The Volkskörper, literally translated as either "national body" or "body national", was the "ethnic body politic" in German population science beginning in the second half of the 19th century. It was increasingly defined in terms of racial biology and was incorporated into Nazi racial theories. After 1945 the term was largely used synonymously with population in anthropology and geography (similarly to ethnicity or nation-state). In political parlance, however, the Volkskörper served as a metaphor for an organic and biological understanding of the unity between the Volk and the Volksgemeinschaft, its broader society. In German politics during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was used especially in anti-Semitic and racial hygiene texts to semantically differentiate the Volk, conceived as a biological and racial unit, from so-called "parasites", "pests" and "diseases". In this naturalistic sense "excretion" was construed in such a way as to define elements of the population as disease-causing and therefore needing to be expelled. The metaphor of the body national was therefore closely related to the Nazi regime's racial system and justified the enactment of policies like Aktion T4.
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👉 Volkskörper in the context of Völkisch
The Völkisch movement (German: Völkische Bewegung [ˌfœlkɪʃə bəˈveːɡʊŋ], English: Folkist movement, also called Völkism) was a Pan-German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through the dissolution of the Third Reich in 1945, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor (Volkskörper, "ethnic body"; literally "body of the people"), and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk ("race" or "folk") from the Germans. After World War II, the Völkisch movement became viewed as a proto-fascist or proto-Nazi phenomenon in the context of German society.
The Völkisch movement was not a homogeneous set of beliefs, but rather a "variegated sub-culture" that rose in opposition to the socio-cultural changes of modernity. The "only denominator common" to all Völkisch theorists was the idea of a national rebirth, inspired by the traditions of the Ancient Germans which had been "reconstructed" on a romantic basis by the adherents of the movement. This proposed rebirth entailed either "Germanizing" Christianity or the comprehensive rejection of Christian heritage in favor of a reconstituted pre-Christian Germanic paganism. In a narrow definition, the term is used to designate only groups that consider human beings essentially preformed by blood, or by inherited characteristics.
Volkskörper in the context of Blood and soil
Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany, and is associated with the contemporaneous concept of Lebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.
"Blood and soil" was a key slogan of Nazi ideology. The nationalist ideology of the Artaman League and the writings of Richard Walther Darré guided agricultural policies which were later adopted by Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Baldur von Schirach.