Volk (German word)

In German, the word Volk may mean folk (simple people), people in the ethnic sense, and nation.

Volk is commonly used as the first, determining part (head) of compound nouns such as Volksentscheid (plebiscite, literally "decision of/by the people") or Völkerbund (League of Nations), or the car manufacturer Volkswagen (literally, "people's car").

19th century and early 20th century

A number of völkisch movements existed prior to World War I but more recently they are mainly connected to Nazi German ,.[1] Combining interest in folklore, racism, ecology, occultism and romanticism with ethnic nationalism, their ideologies were a strong influence on the Nazi party, which itself was inspired by Adolf Hitler's membership of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), even though Hitler in Mein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use, although he used it often, especially in connection with racial Germans or Volksdeutsche who we would today call "ethnic Germans" . Today, the term völkisch continues to be used in a non-racial context or else it is largely restricted to historical contexts describing a racist view held in the 19th century and early 20th century after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Third Reich[2]

Nazi era

During the years of the Third Reich, the term Volk became heavily used in nationalistic political slogans, particularly in slogans such as Volk ohne Raum — "(a) people or race without space" or Völkischer Beobachter ("popular or racial observer"), an NSDAP party newspaper. Also the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ("One nation or race, one empire, one leader"); the compound word Herrenvolk, translated as "master race"; and the term Volksgemeinschaft, translated as "people's community".

Even though Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf often confusedly applied specific biological and zoological terms such as race, species, and others, the Nazi-era use of Volk could sometimes, depending on context, be interpreted as "race", "Germanic", or "Indo - European." In Nazi propaganda and the confusing writings of racist thinkers, the use of "Rasse" and "Volk" were often not distinguishable as 'race' and 'people' but had overlapping meanings. In the writings of leading Nazi racist thinkers, such as Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Guenther several Volk or peoples made up a Rasse or race, so these two terms did not always denote the same concept during the Nazi years. The Deutsche Volk or German people were considered part of the Nordic Rasse or Northern race which officially included the Scandinavians, the English, and the Dutch as well, and represented the ideal superior 'race', so Volk did not always equal German either. Nazi - era racist views rather simplistically differentiated Nordic, Western, Eastern, and Dinaric 'races' and gave them the phenotypes associated with these simplistic geographic regions. Nazi-era publications on pre-history only differed whether their Germanic race equalled the Indo-European race or the Germanic race itself was part of a family of Indo-European races, since indogermanisch was the common German term for Indo-European. Thus the term Volk, in the vision of Nazis, had a very broad set of meanings, and referred sometimes to the entirety of German nation and other times to the Nordic 'race'.[3]

Today

Because Volk is the generic German word for "people" in the ethnic sense today as well as for "people entitled to vote" (Wahlvolk), its use does not necessarily denote any particular political views in post-1945 Germany. However, because of its past, the word is rarely used, with Bevölkerung ("population") serving as a substitute. Especially the adjective "völkisch" (meaning "of the Volk" or "for the Volk") is only used to describe attitudes and political concepts linked to the National Socialist racist idea of "Volk". However Frauke Petry of the AfD right-wing party pleaded to use the word in a positive way again.[4] Meanwhile Volk still persists to be used in its meaning as "for the simple people", especially in advertising. The German Bild Zeitung yellow press newspaper uses the word to promote various products from computers to toothbrushes, advertising them as simple, tested and affordable for everybody.[5]

"Wir sind das Volk!" ("We are the people!") was a chant used by the Monday demonstrators during the peaceful demonstrations of 1989/1990 to end the DDR and bring down the Berlin Wall. The slogan meant that the "simple people" would no longer endure the dictatorship, and wanted to reform the political system of the GDR. It did not necessarily express support for the idea of a reunification. However, the slogan was also altered to "Wir sind ein Volk!" ("We are one people") during the course of the protests, indicating the ethnic meaning of Volk, where the division of Germany was regarded as unjust because of an alleged common ethnic identity of all Germans.

