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CHAPTER 3 German-Speaking People and German Heritage Nazi Germany and the Problem of Volksgemeinschaft Norbert Götz It has become commonplace to describe the utopia of German National Socialists in their own words as Volksgemeinschaft. Englishspeaking authors quite often do not translate the word as “national community” or “people’s community” but rather keep it in the original German. This practice intentionally stresses the speci‹cally German character of the concept and particularly its inextricable association with the ideas of National Socialism. This makes sense, even though the term does exist in other languages, such as the Scandinavian languages or Finnish, and despite the fact that democratic political parties in Germany before the Nazi rise to power also commonly used the phrase. In the 1930s Volksgemeinschaft became a key concept within National Socialism, omnipresent in political, legal, and scienti‹c discussions , as well as in administrative and everyday language. From the National Socialists’ point of view, the Volksgemeinschaft consisted of all Germans not excluded for racial, hereditary, behavioral, or political reasons. Since the expansionist National Socialist worldview ›atly rejected the German Reich’s post–World War I borders, the following questions arose: Which Germans were to be included in the Volksgemeinschaft , and where were they located?1 In light of the territorial ambitions of the National Socialists, a discussion of the Volksgemeinschaft in the 1930s and 1940s cannot be limited to the state of Germany. Not only the Nazis, but also Germanspeaking people of completely different political views in and outside of Germany, staked out relative positions of power and hegemonic spheres in their debate over the meaning of Volksgemeinschaft. In gen58 eral, the German diaspora was neither able nor willing to resist the use of this powerful terminology. However, the idea of Volksgemeinschaft could mean different things to different people. Among overseas populations of German speakers or German descent, one can distinguish three different conceptualizations : supranational, national, and subnational notions of Volksgemeinschaft , only partially compatible with each other. Volksgemeinschaft could stand for the democratic idea of citizenship or for Nazi racialism and expansionism. It could be used to support existing political boundaries or to draw new ethnocultural boundaries of Germanness completely at odds with existing national borders. German Nazis had a strong tendency to claim territory outside of the German Empire, but they were rather ›exible in how they applied their concept of Volksgemeinschaft. Their de‹nitions of the notion are characterized by ambiguity and vary case by case. Most importantly, the term Volksgemeinschaft did not just stand for different notions; it became a vehicle for the struggle over different worldviews among people of German extraction. With some noticeable exceptions, the Nazis were quite successful in their battle to equate German heritage with membership in the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. However, they lost the larger war, which was their campaign to translate their de‹nition into practice. This chapter provides an overview of the broad international discourse surrounding the concept of Volksgemeinschaft as it concerned Germans abroad. The empirical examples that I present re›ect the ideas of the largest groups, those in closest geographical proximity to Germany and those whose ideas were most representative of the different concepts of Volksgemeinschaft. Due to this study’s methodological orientation toward conceptual history, I also have given preference to cases where the names of institutions or titles of publications actually use the term Volksgemeinschaft.2 Therefore, Mexico and Brazil, where such organizations and writings were prominent, are discussed much more frequently in what follows than, for example, the United States, despite its larger population of German heritage. The lesser importance of the notion of Volksgemeinschaft in North America appears to re›ect its lack of appeal for the region’s populations of German descent, which I argue is a result of their greater integration and acculturation into mainstream society.3 Of the three conceptualizations of the Volksgemeinschaft mentioned previously—the supranational, national, and subnational—the ‹rst was most important. The supranational concept was suggestive and German-Speaking People and German Heritage 59 aggressive, the one that demanded Anschluss and provoked an answer: yes or no. This concept became a catch phrase that compelled Germans abroad, especially those living in regions subject to potential German invasion or other interference, to react. National Socialists in Germany and German-speaking sympathizers abroad primarily employed the supranational concept of Volksgemeinschaft , which they thought of as a primordial community of common descent ideologically reconstructed by the Nazi movement. Quite often individuals with this supranational viewpoint still...

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