Blood and soil
Encyclopedia
Blood and Soil refers to an ideology
that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent
(Blood (of a folk
)) and homeland
/Heimat
(Soil). It celebrates the relationship of a people to the land they occupy and cultivate, and it places a high value on the virtues of rural living.
and national romanticism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism. This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis.
Ultranationalists predating the Nazis often supported country living as more healthy, with the Artaman League
sending urban children to the countryside to work in part in hopes of transforming them into Wehrbauer
n.
Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise of Nazi Germany
; he wrote a book called Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Aristocracy Based On Blood And Soil) in 1930, which proposed a systemic eugenics program, arguing for breeding as a cure-all for all the problems plaguing the state. Darré was an influential member of the Nazi party
and a noted race theorist
who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities. Prior to their ascension to power, Nazis called for a return from the cities to the countryside. This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.
The doctrine not only called for a "back to the land" approach and re-adoption of rural values; it held that German land was bound, perhaps mystically, to German blood. Peasants were the Nazi cultural heroes, who held charge of German racial stock and German history -- as when a memorial of a medieval peasant uprising was the occasion for a speech by Darré praising them as force and purifier of German history. This would also lead them to understand the natural order better, and in the end, only the man who worked the land really possessed it.
It contributed to the Nazi ideal of a woman: a sturdy peasant, who worked the land and bore strong children, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work. That country women gave birth to more children than city ones also was a factor in the support.
Carl Schmitt
argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its "blood and soil" because authenticity required loyalty to the Volk over abstract universals.
Neues Volk
displayed demographic charts to deplore the destruction of the generous Aryan families' farmland and how the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry. Posters for schools depicted and deplored the flight of people from the countryside to the city. The German National Catechism, a pamphlet widely used in schools, also recounted how farmers lost ancestral lands and had to move to the city, with all its demoralizing effects.
tried to settle workers in villages about decentralized factories, generals and Junkers successfully opposed him. Generals objected because it interferred with rearmament, and Junkers because it would prevent their exploiting their estates for the international market. It would also require the breakup of Junker estates for independent farmers, which was not implemented.
The Reichserbhofgesetz
, the State Hereditary Farm Law of 1933, implemented this ideology, stating that its aim was to: "preserve the farming community as the blood-source of the German people" (Das Bauerntum als Blutquelle des deutschen Volkes erhalten). Selected lands were declared hereditary, to pass from father to eldest son, and could not be mortgaged or alienated, and only these farmers were entitled to call themselves Bauen or "farmer peasant", a term the Nazis attempted to refurbish from a neutral or even pejorative to a positive term. This was also regarded as the best place to raise infantry, and as having a organic harmony between landowner and peasant
, unlike the "race chaos" of the industrial cities.
The concept was a factor in the requirement of a year of land service for members of Hitler Youth
and the League of German Girls
. This period of compulsory service was required after completion of a student's basic education, before he or she could engage in advanced studies or become employed. Although working on a farm was not the only approved form of service, it was a common one; the aim was to bring young people back from the cities, in the hope that they would then stay "on the land". In 1942, 600,000 boys and 1.4 million girls were sent to help bringing in the harvest.
Blood and soil was one of the foundations of the concept of Lebensraum
, "living space". By expanding eastward and transforming those lands into breadbaskets, another blockade, such as that of World War I, would not cause massive food shortages, as that one had, a factor that aided the resonance of "Blood and soil" for the German population. Even Alfred Rosenberg
, not hostile to the Slavs as such, regarded their removal from this land, where Germans had once lived, as necessary because of the unity of blood and soil. Mein Kampf
prescribed as the unvarying aim of foreign policy the necessity of obtaining land and soil for the German people.
While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian "breadbasket" and expressed particular hositility to its "Russian" cities as hotbeds of Russianness and Communism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war. Even during the war itself, Hitler gave orders that Leningrad was to be razed with no consideration given for the survival and feeding of its population. This also called for industry to die off in these regions. The Wehrbauer
, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns. This would also encourage large families.
Furthermore, this land, held by "tough peasant races" would serve as a bulwark against attack from Asia.
, uncontaminiated by the city. These books were generally set in the nominal past, but through their invocation of the passing of the seasons often gave them an air of timelessness. "Blood and soil" novels and theater celebrated the farmer's life and human fertility, often mystically linking them.
