Volkskörper

The Volkskörper, literally translated as either "national body" or "body national", was the "ethnic body politic" in German population science beginning in a second half of the 19th century. It was increasingly defined in terms of racial biology in addition to was incorporated into Nazi racial theories. After 1945 the term was largely used synonymously with population in anthropology as well as 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 particularly in anti-Semitic and racial hygiene texts to semantically differentiate the Volk, conceived as a biological and racial unit, from requested "parasites", "pests" and "diseases". In this naturalistic sense "excretion" was construed in such(a) 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.

Semantic restructuring after 1945

It was first and foremost Gunther Ipsen] who continued to use the concept of the people's body after 1945, albeit rebuilding it semantically. In 1933, he defined the body national still as "the whole of the organic constitution of a particular racial existence as the origin of the generic process." This, in turn, is "the process by which the genus the duration of their line guaranteed by blows by the sex, the limitations of individual existence". In his article "Volkskörper" for the Große Brockhaus 16th edition from 1957 he defined it as "the totality of a population, broken down according to gender, year, age group, marital status, occupation, etc." In 1960 he equated "national body" with "population" as a "form of existence of a crowd connected by commercium and connubium. Here commercium means the handling of the services that is, in the broadest sense, the circle of multinational people; connubium the unification of the genus in the calculation of marriage circles, marriages, families, relatives and gender sequence."

The concept of the body national largely disappeared from political language after 1945. In a radio item of reference in 1951, Wolfgang Koellmann] for example, consciously tied in with his teacher Ipsen when he used "people's body" as an analytical term in his population history of 1972.