‘Volkstum’ refers to a utopian, idealised construct of group identities based on cultural, ethnic or even ideological grounds. In German discourse, membership of a supposedly ethnically homogeneous ‘Volkstum’ was defined as having developed historically, in the sense of a myth of continuity. It was intended to establish a sense of communal solidarity amongst the people within specific geographical areas, based on a shared culture and ancestry, and to point to a collective, fated future in hierarchical distinction from other peoples or ‘races’. ‘Volkstum’ thus refers both to the inclusion of ethnically and culturally defined groups within a‘people’and to the exclusion of similarly defined ‘outsiders’ from a‘people’. In its ideological significance, its constructed nature and its political impact, ‘national character’ cannot be separated from contemporary definitions and the respective historical contexts.

The term ‘Volkstum’ has a specific connotation in German-speaking countries and has only approximate equivalents in other languages, such as the English terms ‘folk ’ or ‘ethnicity’.

The concept of ‘Volkstum’ became established in Germany between 1770 and 1830. The term was coined in 1810 by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) to denote ‘that which the people have in common, their inherent nature, their spirit and life, their regenerative power, their capacity for reproduction’. Discussions regarding ‘Volkstum’ as the basis for ethnic and cultural solidarity were fuelled by the question of German nation-building and the affiliation of German-speaking settlement groups within various empires and nation states.

Even after the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was dissolved in 1806, definitions of a German nation initially often continued to refer to an ‘imperial nation’, in which the territorial boundaries did not coincide with the settlement areas of the German-speaking populations. Towards the end of the 18th century, the concept of a German‘people’developed among the educated classes as a counter-movement to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, evolving into a romanticised and mythologised worldview. Drawing on history, the Romantic period emphasised the individual historical developments of ‘peoples’ and placed an emotionally charged sense of community at the heart of national identity. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who viewedthe ‘people’as a linguistic and cultural community, spoke of the plurality of human communities as well as of a unique ethnic character of the ‘peoples’, which he believed was rooted in geography and history.

Particularly during the Anti-Napoleonic Wars (1813–1815), conceptions of ‘national character’ gained momentum; these stood in opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution as well as to individual national dynasties, and were linked to demands for the consolidation of the nation-state. For Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), war became a community-building ‘instrument of catharsis’ designed to awaken patriotic national pride in the face of the enemy image of French nationalism. In his addresses to the German nation, Fichte contrasted the French nation with a German ‘primordial people’ (Urvolk) – a cultural community that had developed historically and was constituted as a union of wills. The ideology of ‘national character’ (Volkstum) became a resource for mobilisation in the war against the ideals of the French Revolution.

As Herder had done before them, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) defined the German language as the foundation for the German‘people’as an organic unity. At the 1846 Congress of Germanists, the connection between language and culture, as well as between nation and‘people’, was affirmed, thereby underlining the principle of the deterritorialisation of national identity. The concept of a German ‘people’s state’ developed into a political ideology. The key question arising from this – concerning the structure of a future German nation-state – could not be resolved in the wake of the 1848 Revolution during the debates over a ‘Small German’ or ‘Greater German’ unification (including Austria) and over the Protestant-Catholic divide as a fundamental problem of the ethnically homogenising ideology of ‘national character’.

In the decades that followed, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–1897) developed a concept of ‘Volkstum’ that elevated German ‘inner life’ as a counter-world to modernity. According to Riehl, the development of a ‘national organism’—even after industrialisation and urbanisation—was rooted in an organic connection with its natural environment, as the original locus of an unalienated identity and cultural distinctiveness.

The establishment of the ‘Small German’ Empire in 1871 fulfilled key demands of the German national movement; however, it was regarded by proponents of a ‘Greater German’ solution as the beginning rather than the end of German nation-building. Internal nation-building also remained incomplete, opening up further scope for discourse amongst ideologues of ‘national character’. The end of the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, social legislation, an authoritarian nation-state, and ‘world politics’ in the form of colonial acquisitions were intended to promote the internal formation of the nation and strengthen social integration, even though the German Empire remained, in its political culture, a compromise between various forms of identity formation. The struggle against ethnic and cultural minorities such as the Poles – popularised by organisations such as the Ostmarkenverein and the Alldeutscher Verband and driven forward by a state-led ‘policy of Germanisation’ – aimed at achieving ethnic homogeneity within ‘German identity’.