One of the anti-Semitic fabrications in the children's book Der Giftpilz
was the claim that the Talmud described farming as the most lowly of occupations. It also included an account of a Jewish financier forcing a German to sell his farm.
", to offending pieces. In the art of the Third Reich, both landscape paintings and figures reflected blood-and-soil ideology. Indeed, some Nazi art exhibits were explicitly titled "Blood and Soil". Artists frequently gave otherwise apolitical painting such titles as "German Land" or "German Oak". Rural themes were heavily favored in painting. Landscape paintings were featured most heavily in the Greater German Art Exhibitions. While drawing on German romantic
traditions, painted landscapes were expected to be firmly based on real landscapes, the German people's Lebensraum
, without religious overtones. Peasants were also popular images, promoting a simple life in harmony with nature. This art showed no sign of the mechanization of farm work. The farmer labored by hand, with effort and struggle.
The acceptance of this art by the peasant family was also regarded as an important element.
has the heroine's running away to the city result in her pregnancy and abandonment; she drowns herself, and her last words beg her father to forgive her for not loving the countryside as he did. The documentary Ewiger Wald
(The Eternal Forest) depicted the forest as being beyond the vicissitudes of history, and the German people the same because they were rooted in the story; it depicted the forest sheltering ancient Germans, Arminius
, and the Teutonic Knights, facing the peasants wars, being chopped up by war and industry, and being humiliated by occupation with black soldiers, but culminated in a neo-pagan May Day celebration. In Die Reise nach Tilsit
, the Polish seductress is an obvious product of "asphalt culture," but the virtuous German wife is a country dweller in traditional costume.
made extensive use of the term, usually in quotation marks, and showing an extensive debt to the Nazi usage.
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent
Cultural heritage
Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations...
(Blood (of a folk
Folk
The English word Folk is derived from a Germanic noun, *fulka meaning "people" or "army"...
)) and homeland
Homeland
A homeland is the concept of the place to which an ethnic group holds a long history and a deep cultural association with —the country in which a particular national identity began. As a common noun, it simply connotes the country of one's origin...
/Heimat
Heimat
Heimat is a German word that has no simple English translation. It is often expressed with terms such as home or homeland, but these English counterparts fail to encapsulate the true meaning of the word.-The meaning of Heimat:...
(Soil). It celebrates the relationship of a people to the land they occupy and cultivate, and it places a high value on the virtues of rural living.
Rise
The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts espousing racialismRacialism
Racialism is an emphasis on race or racial considerations. Currently, racialism entails a belief in the existence and significance of racial categories, but not necessarily that any absolute hierarchy between the races has been demonstrated by a rigorous and comprehensive scientific process...
and national romanticism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism. This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis.
Ultranationalists predating the Nazis often supported country living as more healthy, with the Artaman League
Artaman League
The Artaman League was a German agrarian and völkisch movement dedicated to a Blut und Boden-inspired ruralism. Active during the inter-war period, the League became closely linked to, and eventually absorbed by, the Nazi Party.-Etymology:The term Artamanen had been coined before the First World...
sending urban children to the countryside to work in part in hopes of transforming them into Wehrbauer
Wehrbauer
Wehrbauer was a concept used by the Schutzstaffel of the Nazi Party to refer to soldiers designated as setters for the lands conquered during the German invasions of the the Soviet Union and Poland....
n.
Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
; he wrote a book called Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Aristocracy Based On Blood And Soil) in 1930, which proposed a systemic eugenics program, arguing for breeding as a cure-all for all the problems plaguing the state. Darré was an influential member of the Nazi party
National Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
and a noted race theorist
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities. Prior to their ascension to power, Nazis called for a return from the cities to the countryside. This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.
Nazi ideology
It contributed to the Nazi ideal of a woman: a sturdy peasant, who worked the land and bore strong children, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work. That country women gave birth to more children than city ones also was a factor in the support.
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power...
argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its "blood and soil" because authenticity required loyalty to the Volk over abstract universals.
Neues Volk
Neues Volk
Neues Volk was the monthly publication of the Office of Racial Policy in Nazi Germany. Founded by Walter Gross in 1933, it was a mass-market, illustrated magazine. It aimed at a wide audience, achieving a circulation of 300,000...
displayed demographic charts to deplore the destruction of the generous Aryan families' farmland and how the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry. Posters for schools depicted and deplored the flight of people from the countryside to the city. The German National Catechism, a pamphlet widely used in schools, also recounted how farmers lost ancestral lands and had to move to the city, with all its demoralizing effects.
