Ideology of the Volk

by Jan-Ruth Mills

Subject:

Writing and Reading, 8th Grade Social Studies, World History

Duration:

One day for Middle School Students. 3 days for High School Students.

Grade level:

Meets Arizona Reading and Writing Standards 8-12. See below for Social Studies Standards

Purpose:

Students will understand how differences in 19th century German Romanticism and theories of communities as organic entities were influenced by Napoleonic wars and rise of nationalism. Students will understand how theories of the German Volk as an organic entity contributed to the susceptibility of Germans to Social Darwinism and resulted in the secularization of German Christianity. All of these factors contributed to defining German Jews first as “other” and eventually as a physical danger to the “Volk.”

Arizona Standards:

Social Studies, Writing, Reading and World History

Assessment/Rubrics

Student Handouts on Rubrics for Collaborative Writing on Visual and Written texts based on Six Traits required by AIMS Test

Objectives:

Students evaluate differences in texts (primary visual and written texts as well as secondary historical narrative) to understand the social, political and economic developments of 18th and 19th century Germany. Students will understand impact of Napoleonic wars and Congress of Vienna on German nationalism, effects of Industrial Revolution on urban growth and social impact of industrialization on nationalism and political and economic theories peculiar to Germany (such as the composition of the Volk) and how these contributed to National Socialisms ability to make racist theories into national policies acceptable to majority of Germans.

Preparation

Print out “Creating Otherness out of the Air: the German Volk and Antisemitism.”
Preamble of the Declaration of Independence Pair Share Activity
Write on board:

A metaphor is comparisons not using “like” or “as.”
Metaphors often compare an abstract concept with a concrete object.

My love is a red rose.

Day One

5 minutes
Discuss metaphors. Ask students to come up with some of their own. I like to ask them if they can picture this: My love is a rose. Then I ask them to picture this. “My love is an oudad.” Can they draw my love? No? Because no one has seen an oudad before, so they don’t have an image to compare the abstract “love” with an “oudad.” So the comparison doesn’t work. An oudad is an African mountain goat. Metaphors only provide clarity if the reader can picture the concrete object to which an abstract concept is being compared.

How are metaphors useful for understanding who we are as a nation? Explain enlightened rationalist ideas that a society is the some of its members: Americans tend to think of communities made up of individuals who are all separate beings who were “created equal” as the Declaration of Independence states, and that our nation is a choice, that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

10 minutes
Pair and Share reading the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

How would our society change if we changed this essential metaphor for who we are and what we are built on? This lesson explores how a different understanding of “nation” affected Germans.

Ask students to brainstorm what it means to be “rooted” in a community. Can this be literally true? What does it mean to “put down roots” or to “pull up ones roots?” What is this metaphor meant to communicate about people? Communities? What happens if we are separated? What could this metaphor mean for a family forced to move? What does it mean to “have no roots?” How do people become “rootless?” What does it mean to be one among many? What are our responsibilities to the communities in which we live? How are we connected? How separate?

We may see “being rooted” as a metaphor, but what if people believed communities were living organisms of which the individual was just a part? What happens when one part of a living organism is pulled away? What happens to a leaf separated from a tree? We use phrases like the “body politic,” but what if there really was a “body” to our nation?

But what if communities themselves were seen as living beings? What would happen to one of its “members” if it were pulled away from the whole? If we nation literally had “roots” like a plant in “American soil,” how would we feel if a weed moved in next door?

10 minutes
Write “estate—social standing or rank” on board. Explain that  this was once a term used to describe the political power invested in certain classes—peasants, nobles, clergy. These groups did not have equal power.

Ask students to pair/share as they read the “Early Theories of a Volk among Equal Völker” from first page of “Creating Otherness out of the Air: the German Volk and Antisemitism.” On back of Preamble Pair/Share activity, ask students to draw Herder’s concept of the humanity: divided into Voelker, and the Voelker divided into estates.

15 minutes Discuss what it means to believe that national history is “divinely revealed?” Compare/contrast this to the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence that humans are “created equal” and that governments derive power from the governed? If the American colonists believed that the history of England was “divinely revealed” would they have resisted the King of England? What does it mean to say that if their rights are violated, individuals have the right to change governments? What choice do individuals have in a “divinely revealed history?” What if an individual objects to his or her government’s actions in a nation whose history is “divinely revealed” and whose people make up an “organic entity”? Can a limb rebel against a tree? What happens if it does? Does this concept allow for difference? For diversity? What if diversity was seen as damaging to that “organic” entity? How much difference would be tolerated?

Collect group work.

Homework:

Ask students to write a metaphor for their concept of America and then draw a picture of the concrete object that makes the abstract concept clearer. Or if many students have Internet: Ask students to listen to Selma Neuhauser and/or Gerd Strauss’ experiences from Tucsonsurvivors.org. How where Selma and Gerd treated by the governments of Germany and Austria? As equals? What metaphor would students write/draw to explain their treatment by the Nazis?

