Blood and soil (German:Blut und Boden,pronounced[ˈbluːtʊntˈboːdn̩]ⓘ) is anationalist phrase and concept of aracially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the Germanvölkisch movement, it was used extensively byNazi Germany, and is associated with the contemporaneous concept ofLebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand intoEastern Europe, conquering and displacing the nativeSlavic andBaltic population viaGeneralplan Ost.[citation needed]
"Blood and soil" was a key slogan of Nazi ideology. Thenationalist ideology of theArtaman League and the writings ofRichard Walther Darré guided agricultural policies which were later adopted byAdolf Hitler,Heinrich Himmler andBaldur von Schirach.
The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts which espousedracialism/racism andromantic nationalism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism.[1] This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis.[2] Major figures in 19th century Germanagrarian romanticism includedErnst Moritz Arndt andWilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who argued that the peasantry represented the foundation of the German people andconservatism.[3]
Ultranationalists who predated the Nazis frequently supported country living by claiming that it was healthier than city living, with theArtaman League sending urban children to the countryside to work in the hope that they would be transformed intoWehrbauern (lit. "soldier peasants").[4]
Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise ofNazi Germany in his 1930 bookNeuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility Based On Blood And Soil), in which he proposed the implementation of a systematiceugenics program, arguing that selective breeding would be a cure-all for the problems which were plaguing the state.[5] In 1928, he had also written the book,Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, in which he presented his theory that the alleged difference between Nordic people and Southeastern Europeans was based in the Nordic people's connection to superior land.[6] Darré was an influential member of theNazi Party and a notedrace 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.[7] 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.[8]
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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.[9]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 a force and purifier of German history.[10] Agrarianism was asserted as the only way to truly understand the "natural order."[11] Urban culture was decried as a weakness, labelled "asphalt culture" and partially coded as resulting from Jewish influence, and was depicted as a weakness that only the Führer's will could eliminate.[12]
The doctrine also 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.[13] That country women gave birth to more children than city ones was also a factor in the support.[14]
Carl Schmitt argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its "blood and soil" because authenticity required loyalty to theVolk over abstract universals.[15]
Neues Volk displayed anti-Semitic demographic charts to deplore the alleged destruction of Aryan families' farmland and claim that the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry.[16] Posters for schools depicted the flight of people from the countryside to the city.[17] TheGerman National Catechism, German propaganda widely used in schools, also spun tales of how farmers supposedly lost ancestral lands and had to move to the city, with all its demoralizing effects.[18]
The program received far more ideological and propaganda support than concrete changes.[19] WhenGottfried Feder tried to settle workers in villages about decentralized factories, generals andJunkers successfully opposed him.[20] Generals objected because it interfered with rearmament, and Junkers because it would prevent their exploiting their estates for the international market.[21] It would also require the breakup of Junker estates for independent farmers, which was not implemented.[7]
TheReichserbhofgesetz, 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 landswere declared hereditary and could not be mortgaged or alienated, and only these farmers were entitled to call themselvesBauern or "farmer peasant", a term the Nazis attempted to refurbish from a neutral or even pejorative to a positive term.[22] Regional custom was only allowed to decide whether the eldest or the youngest son was to be the heir. In areas where no particular custom prevailed, the youngest son was to be the heir.[23][24][25][26] During the Nazi era, the eldest son inherited the farm in most cases.[27] Priority was given to the patriline, so that, if there were no sons, the brothers and brothers' sons of the deceased peasant had precedence over the peasant's own daughters. The countryside was also regarded as the best place to raise infantry, and as havingan organic harmony between landowner and peasant, unlike the "race chaos" of the industrial cities.[28] It also prevented Jewish people from farming: "Only those of German blood may be farmers."[29]
The concept was a factor in the requirement of a year of land service for members ofHitler Youth and theLeague of German Girls.[30] This period of compulsory service was required after completion of a student's basic education, before they 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".[31] In 1942, 600,000 boys and 1.4 million girls were sent to help bring in the harvest.[citation needed]
Blood and soil was one of the foundations of the concept ofLebensraum, "living space".[9] 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.[32] EvenAlfred 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.[2]Mein Kampf prescribed as the unvarying aim of foreign policy the necessity of obtaining land and soil for the German people (again, "German people" defined by the Nazi Party as racially pure).[33]