Nazi implementation
The program received far more ideological and propaganda support than concrete changes. When Gottfried FederGottfried Feder
Gottfried Feder was an economist and one of the early key members of the Nazi party. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his lecture in 1919 that drew Hitler into the party.- Biography :...
tried to settle workers in villages about decentralized factories, generals and Junkers successfully opposed him. Generals objected because it interferred with rearmament, and Junkers because it would prevent their exploiting their estates for the international market. It would also require the breakup of Junker estates for independent farmers, which was not implemented.
The Reichserbhofgesetz
Reichserbhofgesetz
The Reichserbhofgesetz was a Nazi law to implement principles of blood and soil, stating that its aim was to: "preserve the farming community as the blood-source of the German people"...
, the State Hereditary Farm Law of 1933, implemented this ideology, stating that its aim was to: "preserve the farming community as the blood-source of the German people" (Das Bauerntum als Blutquelle des deutschen Volkes erhalten). Selected lands were declared hereditary, to pass from father to eldest son, and could not be mortgaged or alienated, and only these farmers were entitled to call themselves Bauen or "farmer peasant", a term the Nazis attempted to refurbish from a neutral or even pejorative to a positive term. This was also regarded as the best place to raise infantry, and as having a organic harmony between landowner and peasant
Volksgemeinschaft
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community". Originally appearing during World War I as Germans rallied behind the war, it derived its popularity as a means to break down elitism and class divides...
, unlike the "race chaos" of the industrial cities.
The concept was a factor in the requirement of a year of land service for members of Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
and the League of German Girls
League of German Girls
The League of German Girls or League of German Maidens , was the girl's wing of the overall Nazi party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. It was the only female youth organization in Nazi Germany....
. This period of compulsory service was required after completion of a student's basic education, before he or she could engage in advanced studies or become employed. Although working on a farm was not the only approved form of service, it was a common one; the aim was to bring young people back from the cities, in the hope that they would then stay "on the land". In 1942, 600,000 boys and 1.4 million girls were sent to help bringing in the harvest.
Lebensraum
Lebensraum
was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany...
, "living space". By expanding eastward and transforming those lands into breadbaskets, another blockade, such as that of World War I, would not cause massive food shortages, as that one had, a factor that aided the resonance of "Blood and soil" for the German population. Even Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
, not hostile to the Slavs as such, regarded their removal from this land, where Germans had once lived, as necessary because of the unity of blood and soil. Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...
prescribed as the unvarying aim of foreign policy the necessity of obtaining land and soil for the German people.
While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian "breadbasket" and expressed particular hositility to its "Russian" cities as hotbeds of Russianness and Communism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war. Even during the war itself, Hitler gave orders that Leningrad was to be razed with no consideration given for the survival and feeding of its population. This also called for industry to die off in these regions. The Wehrbauer
Wehrbauer
Wehrbauer was a concept used by the Schutzstaffel of the Nazi Party to refer to soldiers designated as setters for the lands conquered during the German invasions of the the Soviet Union and Poland....
, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns. This would also encourage large families.
Furthermore, this land, held by "tough peasant races" would serve as a bulwark against attack from Asia.
Fiction
Prior to the Nazi take-over, two popular genres were the Heimat-Roman, or regional novel, and Schollen-Roman, or novel of the soil, which was also known as Blut-und-Boden. This literature was vastly increased, the term being contract to a slogan "Blu-Bo", and developed a mysticism of unity. It also combined with war literature with the figure of the soldier-peasantWehrbauer
Wehrbauer was a concept used by the Schutzstaffel of the Nazi Party to refer to soldiers designated as setters for the lands conquered during the German invasions of the the Soviet Union and Poland....
, uncontaminiated by the city. These books were generally set in the nominal past, but through their invocation of the passing of the seasons often gave them an air of timelessness. "Blood and soil" novels and theater celebrated the farmer's life and human fertility, often mystically linking them.
