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Völkisch movement

The völkisch movement (original name: Völkische Bewegung) is the German interpretation of the

 populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic". The term völkisch,

meaning "ethnic", derives from the German word Volk (cognate with the English "folk"),

corresponding to " people", with connotations in German of "people-powered", "folksy" and

"folkloric". According to the historian James Webb, the word also has "overtones of 'nation', 'race'

and 'tribe,'… " [1]

The defining idea that the völkisch movement revolved around was that of a Volkstum (lit.

"folkdom", probably more precise in meaning would be "folklore" and "ethnicity"), not to be

confused with the Volkssturm. "Populist", or "popular", in this context would be volkstümlich.

The völkisch "movement" was not a unified movement but "a cauldron of beliefs, fears and hopes

that found expression in various movements and were often articulated in an emotional tone,"

Petteri Pietikäinen observed in tracing völkisch influences on Carl Gustav Jung.[2] The völkischmovement was "arguably the largest group" in the Conservative Revolutionary movement in

Germany.[3] However, like "conservative-revolutionary" or "fascist", völkisch is a complex term

("schillernder Begriff" ).[3] In a narrow definition it can be used to designate only groups that

consider human beings essentially preformed by blood,[3] i.e. by inherited characteristics

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[edit] Origins in the 19th century

The völkisch movement had its origins in Romantic nationalism, as it was expressed by early

Romantics such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation published during

the  Napoleonic Wars, from 1808 onwards, especially the eighth address, “What is a Volk, in the

higher sense of the term, and what is love of the fatherland?," where he answered his question of 

what could warrant the noble individual's striving "and his belief in the eternity and the immortality

of his work," by replying that it could only be that "particular spiritual nature of the human

environment out of which he himself, with all of his thought and action... has arisen, namely the

 people from which he is descended and among which he has been formed and grown into that

which he is".[4]

The movement combined sentimental patriotic interest in German folklore, local history and a

"back-to-the-land" anti-urban populism with many parallels in the writings of William Morris. "In

 part this ideology was a revolt against modernity," A. J. Nicholls remarked.[5] The dream was for a

self-sufficient life lived with a mystical relation to the land; it was a reaction to the cultural

alienation of the Industrial revolution and the "progressive" liberalism of the later 19th century and

its urbane materialist banality. Similar feelings were expressed in the US during the 1930s by the

 populist writers grouped as the Southern Agrarians.

In addition the völkisch movement, as it evolved, sometimes combined the arcane and esoteric aspects of folkloric occultism alongside "racial adoration" and, in some circles, a type of  anti-

Semitism linked to exclusionary ethnic nationalism. The ideas of völkisch movements also included

anti-communist, anti-immigration, anti-capitalist and anti-Parliamentarian principles. The völkisch

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ideas of "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft ) came more and more to exclude Jews.

[edit] Before and after World War I

A number of the völkisch-populist movements that had developed during the late 19th century in the

German Empire, under the impress of  National Romanticism, were reorganized along

 propagandistic lines after the German defeat in World War I, as the word "the people" (Volk ) became increasingly politicized as a flag for new forms of ethnic nationalism.

Yet at the same time, Volk was also used by the international socialist parties in the German lands as

a synonym for the proletariat. The Völkisch movement was a force as well in Austria.[6] From the

left, elements of the folk-culture spread to the parties of the middle-classes. [7] But whereas Volk could mean "proletariat" among the left, it meant more particularly "race" among the center and

right. Although the primary interest of the Germanic mystical movement was the revival of native

 pagan traditions and customs (often set in the context of a quasi-Theosophical esotericism), a

marked preoccupation with purity of race came to motivate its more politically oriented offshoots

such as the Germanenorden, the Germanic or Teutonic Order  . This latter was a secret society

(founded at Berlin in 1912) which required its candidates to prove that they had no "non-Aryan" bloodlines and required from each a promise to maintain purity of his stock in marriage. Local

groups of the sect met to celebrate the summer solstice, an important neopagan festivity in völkischcircles and later in Nazi Germany, and more regularly to read the Eddas as well as some of the

German mystics.[8] This branch of the völkisch movement quickly developed a hyper-nationalist

sentiment and allied itself with anti-semitism, then rising throughout the Western world.

George Mosse[9] identified some of the more "respectable" and centrist channels through which

these sensibilities flowed: school texts that transmitted a Romantic view of a "pure" Germanic past,

the nature-oriented German Youth Movement, and novels with an ideally ruthless völkisch hero,

such as Hermann Löns'  Der Wehrwolf (1910).

Another völkisch movement of the same time was the Tatkreis. Not all folkloric societies with connections to Romantic nationalism were located in Germany. The

community of Monte Verità ('Mount Truth') which emerged in 1900 at Ascona, Switzerland, is

described by the Swiss art critic Harald Szeemann as "the southernmost outpost of a far-reaching

 Nordic lifestyle-reform, that is, alternative movement".[10] It embraced a mix of  anarchism,

libertarian communism and various forms of artistic bohemianism and neopaganism.

[edit] Connection with Nazism

The völkisch ideologies were influential in the development of   Nazism. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels 

 publicly asserted in the 1927 Nuremberg rally that if the populist (völkisch) movement hadunderstood power and how to bring thousands out in the streets, it would have gained political

 power on 9 November 1918 (the outbreak of the SPD-led German Revolution of 1918–1919, end of 

the German monarchy).[11] Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (My Struggle): "the basic ideas of 

the National-Socialist movement are populist (völkisch) and the populist (völkisch) ideas are

 National-Socialist." Nazi racial pseudo-science was couched in Völkisch terms, as when Eugen

Fischer stepped into the vacuum, as other scholars withdrew from the University of Berlin in 1933,

and delivered his inaugural address as Nazi rector, "The Conception of the Völkisch state in the

view of biology" (29 July 1933).[12]

This connection can be overstated, however. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke an

imaginative mythology has grown up around the supposed influence within the  Nazi Party of a

völkisch group, the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), which was founded on August 17, 1918 by

Rudolf von Sebottendorff . Its original name was Studiengruppe für Germanisches Altertum (Study

Group for Germanic Antiquity), but it soon started to disseminate anti-republican and anti-Semitic

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 propaganda. In January 1919 the Thule Society was instrumental in the foundation of the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (German Workers' Party, or DAP) which later became the NSDAP (Nazi Party).

Thule members that would later join the Nazi Party included Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans

Frank , Gottfried Feder , Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer , but notably not Adolf Hitler who never 

was a member of the Thule Society. Furthermore the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer ),

owned by Sebottendorff, was the press organ of another small nationalist party and later became the

Völkischer Beobachter  ( People's Observer ).On the other hand it can be noted that Karl Harrer, the Thule member most directly involved in the

creation of the DAP in 1919, was sidelined at the end of the year when Hitler drafted regulations

against conspiratorial circles, and the Thule Society was dissolved a few years later (Goodrick-

Clarke 1985: 150, 221). It had no members from the top echelons of the party and Nazi officials

were forbidden any involvement in secret societies. Adolf Hitler was never a member, while Rudolf 

Hess and Alfred Rosenberg were only visiting guests of the Thule Society in the early years before

they came to prominence in the Nazi movement (Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 149, 201). However, the

völkisch circles did hand down one significant legacy: Friedrich Krohn, a Thule member, designed

the original version of the Nazi swastika in 1919.