Book Review: Growing Volkisb Identity in the Third Reich

Abstract

Introduction:  The story of National Socialism’s role in the encouragement and nurturing of German volkish identity is a wildly violent tale of an exaggerated sense of superiority and brutal racial hatred. The Nazi racial myth is given form and content in word, but was implemented through the language of blood. Much of the Nazi story is, in fact, told in «fictional terminology» lacking concise accuracy and meaning, and is seemingly legitimized simply by its repetitive use. The «Aryan» myth grew out of linguistic terminology coined by the Frenchman Comte Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882); terminology which was «decontextualized» into the biological, physical reality of «blood and soil». The Nazi interpretations of nineteenth century Darwinian evolution, of the biological eugenics of Francis Galton (1822-1911), of German Kaiser Reich imperial ambitions, and of terminology borrowed from the study of languages by Gobineau and other linguists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contributed to the culmination of the Aryan myth taking shape in the radical institutionalization of the Nazi racial state. The myth of racial superiority, which the Nazis embodied in tales of «blood and soil», required for its completion the opposition labeling of the «inferior races». The Nazi categorization of the «negative other» provided targets for «scapegoating» and the stroking of fear and hatred; as the «enemy» of the Aryan volk, they served as the necessary dichotic component characterizing the maniacal Nazi project. The German volk~ so the argument went, required lebens raum, or living space, and thus the ambitious, expansive Nazi gaze fell upon Eastern Europe and its «inferior», non-German populations. The German dream of empire and territorial expansion was justified in the Nazi myth making process and proved reason enough (along with geopolitical interests in natural resources such as oil) for the Nazi militarist drive to aggression and war.