The völkisch movement, which gained momentum around 1900, synthesised the elements of language, race, religion and territory into the concept of ‘Volkstum’, presenting them as supposedly ‘inherent’ characteristics of a people. Society was increasingly interpreted as a biological system as a whole, the foundation of which was not the state, the nation or the imperial empire defined by flexible borders, but an organically grown‘people’of the same cultural, ethnic and geographical origin. Bourgeois values of the Enlightenment and norms of the Christian faith, such as humanity, equality and respect for the individual were replaced by natural-law approaches to the ‘racial’ hierarchisation of peoples and socio-biological applications of Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theories of natural competition and selection. Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) also drew on Social Darwinist ideas of evolution and conceptions of the state as a biological organism; it was he who coined the catchphrase ‘Lebensraum’ at the turn of the century. Such biological conceptions of space were linked to concepts of geopolitics and war as a necessary conflict of resolution between competing peoples.

The crisis-ridden perception of demographic trends, migration, urbanisation and industrialisation intensified debates about more rigid state control of these complex social processes of modernity and about the normative shaping of the ‘national body’. State control of reproduction, extending as far as compulsory sterilisation, was advocated even within the ranks of the German Social Democratic Party. The ‘scientification of the social’ took place within the new disciplines of racial anthropology and racial hygiene/eugenics, the foundations of which for the German-speaking world were laid, amongst others, by Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) and Wilhelm Schallmayer (1857–1919). The racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) were popularised through translations at the turn of the century and widely embraced within the völkisch movement.

The exclusion of Jews played a central role in the völkisch movement’s demands for ethnic and cultural homogenisation and ‘racial purity’ within German society. As early as the 1870s and 1880s, anti-Semitic parties and the Protestant court chaplain Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909) were gaining support. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), who, with his concept of the ‘power state’, was indeed opposed to an ethnically based ‘policy of national identity’, nevertheless had a lasting influence on an entire generation through his description of the Jews as a ‘misfortune’ in the anti-Semitism debate of 1879–1880. In 1881, Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) spoke explicitly of the ‘racial harmfulness’ of the Jews.

The debates concerning membership oftheGerman‘people’and the German nation also touched upon the regulation of citizenship. The principle of descent ( ius sanguinis ), which had already been enshrined in the Prussian Nationality Act of 1842 (as opposed to the territorial principle of nationality, ius soli), also applied in the German Empire. The retention of citizenship whilst abroad was permitted and confirmed in the 1913 amendment to the Citizenship Act, as was the rejection of the concept of citizenship as the basis for the creation of an ‘exclusive national identity’. In particular, interest groups such as the Pan-German League advocated making it more difficult for ethnically German settlers outside the Reich’s borders to lose their German citizenship. Such demands, which had been debated in the Reichstag since the mid-1890s, were incorporated into the reformed Nationality Act in 1913. In 1906, the cartographer and geographer Paul Langhans (1867–1952) put forward a methodologically questionable and exaggerated estimate of a ‘German population’ totalling 95 million ethnic Germans worldwide, of whom only 55.7 million lived in the German Empire. In the wake of the increasing politicisation (‘diasporisation’) of‘Germans abroad’, calls for their constitutional and cultural ties to the German Empire grew louder.

During the First World War, the debates surrounding‘Germans abroad’were driven by the Supreme Army Command and the Pan-German League, which put forward comprehensive demands for further settlement territory in the East, as well as for the resettlement of German settlers and the simultaneous expulsion ‘foreign-born’ people. In the context of the debate over Germany’s war aims, the First World War generally led to a intensification and radicalisation of the ideology of ‘Volkstum’. Demands for a fundamental ‘ethnic cleansing’, as put forward within the circles of the Pan-German League and, above all, in the war aims programme of Heinrich Claß (1868–1953), point to a radicalisation of ethnic settlement policy.