Second Hour

Preparation

Print out Group Work on Volk for groups of three. If possible, allow each student to have a slide of the illustration. I also have a few handouts of the reading on hand in case anyone has forgotten theirs.

20 minutes.

Ask students to read or read together the second page of  “Creating Otherness out of the Air: the German Volk and Antisemitism.” Ask students to explain what being “rooted” came to mean for those seen as “outsiders,” particularly for Jews. If students have listened to or can listen to Gerd and Selma’s experiences in 1939 Germany and Austria, this can help prepare them for the group work.

20-25 minutes (depending on how accustomed students are to being in groups)

Explain to students that they are going to look at an illustration from a children’s book published in 1938. When asked, many students will be able to identify 1938 as close to the time that World War One began. Complete illustrations from this text can be found at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/thumb.htm. Selma and Gerd’s experiences with Kristallnacht are also relevant context.

Have students break up into groups and examine the illustration and complete group work.  

10 minutes
Listen to reports from groups. Discuss body language of figures in drawing. Students may notice that the farmer in the background is sharpening his scythe. After discussing their answers, one might ask them to analyze the farm tools. These tools date back to at least the 17th century, indicating that these peasants are working with tools which themselves indicate centuries of tradition on the land…a völkisch ideal. If you can project the image, note how the colors of the farmers’ clothing are in natural tones whereas the figure in the background is wearing a grey modern suit. What in nature is grey? Does the figure in the suit appear to be part of this scene? Notice that he is sweating while the working people seem to be comfortable. Does he “belong” here?

Ask groups to discuss this scene in terms of the second to the last paragraph about stereotypes of Jews as moneylenders intent on destroying the rural life of the Volk. What details seem to support that this is an example of that kind of antisemitic propaganda?

Homework:

Ask students to write an explanation of the scene using the reading and class discussion. Remind them that they must provide evidence from the illustration in the form of exact details of what they see. Their evidence from the reading will be paraphrasing or quoting the text to support their conclusion.

Third Day

Materials:

Print out Group work for Mühlheim/Ruhr Federation

10-15 minutes:

Before breaking students into groups, explain that they will be examining a translation of a document from a union of Christian churches dated the same year (1938) as the children’s book illustration they examined the day before and the same year Selma lived through Kristallnacht in Austria and Gerd witnessed the influx of German Jews into Buchenwald the same night. One might explain that although the churches in question are Protestant, the importance of the document does not lie in the particular Christian denomination: although some individual pastors and priests protested, neither the Catholic Church in Germany nor the Lutheran Church, the largest Protestant denomination in Germany, officially protested the treatment of Jews in pre-war Germany. Students are going to examine the document for what it reveals about beliefs about the German Volk, the relationship of German Jews to the Volk, and about the Germans responsibility to unquestioningly obey their state. Because we enjoy separation of church and state as a result of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .), the statement of a church that it will support the state regardless of the states persecution of citizens on the basis of physical handicap or religion may be shocking. Here one might review the conception of the Volk as an organic entity vulnerable to disease or exposure to “otherness” rather than a collection of individuals who chose to associate with one another and form a community of equals.

Extract from the Constitution of the Congregational Federation Mühlheim/Ruhr
Translated by F.B.Voll

Translator’s Preliminary Remarks:

The Congregational Federation is a free-church (in contrast to state church) union of Pentecostal congregations which recognize the Lutheran practice of child baptism and whose members therefore are able to remain members of the Lutheran Church in Germany (in contrast to most other Pentecostal churches, which only recognize the baptism of believing adults and can therefore not remain or become members of the state church).

The constitution from which Article Seven has been extracted came into effect on October 13, 1938, and was signed by Humburg, Schober, Wiechert in behalf of the Main Conference of the Brothers.

Article 5 (Means of the Federation) was changed according to a resolution of the Main Conference of the Brothers. However, Article 7 (Attitude of the Federation towards Volk and Reich) was not changed.

I have not translated Volk because it is used here in the sense of the Nazi concept of peoplehood. Reich (empire) meant the Third Reich. In the Nazi-construct of history the First Reich was that of Charles the Great, the Second that of the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Third Reich, of course, that of Hitler's Germany.
The constitution came into effect just 27 days before the Reichskristallnacht.

20 minutes:

Break students up into groups and pass out Group Work on Mühlheim/Ruhr Federation

15-20 minutes:

Listen and discuss responses. Students may also want to discuss the murder of disables people as well, as there seems to be a clear reference to this in the “incurable and inherited diseases” of paragraph three. It’s estimated that 200,000 disabled people were murdered and 400,000 people were sterilized.

Final Assessment
Consider the art of Diego Rivera and Marc Chagall. How do they represent the individual in relationship to others? To nature? Draw a picture which represents your understanding of yourself in relationship to your national community. Write paragraphs comparing/contrasting your vision of your relationship to others with the understanding of the Volk as an organic entity from the reading.

Resources:

http://www.diegorivera.com/murals/index.php
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/chagall_marc.html

Many thanks to Fritz Voll for his insight, assistance and translation of the Constitution of the Congregational Federation Mühlheim/Ruhr