contributions than for his folklore research or his volumes of fairy tales.23 In his work Volk und Staat (Folk and State), published between 1802 and 1815, he praised the solid and safe possession of the soil inherited from generation to generation. Like Langbehn and de Lagarde after him, he saw the peasant as guardian not only of folklore but of the soil, thus praising him as the protector of the German state. He deserved to be called “the first of the fatherland,” and Arndt, as he had best preserved the original native concepts of custom, law, honor, loyalty and closeness to tradition and the land. He set the peasant up as a sharp contrast to the Bürger (bourgeois) of the cities who had lost interest in both tradition and land while chasing after superficial entertainment.24 While Jahn used German folk songs for his youth programs, thus hoping to revive German national consciousness among the young, Arndt became more engaged in political theory which made substantial use of the Nordic Germanic folk heritage.
The idea that the simple peasant held the key to certain intuitive powers of knowledge which were lacking in civilized man was not the invention of the early Romanticists nor of Herder, but originally came from Rousseau. New to the German interpretation of the “noble savage” concept was its association of the “golden age” with that of the Nordic Germanic past within the context of an “organic” folk state.25 It was mainly due to the influence of Heinrich Wilhelm Riehl that by the middle of the nineteenth century the study of folklore in Germany developed as a science, with close affinities to the field of sociology. In the idyllic and peaceful peasant community Riehl saw the basis for a new society built according to the pattern of medieval estates. For the industrial worker he developed a plan that was to transform him into a member of the folk community: he was to receive a small piece of land that he was expected to cultivate in his free time. Riehl thought that in this way he would not only strengthen his communion with the soil but also with the people of the peasant community. Within this community, he would recapture what he had lost as a result of civilization: his creative self, his individuality.26 Tönnies later developed the sociological contrast between the Gemeinschaft (community) and the Gesellschaft (society), both of which the Nazis adopted for their own purposes while denying the role of the individual within the community.27
We may identify two reasons why the German Romantic writers placed so much emphasis on folklore and folk community. Aside from Schelling’s nature philosophy which influenced many of their thoughts pertaining to the mystical power of the landscape, they faced some real problems with regard to the state of the nation, as well as the German cultural situation at large. Both of these they hoped to remedy. After Napoleon’s conquest, the three hundred diverse little dukedoms and kingdoms that made up Germany were reduced to forty-eight, which still did not bring about political or cultural unity. Officially, Germany did not reach statehood until 1871, and even then there were diverse systems, customs, and traditions that seemed to work against the ideal of the folk community. Nordic Germanic folklore, and peasant folklore in general, were at least a bond in history that was thought to work in favor of national unity.
A general dissatisfaction with the state of German culture motivated many German writers in the second part of the nineteenth century to diagnose the “disease” and to propose some remedies. As a cultural critic, Friedrich Nietzsche attacked German philistinism prevalent at his time in all spheres of life and art, along with rationalism and an extreme type of aestheticism. Other critics, although of lesser intellectual status than he, shared this diagnosis, but instead of advocating the contemplative power of the spiritual “superman” gaining wisdom from social isolation, they strongly urged for a return to the folk community and the “roots” of German ethnicity. Among them, particularly Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn had a strong influence on the development of Volkish thought that would influence children’s literature a few decades later.
De Lagarde bemoaned the fact that there was no German history, no German education, and no German folklore in the cultural life of the nation. People had forgotten their heritage; they trampled thoughtlessly upon the ruins of old monasteries and landmarks and hardly remembered Siegfried, the treasure of the Nibelungen, or the old German folktales. Education paid homage to classical ideals of Greece and Rome while neglecting native folklore, history, and literature. Nevertheless, Lagarde thought it was not too late to revitalize the idea of German ethnicity: “The old Germany is not yet dead . . .” he wrote in his Deutsche Schriften (German Writings). Even though life in the cities resembled that of wilting hothouse plants taken out of their natural environment, there was still hope for the German peasantry “rooted” in German traditions: “Behind the plow and in the forest, at the anvil of the lonely smithy, there we will find it. It helps us to fight our battles and grow the corn in our fields.”29 De Lagarde proposed a Nordic Germanic “Volkish” orientation within an “organic” folk community concerned with native religion, art, science, and literature—albeit under a “God-inspired Kaiser.”
Julius Langbehn, too, advocated a return to the Germanic North. Although he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greek sculpture and spent much of his time in the South, he idealized the Nordic Germanic peasants and men of the North in general as the “true symbols of Volkish strength.” Like de Lagarde he glorified the German peasant, but more as the true representative of the German Volk who might save the nation from cultural despair. To him, the Germans were a peasant folk at heart, an Urvolk (primeval folk), endowed with native intelligence, a sense of independence and creativity. Rembrandt was his model of the Urvolk, of Nordic Germanic man himself. In his work Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as an Educator) he proposed that Germans had to become true to their character and origin, just as Rembrandt had always been. Only in this way would they be able to unfold their mystical creative powers from within and once more rise as a nation. Langbehn strongly recommended a national art policy that would build up German self-confidence through a contemplation of German history and folklore. His book went through eight editions within the first two years following its publication and turned out to be the “Germanic Gospel” for hundreds of educators. Leaders of the German Youth movement reportedly carried it along on hiking trips, where it helped them to formulate their program.30
De Lagarde and Langbehn were strongly anti-semitic. For the Nazis, however, who very much admired both of them, their anti-semitism wasn’t strong enough, as they both believed in the “assimilated Jewry” determined by the degree of conversion to Nordic Germanic and conservative thought, rather than by blood.31 On the other hand, we have in the writings of these “Conservatives” already the idea of a cultural policy based on the concept of German ethnicity. In a more radical way Adolf Bartels and Josef Nadler applied this idea to literature around 1900, thus introducing a racially oriented literary policy32 pursued on an unprecedented scale by the Nazis after 1933. While Bartels and Nadler were the first ones to use the term “decadent literature” in association with “undesirable” cosmopolitan, liberal and Jewish influences, the Nazis later added to it the term “heroic literature” in an effort to promote a “positive” censorship policy based on Nordic Germanic heroic ideals and their own ideology.
This is not to say that all Volkish thought was racist or political, or that Nazism was the inevitable result of a historical evolution. On the contrary, trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries give evidence of a great variety of ideas and concepts existing side by side. The Volkish writers themselves were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes—a fact that the Nazis preferred to ignore. De Lagarde and Langbehn, like Jahn, Arndt, and Riehl, also still believed in the unique individual and his organic role within the folk state—a thought from which the Nazis extracted only the latter part. In selecting passages from their works, National Socialist textbook writers and anthologists worried little about possible misrepresentation of Volkish thought, as long as it helped to support their ideological orientation.33
Plate 1
THE PEASANT AND THE NORDIC PAST