While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian "breadbasket" and expressed particular hostility to its "Russian" cities as hotbeds of Russianness andCommunism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war.[34] 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.[35] This also called for industry to die off in these regions.[36] TheWehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns.[1] This would also encourage large families.[37]
Furthermore, this land, held by "tough peasant races", would serve as a bulwark against attack from Asia.[38]
Prior to the Nazi take-over, two popular genres were theHeimat-Roman, or regional novel, andSchollen-Roman, or novel of the soil, which was also known asBlut-und-Boden.[39] This literature was vastly increased, the term being contracted into "Blu-Bo", and developed a mysticism of unity.[1] It also combined war literature with the figure of the soldier-peasant, uncontaminated by the city.[1] These books were generally set in the nominal past, but their invocation of the passing of the seasons often gave them an air of timelessness.[40] "Blood and soil" novels and theater celebrated the farmer's life and their fertility, often mystically linking them.[41]
One of the anti-Semitic fabrications in the children's bookDer Giftpilz was the claim that theTalmud described farming as the most lowly of occupations.[42] It also included an account of a Jewish financier forcing a German to sell his farm as seen by a neighbor boy; deeply distressed, the boy resolved never to let a Jew into his house, for which his father praised him, on the grounds that peasants must remember that Jews will always take their land.[43]
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."[44] Failure to meet this standard resulted in the attachment of the label "degenerate art" to offending pieces. Inart of Nazi Germany, bothlandscape paintings and figures reflected blood-and-soil ideology.[45] Indeed, some Nazi art exhibits were explicitly titled "Blood and Soil".[46] Artists frequently gave otherwise apolitical paintings such titles as "German Land" or "German Oak".[47] Rural themes were heavily favored in painting.[48]Landscape paintings were featured most heavily in the Greater German Art Exhibitions.[49] While drawing onGerman Romantic traditions, painted landscapes were expected to be firmly based on real landscapes, the German people'sLebensraum, without religious overtones.[50] Peasants were also popular images, promoting a simple life in harmony with nature.[51] This art showed no sign of the mechanization of farm work.[52] The farmer labored by hand, with effort and struggle.[53]
The acceptance of this art by the peasant family was also regarded as an important element.[54]
UnderRichard Walther Darré, The Staff Office of Agriculture produced the shortpropaganda filmBlut und Boden, which was displayed at Nazi party meetings as well as in public cinemas throughout Germany. OtherBlut und Boden films likewise stressed the commonality of Germanness and the countryside.[55]Die goldene Stadt has the heroine running away to the city, resulting 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.[56] The filmEwiger 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 Aryan Germans,Arminius, and theTeutonic 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.[57] InThe Journey to Tilsit, the Polish seductress is portrayed as an obvious product of debased "asphalt culture" (urbanity) but the virtuous German wife is a country-dweller in traditional costume.[58] Many other commercial films of the Nazi era featured gratuitous, lingering shots of the German landscape and idealized 'Aryan' couples.[59]
A 1943 Japanese government report titledAn Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus made extensive use of the term, usually in quotation marks, and showing an extensive debt to the Nazi usage.[60]
Presbyterian theologiansWalter T. Davis andPauline Coffman have asserted that the concept of blood and soil had an influence on nationalisms across Europe, including aspects ofZionist ideology.[61] According toDavid Biale, "Before the Nazis came to power in Germany... the language of 'blood and soil' ... held wide appeal for Jews searching for new ways of defining themselves."[62]
While acknowledging the pre-Nazi use of "blood and soil" as an "abstract, Hegelian term",Raphael Falk notes, "Zionists adopted the concept ofVolk in terms of a nation-race as molded by the notion of Blood and Soil ..."[63] Falk cites Israel's national poet as an example:
A blunt, unfortunate example of the adherence of the Zionists to the nineteenth-century notion of Blood and Soil as ground for their territorial rights is the statement by the poetChaim Nachman Bialik at a press conference at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the beginning of 1934: "I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of blood."[64]
Falk says he knows of no other precedent for the Zionist effort to biologically sort humanity into Jew and non-Jew are the "Nazi efforts todiagnose the biological belonging of individuals to national-ethnic entities ..."[65]