In 2015 the slogan "Wir sind das Volk" became popular again among the PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against Islamisation of the West) movement, and various groups that claimed to stand in the tradition of Monday Demonstrations. Here however the ethnic connotation of "Volk" quickly became obvious. While the slogan "Wir sind ein Volk" was no longer in use since the reunification, the slogan "Wir sind das Volk" was given a new meaning. Now the word "Wir" was used by right wing protesters to refer to themselves, in order to distinguish from migrants and so-called "Gutmenschen" ("Good People", meaning Germans that supported refugees). After Germany decided to give shelter to a growing number of refugees, especially from Syria, in 2015, right wing groups as well as more modest movements, that were referred to by the media as "the concerned citizens", started to use the slogan. They wanted to indicate that, according to their beliefs, the Volk (meaning only ethnic Germans) should have more rights than immigrants and especially refugees. The similarity to the National Socialist Volk conception was pointed out by various media.[6] The protesters also made references to the protests against the dictatorship of the GDR, since they regarded it as their right to decide whether the state should give shelter to refugees or not. This however is a constitutional right in Germany, that can not be changed unless the constitution is changed with a two-thirds majority in the parliament. The Reichstag building in Berlin, in which the parliament resides, still bears the inscription "Dem deutschen Volke" ("For the people of Germany") from 1916 over its western gate, demonstrating the ambiguity of the word.

Cognates in other Germanic language

Folk has a cognate in almost every other Germanic language, all deriving from Proto-Germanic *fulka, some are listed below:

In all Germanic languages, the variant of "folk" means "people" or something related to the people.

The English word "folk" is derived from a Germanic noun, *fulka meaning "people" or "army" (i.e. a crowd as opposed to "a people" in a more abstract sense of clan or tribe). The English word folk has cognates in most of the other Germanic languages. Folk may be a Germanic root that is unique to the Germanic languages, although Latin vulgus, "the common people", has been suggested as a possible cognate.[7]

English word folk

The Modern English word folk, derives from Old English folc meaning "common people", "men", "tribe" or "multitude". The Old English noun itself came from Proto-Germanic *fulka which perhaps originally referred to a "host of warriors". Compare Old Norse folk meaning "people" but more so "army" or "detachment", German Gefolge ("retinue"), and Lithuanian pulkas meaning "crowd". The latter is considered to be an early Lithuanian loanword from Germanic origin, cf. Belarusian полк - połk meaning regiment and German Pulk for a group of people standing together.

The word became colloquialized (usually in the plural folks) in English in the sense "people", and was considered inelegant by the beginning of the 19th century. It re-entered academic English through the invention of the word folklore in 1846 by the antiquarian William J. Thoms (1803–85) as an Anglo-Saxonism. This word revived folk in a modern sense of "of the common people, whose culture is handed down orally", and opened up a flood of compound formations, e.g. folk art (1921), folk-hero (1899), folk-medicine (1898), folk-tale (1891), folk-song (1847), folk-dance (1912). Folk-music is from 1889; in reference to the branch of modern popular music (associated with Greenwich Village in New York City) here it dates from 1958.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/deutsch-englisch/v%f6lkisch.html
  2. ↑ Beer, M. and Seewann, G. (2004) Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen - Inhalte – Personen. Munich: Oldenbourg.
  3. ↑ Literature and Film in the Third Reich - Page 351 Karl-Heinz Schoeps - 2004 In essence, Volk referred in that period to "the entirety of the German nation as a political, racial, cultural, and fated 'community by blood.'"2
  4. ↑ "Frauke Petry Pleads to Use "Völkisch" in a Positive Way Again". Welt. Retrieved 21 June 2017.
  5. ↑ "Bild-Zeitung - From Volks-Bibles to Volks-Toothbrushes". Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved 21 June 2017.
  6. ↑ "Wir sind das Volk - The Call for Freedom Becomes a Slogan of Hate (German)". Deutschland Funk. Retrieved 21 June 2017.
  7. ↑ Calvert Watkins (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, second edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) ISBN 0-618-08250-6

References

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