One of the anti-Semitic fabrications in the children's book Der Giftpilz
Der Giftpilz
Der Giftpilz is a children's book published by Julius Streicher in 1938. The title is German for "the toadstool" or "the poison mushroom". The book was intended as anti-Semitic propaganda...
was the claim that the Talmud described farming as the most lowly of occupations. It also included an account of a Jewish financier forcing a German to sell his farm.
Fine art
During the Nazi period in Germany, one of the charges put forward against certain works of art was that "Art must not be isolated from blood and soil." Failure to meet this standard resulted in the attachment of the label, "degenerate artDegenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...
", to offending pieces. In the art of the Third Reich, both landscape paintings and figures reflected blood-and-soil ideology. Indeed, some Nazi art exhibits were explicitly titled "Blood and Soil". Artists frequently gave otherwise apolitical painting such titles as "German Land" or "German Oak". Rural themes were heavily favored in painting. Landscape paintings were featured most heavily in the Greater German Art Exhibitions. While drawing on German romantic
German Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...
traditions, painted landscapes were expected to be firmly based on real landscapes, the German people's Lebensraum
Lebensraum
was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany...
, without religious overtones. Peasants were also popular images, promoting a simple life in harmony with nature. This art showed no sign of the mechanization of farm work. The farmer labored by hand, with effort and struggle.
The acceptance of this art by the peasant family was also regarded as an important element.
Film
Blut und Boden films likewise stressed the commonality of Germaness and the countryside. Die goldene StadtDie goldene Stadt
Die goldene Stadt , is a 1941 German film directed by Veit Harlan, starring Kristina Söderbaum, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and in Agfacolor.-Plot:...
has the heroine's running away to the city result in her pregnancy and abandonment; she drowns herself, and her last words beg her father to forgive her for not loving the countryside as he did. The documentary Ewiger Wald
Ewiger Wald
Ewiger Wald is a 1936 German film directed by Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski.The film is also known as Enchanted Forest - Cast :*Günther Hadank *Heinz Herkommer...
(The Eternal Forest) depicted the forest as being beyond the vicissitudes of history, and the German people the same because they were rooted in the story; it depicted the forest sheltering ancient Germans, Arminius
Arminius
Arminius , also known as Armin or Hermann was a chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci who defeated a Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest...
, and the Teutonic Knights, facing the peasants wars, being chopped up by war and industry, and being humiliated by occupation with black soldiers, but culminated in a neo-pagan May Day celebration. In Die Reise nach Tilsit
Die Reise nach Tilsit
Die Reise nach Tilsit is a German 1939 film directed by Veit Harlan. It is a sound remake of the silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which was based on Hermann Sudermann's short story "Die Reise nach Tilsit"; Harlan maintained it was a true film, whereas Sunrise was only a poem, and it...
, the Polish seductress is an obvious product of "asphalt culture," but the virtuous German wife is a country dweller in traditional costume.
Japanese usage
An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as NucleusAn Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus
, was a secret Japanese government report created by the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Population Problems Research Center, and completed on July 1, 1943....
made extensive use of the term, usually in quotation marks, and showing an extensive debt to the Nazi usage.
See also
- Action FrançaiseAction FrançaiseThe Action Française , founded in 1898, is a French Monarchist counter-revolutionary movement and periodical founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois and whose principal ideologist was Charles Maurras...
- Art of the Third Reich
- Bumiputera (Malaysia) - "Sons of the soil"
- Ethnic nationalismEthnic nationalismEthnic nationalism is a form of nationalism wherein the "nation" is defined in terms of ethnicity. Whatever specific ethnicity is involved, ethnic nationalism always includes some element of descent from previous generations and the implied claim of ethnic essentialism, i.e...
- IntegralismIntegralismIntegralism, or Integral nationalism, is an ideology according to which a nation is an organic unity. Integralism defends social differentiation and hierarchy with co-operation between social classes, transcending conflict between social and economic groups...
- IrredentismIrredentismIrredentism is any position advocating annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, actual or alleged. Some of these movements are also called pan-nationalist movements. It is a feature of identity politics and cultural...
- Nazi eugenicsNazi eugenicsNazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns...
- ReichsnährstandReichsnährstandThe Reichsnährstand was a government body set up in Nazi Germany to regulate food production.-Foundation:The Reichsnährstand was founded by the Reichsnahrstandsgesetz of 13 September, 1933; it was led by R. Walther Darré.-Policies:...
- Völkisch movementVölkisch movementThe volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic"...