Walter Laquer identifiedMartin Buber as "an early protagonist ofBlut und Boden". Laquer argues thatanti-Zionists have used this fact outside of its historical context as an attack on Zionism,[66]: 398 and that Buber's use of the concept, in its historical context, was "innocent".[66]: 398 Hans Derks criticizes Laquer for downplaying Buber's views and, quoting Laquer, those of other Zionist "advocates of thevolkische idea".[67]: 186 Laquer's purpose, according to Derks, is "to avoid the painful nazism-zionism relationship."[67]: 186 To Derks, historical context does not exonerate Buber. Derks asserts that "in that time many people in and outside Palestine rightly attacked zionists for their radical right-wing thoughts and warned their large audiences against it."[67]: 186 Biale, on the other hand, says that Buber's invocation of Blood and Soil "was very far from either racism or integral nationalism."[68]
In his biography ofArthur Ruppin,Etan Bloom says the importation "of the Christian-European model of theMaccabeans" resulted in the establishment of the "Blut und Boden trope... in the emerging Modern Hebrew culture."[69]: 116 Biale also cites poetsYa'akov Cahan andKadish Lieb Silman as propagators of Blood and Soil ideology in Zionist culture.[70]
In 1944,Hannah Arendt criticized Zionism for its insistence on the "politics of 'blood and soil'" and its "uncritical acceptance of German-inspired nationalism," an ideology that "explains peoples... in terms of biological superhuman personalities."[71][72]
North Americanwhite supremacists,white nationalists,Neo-Nazis and members of thealt-right have adopted the slogan. It gained widespread public prominence as a result of the August 2017Unite the Right rally inCharlottesville, Virginia, when participants carryingtorches marched on theUniversity of Virginia campus on the night of 11 August 2017 and were recorded chanting the slogan, among others.[73] The rally was organized to protest the town's planned removal of a statue ofRobert E. Lee.[74] The rally remained in national news through December 2018 thanks to the trial ofJames Alex Fields, a white supremacist who purposefullyran his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing 32-year old paralegal Heather Heyer.[75] The chant was also heard in October 2017 at the"White Lives Matter" rally inShelbyville, Tennessee.[76]
In his 2018 farewell letter, US SenatorJohn McCain stated that America is "a nation of ideals, not blood and soil", specifically rejecting such notions.[77]
Vice-PresidentJD Vance has been accused of supporting the concept of blood and soil in his speeches, for implying that America is not just an idea, but rather a group of people with a shared history, culture and ancestry tied to the land since the founding and the civil war, adding that the notion of America as an idea is "overinclusive and underinclusive. It would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners. Must we admit them tomorrow? But, at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people theADL would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War."[78][79]
Before the Nazis came to power, though, many Jews fell under the influence of the Germanvölkisch thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ideas that ultimately played a role in the rise of Nazism but in their earlier manifestations did not always have such sinister connotations. Despite the anti-Semitic overtones of some of these ideas, the language of 'blood and soil' (Blut und Boden) held wide appeal for Jews searching for new ways of defining themselves.
In other words, the Zionists adopted the concept ofVolk in terms of a nation-race as molded by the notion of Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden) – current in central Europe of the time ... Undoubtedly many of those who expressed themselves at the turn of the century in terms ofBlut und Boden were referring to the abstract, Hegelian term, rather than to the anthropological or biological notion, and surely not to the later National Socialist interpretation of the term. Yet, considering the positivist attempts to impose social and humanitarian principles upon the principles of the natural sciences, it is difficult to accept that persons who adopted this term did not see the real life consequences of such an expression.
... except for Nazi efforts todiagnose the biological belonging of individuals to national-ethnic entities, there is no other example known to me like the Zionists' of an intensive effort to prove the immanent biological belonging or non-belonging of communities to what is considered to be the Jewish entity. [Emphases in original.
... in the light of the subsequent development of German nationalism, essays that were innocent enough when written appeared several decades later in a sinister light, with Martin Buber as an early protagonist ofBlut und Boden and other Zionist ideologists as advocates of thevoelkische idea. Torn out of their historical context they now make embarrassing reading and the critics of Zionism have not failed to make the most of them.
Although Buber shared the language of blood community with the racial thinkers of his time, his view was very far from either racism or integral nationalism.
For Arendt, Herzl's brand of Jewish nationalism mimics the nation-building practices of anti-Semitic governments because it insists on politics of 'blood and soil'—in other words, it requires a racially homogenous population, which inevitably renders minorities a problem (and in Palestine, the so-called "minority" was the Arab people).
Only in its Zionist variant has such a crazy isolationism gone to the extreme of escape from Europe altogether. But its underlying national philosophy is far more general; indeed, it has been the ideology of most central European national movements. It is nothing else than the uncritical acceptance of German-inspired nationalism. This holds a nation to be an eternal organic body, the product of inevitable natural growth of inherent qualities; and it explains peoples, not in terms of political organizations, but in terms of biological superhuman personalities.
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