The Prussian control system for regulating Polish labour migration, which had been tightened since 1890, was maintained during the First World War – amidst the growing labour shortage in industry and agriculture – particularly in relation to the recruitment and deportation of workers, mainly from Belgium and Poland. The closure of the border to immigration from Eastern Europe had already been demanded by the radical right before the war and was implemented following the peace with Russia through the subsequent closure of the Prussian eastern border in April 1918.

At the same time, efforts at homogenisation intensified, directed at German society itself and accompanied by an anti-Semitic radicalisation both on the political right and within state institutions, as exemplified by the ‘Jewish census’ ordered in 1916 within the Prussian army. During the First World War, the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ became the dominant concept of social cohesion, expanding increasingly from ethnic solidarity to ideological homogenisation.

The cession of 13 per cent of the empire’s territory and approximately 10 per cent of its population, as stipulated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919, exacerbated the ‘tension between the state nation and the ethnic nation’. At the same time, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire gave impetus to demands for a ‘Greater Germany’ and fuelled the promotion – not only amongst the radical right – of ethnic homogenisation within a state intended to unite all culturally and ethnically German people. During the Weimar Republic, there was a forced marginalisation of national minorities, an emphasis on German ethnicity, and restrictive naturalisation practices for foreigners of ‘foreign origin’ or from ‘different cultural backgrounds’.

Whilst approximately one million Germans who had emigrated from the ceded territories had to be integrated into the Weimar Republic, the state supported the interests of the German minorities living there, and various foundations and government-funded institutes engaged in ethnic and cultural research in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe. Max Hildebert Boehm (1891–1968) and Wilhelm Stapel (1882–1954) declared the German‘people’to be an irreducible entity with its own ‘nature’ and specific ‘will of the people’. Hans Grimm (1875–1959) lamented the incongruity between‘the people’, their settlement area and the nation state, using the catchphrase‘a people without a homeland’.

Whilst Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925) had already, as early as 1923, anticipated ‘The Third Reich’, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) channelled his propaganda of the ‘national community’ and ‘German identity policy’ into the National Socialist mass movement. Alongside political objectives such as anti-Marxism, the abolition of parliamentary democracy, the elimination of pacifists, liberals, Freemasons and trade unions, he pursued above all a radical anti-Semitism and the suppression of all those who were deemed to stand in the way of a ‘völkisch’ process of standardisation and formation, as well as the unity of the ‘national body’. These demands became the ideological foundation of the NSDAP as a self-proclaimed ‘people’s movement’. Under the slogan ‘One People, One Reich, One Führer’, charismatic leadership was intended to overcome the political and ideological fragmentation of German society through homogenisation and expansion.

The radical implementation of National Socialist anti-Semitism and the racist ‘policy of selection’, as well as the policies of resettlement and extermination during the Second World War, represented the culmination of a radicalised German ‘ethnic policy’ between 1933 and 1945. National Socialism, with its paradigm of ‘racial purity’, was founded on the völkisch movement. Within the framework of a policy of territorial expansion, it pursued a policy of annexation of ethnically German population groups whilst simultaneously implementing a policy of exclusion and extermination towards ‘foreign peoples’, particularly with regard to Jews and Slavs. The exclusion of ‘deviants’ from its own ‘national identity’ and the eradication of those ‘unfit for community’, as well as the fight against the encroachment of ‘foreign national identities’, became constitutive elements of a holistic, overarching conception of National Socialist ‘racial policy’, which aimed at ethnic, social and political homogenisation whilst also representing a radicalised application of a socio-biological worldview of ‘national character’ and ‘national community’.

Scholars of folk history, Eastern Studies or ‘racial studies’ served the National Socialist regime as experts in planning exclusion and extermination and, through their publications and advisory work, contributed to the radicalisation of ‘ethnicity policy’ and the racist policy of extermination under National Socialism. ‘Racial anthropology’ attained the status of a leading discipline grounded in an ideological worldview under National Socialism.

The exclusion of ‘asocials’ from the ‘national community’ was radically implemented through laws on the ‘prevention of hereditary disease in offspring’ (14 July 1933) and Hitler’s decree on the killing of ‘incurably ill’ people (October 1939). Dachau became one of the first concentration camps established for the detention of political opponents (including Communists, Social Democrats and trade union officials), ‘socially deviant’ individuals (including alcoholics, homosexuals and criminals), religious and pacifist activists, and Jews. The gradual exclusion of Jews from German society, which was ideologically based on a convergence of various strands of ‘völkisch’ anti-Semitism, began with the boycott of Jewish shops (1 April 1933) and was codified in law by the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (7 April 1933) and the Nuremberg Race Laws (15 September 1935). Marriages to Jews were prohibited.

