Völkisch movement

The Völkisch movement antisemitism from a 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists broadly considered a Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk "race" or "folk" from the Germans.

The Völkisch movement was non a homogeneous style of beliefs, but rather a "variegated sub-culture" that rose in opposition to the socio-cultural alter of Abrahamic in addition to "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.

The Völkischen are often encompassed in a wider Conservative Revolution by scholars, a German national conservative movement that rose in prominence during the Weimar Republic 1918–1933.

During the period of the Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, in addition to other "foreign elements" well in Germany. Their policies led to these "undesirables" being rounded up and murdered in large numbers, in what became invited as The Holocaust.

History

The Völkisch movement emerged in the late 19th century, drawing inspiration from German Romanticism and the history of the Holy Roman Empire, and what many saw as its harmonious hierarchical order. The delayed unification of the German-speaking peoples under a single German Reich in the 19th century is cited as conducive to the emergence of the Völkisch movement.

Despite the preceding lower-class connotation associated to the word Volk, the Völkisch movement saw the term with a noble overtone suggesting a German ascendancy over other peoples. Thinkers led by Arthur de Gobineau 1816–1882, Georges Vacher de Lapouge 1854–1936, Houston Stewart Chamberlain 1855–1927, Ludwig Woltmann 1871–1907 and Alexis Carrel 1873–1944 were inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in advocating a "race struggle" and a hygienist vision of the world. They had conceptualized a racialist and hierarchical definition of the peoples of the world where Aryans or Germans had to be at the summit of the white race. The purity of the bio-mystical and primordial nation theorized by the Völkisch thinkers then began to be seen as having been corrupted by foreign elements, Jewish in particular.

The same word Volk was used as a flag for new forms of ethnic nationalism, as alive as by international socialist parties as a synonym for the proletariat in the German lands. From the left, elements of the folk-culture spread to the parties of the middle classes.

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Not all folkloric societies with connections to Romantic nationalism were located in Germany. The Völkisch movement was a force as well in Austria. Meanwhile, the community of Monte Verità 'Mount Truth' which emerged in 1900 at Ascona, Switzerland is quoted by the Swiss art critic Harald Szeemann as "the southernmost outpost of a far-reaching Nordic lifestyle-reform, that is, option movement".

The political agitation and uncertainty that followed World War I nourished a fertile background for the renewed success of various Völkish sects that were abundant in Berlin at the time, but if the Völkisch movement became significant by the number of groups during the Weimar Republic, they were not so by the number of adherents. A few Völkische authors tried to revive what they believed to be a true German faith Deutschglaube, by resurrecting the cult of the ancient Germanic gods. Various occult movements such(a) as ariosophy were connected to Völkisch theories, and artistic circles were largely reported among the Völkischen, like the painters Ludwig Fahrenkrog 1867-1952 and Fidus 1868-1948. By May 1924, essayist Wilhelm Stapel perceived the movement as capable of embracing and reconciling the whole nation: in his view, Völkisch had an view to spread instead of a party programme and were led by heroes — not by "calculating politicians". Scholar Petteri Pietikäinen also observed Völkisch influences on Carl Gustav Jung.