Völkisch movement

[4] 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.

[7][8] During the period of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed in and enforced a definition of the German Volk which excluded Jews, the Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and other "foreign elements" living in Germany.

[1] If Völkisch writers used terms like Nordische Rasse ("Nordic race") and Germanentum ("Germanic peoples"), their concept of Volk could, however, also be more flexible, and understood as a Gemeinsame Sprache ("common language"),[12] or as an Ausdruck einer Landschaftsseele ("expression of a landscape's soul"), in the words of geographer Ewald Banse.

The word has been rendered as popular, populist, people's, racial, racist, ethnic-chauvinist, nationalistic, communitarian (for Germans only), conservative, traditional, Nordic, romantic – and it means, in fact, all of those.

The völkisch political ideology ranged from a sense of German superiority to a spiritual resistance to 'the evils of industrialization and the atomization of modern man,' wrote military historian David Jablonsky.

[19] Völkisch thinkers tended to idealize the myth of an "original nation", that still could be found at that time in the rural regions of Germany, a form of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites.

"[8] The notion of "people" (Volk) subsequently turned into the idea of a "racial essence",[4] and Völkisch thinkers referred to the term as a birth-giving and quasi-eternal entity—in the same way as they would write on "the Nature"—rather than a sociological category.

[21] As they sought to overcome what they felt was the malaise of a scientistic and rationalistic modernity, Völkisch authors imagined a spiritual solution in a Volk's essence perceived as authentic, intuitive, even "primitive", in the sense of an alignment with a primordial and cosmic order.

[23] Although the primary interest of the Germanic mystical movement was the revival of native pagan traditions and customs (often set in the context of a quasi-theosophical esotericism), a marked preoccupation with purity of race came to motivate its more politically oriented offshoots, such as the Germanenorden (the Germanic or Teutonic Order), a secret society founded at Berlin in 1912 which required its candidates to prove that they had no "non-Aryan" bloodlines and required from each a promise to maintain purity of his stock in marriage.

Local groups of the sect met to celebrate the summer solstice, an important neopagan festivity in völkisch circles (and later in Nazi Germany), and more regularly to read the Eddas as well as some of the German mystics.

[25] Meanwhile, the community of Monte Verità ('Mount Truth') which emerged in 1900 at Ascona, Switzerland is described by the Swiss art critic Harald Szeemann as "the southernmost outpost of a far-reaching Nordic lifestyle-reform, that is, alternative movement".

[8] By May 1924, essayist Wilhelm Stapel perceived the movement as capable of embracing and reconciling the whole nation: in his view, Völkisch had an idea to spread instead of a party programme and were led by heroes — not by "calculating politicians".

"[43] As of 2021, 32 neo-völkisch organizations in the United States are designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, with the largest being the Asatru Folk Assembly.