The referendum in the Saar region (13 January 1935), the remilitarisation of the Rhineland (7 March 1936), the invasion of Austria by German troops (12 March 1938) and the Munich Conference on the cession of the Sudeten German territories to the German Reich (29 September 1938) all underscored National Socialism’s claim to revise the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and to bring ‘ethnic identity’ and settlement space into alignment through expansion. National Socialist rearmament and mobilisation for the world war were aimed at the concrete implementation of the concepts of the necessary acquisition of ‘living space’ and ethnic homogenisation in an ideological war, which became a racist war of extermination, particularly for Jews and Slavs.

In particular, the attacks on Poland (1 September 1939) and the Soviet Union (22 June 1941) ushered in a ‘cumulative radicalisation’ of racist ‘ethnic policies’ through the ‘cooperative competition’ between the Wehrmacht and the SS, as well as other Nazi institutions. The resettlement of more than 500,000 ‘ethnic Germans’ from, amongst other places, the Baltic states, Volhynia, South Tyrol, Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobruja – primarily into the occupied Polish territories – was intended to be merely the prelude to a comprehensive ethnic reorganisation of Europe. Responsibility for this lay with the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), who, as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Ethnicity, coordinated ‘racial’, demographic and structural policies in Eastern Europe.

The basis for this was to be the General Plan East , which was later expanded into the General Settlement Plan. It envisaged the forced enslavement, murder and expulsion of between 37 and 45 million Jews and Slavs, alongside the settlement of 10 million Germans within 30 years. The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) was intended to facilitate the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ demanded by Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) – involving the planned murder of eleven million Jews in Europe – through the cooperation of key Reich authorities, ministries and the military under the leadership of the SS, and to initiate a comprehensive resettlement programme aimed at ethnic homogenisation in the East.

Due to the stalemate in the war since the winter of 1942–43, the implementation of the Nazi expansion and resettlement plans receded into the distant future. Consequently, the extermination of European Jews through mass executions and the system of concentration and extermination camps – such as those at Bełżec, Kulmhof,Lublin-Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka and, above all, Auschwitz/Oświęcim – was intensified all the more. Whilst approximately 500,000 Jews in Europe had been murdered by the Nazis by the time of the Wannsee Conference, this figure had risen to six million by the end of the war. The criminal nature of the Nazis’ ‘ethnic policy’ became clear in their radical policy of extermination.

The politics of ethnic community continued to have an impact beyond 1945. Although the GDR expressly did not see itself as an ethnically defined society, it developed a socialist ideal of national belonging that was based on class affiliations, local notions of home and regional traditions.The ‘people’were primarily understood as an emancipatory unit opposed to capitalist and imperialist models of society, but also served as a factor fostering territorial and political solidarity. Not least, the GDR’s status as the sole German-speaking country within the socialist bloc and its special role on the frontier of the Cold War fostered a sense of national identity. The more than four million Germans, referred to as ‘resettlers’ and originating mainly from the ceded eastern territories, at times accounted for over 24 per cent of the GDR’s population.

Whilst the end of the war was interpreted in the GDR as part of the anti-fascist founding myth, its interpretation in West Germany was based on the construct of a German ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (community of the people) as a ‘community of victims and shared destiny’. The flight and expulsion of eight million Germans from the ceded territories between 1944–45 and 1950 into the western occupation zones posed a challenge in terms of their economic and cultural integration, which was alleviated by the Burden-Sharing Act of 14 August 1952. The resettlement process itself, as well as the approximately 300,000 inhabitants who remained in Poland – and who were defined as ‘German’ by the Polish government at the end of 1949 – also reinforced pronounced images of an imagined ‘community of the people’ beyond the end of the war.

