The ''Volkskörper'', literally translated as either "national body" or "body national", was the "ethnic
body politic
The body politic is a polity—such as a city, realm, or state—considered metaphorically as a physical body. Historically, the sovereign is typically portrayed as the body's head, and the analogy may also be extended to other anatomical part ...
" in German population science beginning in the second half of the 19th century. It was increasingly defined in terms of racial biology and was incorporated into
Nazi racial theories
The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several Racial hierarchy, racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its racist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, genocide, extermination, racism, ethnic persecut ...
. After 1945 the term was largely used synonymously with
population
Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...
in anthropology and geography (similarly to ''
ethnicity
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they Collective consciousness, collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, ...
'' or ''
nation-state
A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are (broadly or ideally) con ...
''). In political parlance, however, the ''Volkskörper'' served as a metaphor for an organic and biological understanding of the unity between the ''
Volk
The German noun ''Volk'' () translates to :wikt:people, people,
both uncountable in the sense of ''people'' as in a crowd, and countable (plural ''Völker'') in the sense of ''People, a people'' as in an ethnic group or nation (compare the E ...
'' and the ''
Volksgemeinschaft
''Volksgemeinschaft'' () is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", Richard Grunberger, ''A Social History of the Third Reich'', London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, p. 44. "national community", or "racial community" ...
'', its broader society. In German politics during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was used especially in
anti-Semitic
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...
and
racial hygiene
The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics). It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an anim ...
texts to semantically differentiate the ''Volk'', conceived as a biological and racial unit, from so-called "parasites", "pests" and "diseases". In this naturalistic sense "excretion" was construed in such 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
(German, ) was a campaign of Homicide#By state actors, mass murder by involuntary euthanasia which targeted Disability, people with disabilities and the mentally ill in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-WWII, war trials against d ...
''.
''Körper'' metaphors in political language
The metaphorical transfer of medical terms and language to the areas of society, politics and history can be traced back to antiquity.
Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
, for example, understands the human body in the ''
Republic
A republic, based on the Latin phrase ''res publica'' ('public affair' or 'people's affair'), is a State (polity), state in which Power (social and political), political power rests with the public (people), typically through their Representat ...
Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
uses the comparison of organisms to explain the structure of society.
Livy
Titus Livius (; 59 BC – AD 17), known in English as Livy ( ), was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled , covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding i ...
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.
A circulation metaphor emerged from the medical blood circulation model developed by
William Harvey
William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who made influential contributions to anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, pulmonary and systemic circulation ...
in the 16th century, which had a great impact in political texts.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered t ...
already took up the circulation model in ''
Leviathan
Leviathan ( ; ; ) is a sea serpent demon noted in theology and mythology. It is referenced in several books of the Hebrew Bible, including Psalms, the Book of Job, the Book of Isaiah, and the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch. Leviathan is of ...
'', while the circulation metaphor experienced a boom in the 18th century. Body metaphors gained special importance in the French Revolution. Representatives of the Third Estate especially took up metaphors of the blood circulation and medical vitalism in order to formulate new ideals of social equality.
Folk body in the 19th century
In this form, the concept of the people's body also appeared in the German language. The ''
Deutsches Wörterbuch
The ''Deutsches Wörterbuch'' (; "German Dictionary"), abbreviated ''DWB'', is the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of the German language in existence.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".
Reference term of anti-Semitism
Under the influence of evolutionary theory and
social Darwinism
Charles Darwin, after whom social Darwinism is named
Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economi ...
, the metaphor of the folk body became increasingly naturalistic in the last third of the 19th century. This was intended to express an unconditional dependence of various social groups on one another. Conversely, authors and publicists used the term to pathologize social groups they particularly rejected. The term was initially used primarily by anti-Semites to justify the need to "exclude" Jews from society as allegedly "harmful elements".
The court preacher Adolf Stöcker put it as follows:
In this way, the "German people", but also the "Jewish people", were declared to be an organic whole and the existence of one people in the other was impossible.
