Livy relates the body in connection with the secession of the plebeians in 494 BC with the fable "The Belly and the Members" in which the rebellious limbs refuse to serve the stomach and are therefore no longer nourished.
The Deutsches Wörterbuch, for example, traces the term back to the History of the French Revolution by Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, who wrote of the "people as a living organism" which is "a healthy state principle ... at the same time refreshes the blood circulation in the entire national body".
From this it obviously follows that not only the latter, the cultural goods, but also the generative human hereditary values are the subject of politics, at least of a prudent and far-sighted policy.The First World War and its immediate consequences represented a turning point in the use of organic metaphors.
While the great power of the German "people's body" had been described previously, the national state during the Weimar Republic was mainly interpreted through the categories of illness and recovery.
Politicians like Theodor Lewald called for compulsory sport to be introduced as a replacement for the lost conscription in order to strengthen the body national.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler used the concept of the body national both in anti-Semitic and in racial hygiene and anti-Marxist contexts as a reference for alleged illness and poisoning.
Thus the people does not just consist of the sum of the current living comrades, but everything that was, is and will be of the same blood belongs to it.Overall, the concept of the body national became an omnipresent metaphor during the Nazi era to describe the German population as a biological-racial unit that protects against various types of threats, or heals and cleanses those from various diseases, pests and parasites would.
Thorsten Hallig, Julia Schäfer and Jörg Vögele stated that "the scientific foundations or lines of tradition and the intellectual climate within which the eugenic extermination policy of the National Socialists ... could take place were already in the political debates about the degeneration of the 'People's body' of the Weimar Republic".
Hans Asperger used the term when deporting unwanted children to the Am Spiegelgrund killing center in Vienna (after the Anschluss): In the new Germany, we doctors have taken on a multitude of new duties in addition to our old ones.
The historian Axel Flügel [de], on the other hand, has criticized such an overly "formal view" that overlooks conceptual breaks in the use of the respective vocabulary.
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."
Wolfgang Koellmann [de] 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.