In West German discourse, researchers of ‘Volkstum’ such as Max Hildebert Boehm were able to continue developing their concepts of ‘ethnicised social models’ with certain semantic adjustments. Personal and institutional networks acted as ‘bridges of continuity’ beyond 1945. The concept of ‘Volkstum’ persisted, despite the experience of Nazi racial policy, for example in Section 6 of the Federal Displaced Persons Act, which defined ‘ethnic affiliation’. Within the associations of displaced persons, too, the cultural and ethnic definition of‘Volk’remained entrenched in both language and policy.

It was not until the Act on the Reform of Nationality Law of 15 July 1999 that the ‘principle of descent’ was superseded by provisions for the ‘principle of place of birth’ and enabled children born in Germany to foreign nationals who had lived in Germany for at least eight years and held a permanent residence permit to acquire German citizenship. In 2000, more generous exceptions were also admitted for dual citizenship, whilst newborns of German citizens abroad no longer automatically received German citizenship. Further amendments to the immigration laws of 30 July 2004 and 19 August 2007, as well as the Second Act Amending the Nationality Act of 13 November 2014, underlined the shift in German nationality law towards the territorial principle, whilst at the same time reducing the emphasis on historical ties and ethnic affiliation as prerequisites for German nationality.

[1] Friedrich Ludwig Jahn: *German Volkstum*. Breslau 1935 [1810], p. 13.

[2] Echternkamp: Aufstieg, p. 223.

[3] Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Speeches to the German Nation (1808). In: Fichte’s Works. Ed. by Imanuel Hermann Fichte. Vol. 7. Berlin 1845/46 (reprint Berlin 1971), p. 359ff.

[4] Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl: The Natural History of the People as the Foundation of a German Social Policy. Vol. 1. Stuttgart, Augsburg 1854, p. 9.

[5] Friedrich Ratzel: Lebensraum. A Biogeographical Study. Tübingen 1901.

[6] Lutz Raphael: ‘The Scientification of the Social as Methodological and Conceptual Challenges for a Social History of the 20th Century’. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), pp. 165–193.

[7] Heinrich von Treitschke: ‘Unsere Aussichten’. In *Preußische Jahrbücher* 44 (1879), no. 5, pp. 560–576, here p. 575.

[8] Eugen Dühring: The Jewish Question as a Question of Racial Harmfulness to the Existence, Customs and Worship of Peoples, Berlin, 4th ed., 1892.

[9] Walkenhorst: Nation-People-Race, p. 165.

[10] Paul Langhans (ed.): Justus Perthes’ Pan-German Atlas, Gotha 1900, p. 2. On the concept, see the same author: ‘The Population of the Germans’. In: Alfred Geiser (ed.): The German Empire and the People. A National Handbook. Munich 1906, pp. 217–212.

[11] Stefan Manz: *Constructing a German Diaspora. The “Greater German Empire” 1871–1914*. New York, London 2014, p. 13.

[12] Heinrich Claß: On Germany’s War Aims. A Pamphlet. Munich 1917, p. 47.

[13] Gosewinkel: Naturalisation and Exclusion, p. 343.

[14] Cf. Jochen Oltmer: Migration in the Weimar Republic. Göttingen 2006, pp. 100ff.

[15] Hans Grimm: A People Without Space. 2 vols. Munich 1926.

[16] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Third Reich. Berlin 1923.

[17] Wolfgang Seibel: ‘Polycratic Integration: Senior Nazi Officials as Networkers in the German Occupation Administration in Belgium 1940–1944’. In: Sven Reichhardt, Wolfgang Seibel (eds.): The Precarious State. Ruling and Governing under National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 2011, p. 243.

[18] Hans Mommsen: National Socialism. Cumulative Radicalisation and Self-Destruction of the Regime. In: Meyers Encyclopaedic Lexicon. Vol. 16. Mannheim 1976, pp. 785–790.

[19] Constantin Goschler: ‘Reconciliation’ and ‘Victimisation’. The Displaced Persons and the German Discourse on Victimhood, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 53 (2005), No. 10, pp. 873–884, here p. 875.

[20] For the figures, see Hugo Service: *Germans to Poles. Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War*. Cambridge 2013, p. 124.

[21] Ulrich Prehn: Max Hildebert Boehm. Radical Concepts of Order from the First World War to the Federal Republic. Göttingen 2013, pp. 382, 377.