Body national in population sciences
The body national was not only a political metaphor, but also found its way into scientific linguistic usage. Especially in disciplines such as population statistics, population theory and genealogy, which, so to speak, formed the hard core of the diffuse discipline "population science", the question of the economic "human value" has been raised since the middle of the 19th century. In this context, the "people's body" was not necessarily linked to the selectionist aspects of
Social Darwinism
Charles Darwin, after whom social Darwinism is named
Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economi ...
.
Rudolf Goldscheid
Rudolf Goldscheid (12 August 1870 – 6 October 1931) was an Austrian writer and sociologist, co-founder of the German Sociological Association, known for his theory of human economy () and for developing the topic of fiscal sociology. He has b ...
's powerful concept of "human economy", for example, defined the human being as "biological capital" and explicitly cited reproductive hygiene "as a means of enhancing the quality of the national body". In addition, however, he counted above all a "productivity policy" such as child protection, maternity protection, youth welfare, maternity insurance, etc. and rejected selectionist measures in the sense of
selective breeding
Selective breeding (also called artificial selection) is the process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits (characteristics) by choosing which typically animal or plant m ...
.
Towards the end of the 19th century and especially after the
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, however, the population policy approach that advocated such negative measures became radicalized. Racial hygiene also took up the concept of the people's body. Wilhelm Schallmayer, for example, defined "hereditary hygiene" as a science that had to administer "the hereditary constitution of the national body". He argued:
Body national after the First World War
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. The statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer summarized in 1932 in his book ''People Without Youth'' the widespread concern about the "progressive aging and senescence of our body politic" in the dramatic words: "The German people driving biologically into the abyss". The Transylvanian Johann Bredt plagiarised the work with his book title ''People's State Research'', published in 1930 in Breslau.
Body national in Nazism
In Nazi Germany, these different lines of development were combined. The "people's body" was often synonymous with the "racial" structure of a "people". In ''
Mein Kampf
(; ) is a 1925 Autobiography, autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The book outlines many of Political views of Adolf Hitler, Hitler's political beliefs, his political ideology and future plans for Nazi Germany, Ge ...
'', 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. The law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring was justified with the "will of the government" to "purify the national body and gradually eradicate the pathological genetic makeup".
Population scientists like understood the people's bodies during Nazism explicitly in a '' völkisch'' sense, not just as "population":
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
Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger (, ; 18 February 1906 – 21 October 1980) was an Austrian physician. Noted for his early studies on atypical neurology, specifically in children, he is the namesake of the former autism spectrum disorder Asperger ...
Anschluss
The (, or , ), also known as the (, ), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938.
The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a "German Question, Greater Germany") arose after t ...
''):
The relationship of German population science to the racial foundation of "national body research" under National Socialism is controversial. The sociologist , for example, has argued that the population scientists, who are mostly trained in sociological thinking, have always understood the "breakdown of the national body" in terms of social statistics and are less interested in the supposed homogeneity of a race than in what is called the stratification of the population in the sociological sense would. The historian , on the other hand, has criticized such an overly "formal view" that overlooks conceptual breaks in the use of the respective vocabulary. Using the example of Gunther Ipsen's "folk history", he points out that this form of population research "has fallen behind the differentiated state of population science that weighs a large number of regional, social and cultural factors".
Semantic restructuring after 1945
It was first and foremost 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 kind 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 business people); connubium the unification of the genus in the total 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 address in 1951, Thomas Dehler wanted to describe the
German Trade Union Confederation
The German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded ...
as a "malignant tumor in the German national body", but after the manuscript became known and the DGB intervened with Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman and politician who served as the first Chancellor of Germany, chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of th ...
, he decided not to use this formulation. In the works by Gunther Ipsen, but also those on German population history by Gerhard Mack Roth, however, there remained the concept of the ''body politic'' until the 1970s. 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.