idol of this age”. Since the 19th century, “community” has been the opposite of “society” in Germany – as an expression of criticism of the rapid dynamization and pluralization of social relationships in the wake of industrialization, secularization, market orientation and political liberalism. “The longing for community always arises from a reaction against a present that is perceived as bad.

“The reality of such community models is therefore not to be found in the past, to which they usually refer, but in the present.” – Gérard Raulet, French philosopher, Germanist and translator

“Community” is always asserted within the horizon of modern “society” and is a genuine part of the self-assured crisis discourse of modernity. No one has put this contrast on paper more eloquently than Ferdinand Tönnies, whose book “Community and Society,” first published in 1887, struck a chord with the times and determined social discussions from then on.

The concept of “community” bundled hopes for overcoming alienation, both in a revolutionary and restorative sense. This ambivalence, both to restore what was considered lost and to bring about in the future what was desirable as a social order, was inherent in the concept of “community” from the beginning. Therefore, one would misunderstand the term “national community” if one took it as a description of an actually existing social reality. The political power of the talk about the “national community” lay not in the determination of an actual social situation, but rather in the promise and mobilization.

In the political world of ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries, Volksgemeinschaft referred to the (national) ideal of a largely conflict-free, harmonious social order that left class barriers and class struggle behind. This was described as a community, in contrast to the concept of society, which was rejected as artificial and un-German.

Appearing again during World War I, as Germans rallied behind the war effort, Kaiser Wilhelm II appealed for solidarity, it derived its popularity as a means to break down elitism and class divides. Wilhelm II's statement from August 1914 that from now on he knew no parties, only Germans, achieved widespread resonance because it represented the desire of many Germans for equality and inclusion. Jews and socialists also hoped that because of their patriotic attitude they would finally be accepted as equals by the majority of society, which was the case. Jews served in the tens of thousands with the Imperial German Army (c. 100,000, with 77,000 at the battle fronts), socialists would be the new elite of the Weimar Republic.

The liberal parties emphasized the socially harmonious inclusive aspect “across classes”. For the Social Democrats, the working class had now expanded into a people of creators who faced a small and unjustifiably powerful minority of monopoly capitalists and large landowners. And even this minority could, according to the idea, if they did real work, become part of a socialist national community. In Friedrich Ebert's speeches as Reich President, the “national community” as the inclusion of all creators had a firm place.

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Volksgemeinschaft became a big part of the new government of National Socialist Germany in order to unify the German people and break down class divides. NS-Volksgemeinschaft was based internally on solidarity, cohesion and equality, but externally on exclusion and protection against foreign influences.

See also

• Völkisch movement
• Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst