Visions of Community in Nazi Germany

When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 they promised to create a new, harmonious society under the leadership of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. The concept of Volksgemeinschaft - 'the people's community' - enshrined the Nazis' vision of society'; a society based on racist, social-Darwinist, anti-democratic, and nationalist thought. The regime used Volksgemeinschaft to define who belonged to the National Socialist 'community' and who did not. Being accorded the status of belonging granted citizenship rights, access to the benefits of the welfare state, and opportunities for advancement, while these who were denied the privilege of belonging lost their right to live. They were shamed, excluded, imprisoned, murdered. Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazis' project of social engineering, realized by state action, by administrative procedure, by party practice, by propaganda, and by individual initiative. Everyone deemed worthy of belonging was called to participate in its realization. Indeed, this collective notion was directed at the individual, and unleashed an enormous dynamism, which gave social change a particular direction. The Volksgemeinschaft concept was not strictly defined, which meant that it was rather marked by a plurality of meaning and emphasis which resulted in a range of readings in the Third Reich, drawing in people from many social and political backgrounds. Visions of Community in Nazi Germany scrutinizes Volksgemeinschaft as the Nazis' central vision of community. The contributors engage with individual appropriations, examine projects of social engineering, analyze the social dynamism unleashed, and show how deeply private lives were affected by this murderous vision of society.

Martina Steber is Research Fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich previously she was based at the German Historical Institute London. Her first book Ethnische Gewissheiten: Die Ordnung des Regionalen vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (2010) is an enquiry into the significance of regionality in German political culture in the first half of the twentieth century. She has published on the history of historiography, and on contemporary British and German political history. Currently she is co-editing a collection which scrutinizes German ideas of 'the West' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and completing a book on political languages of conservatism in West Germany and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. Bernhard Gotto is research fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. In 2006 he published Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik: Administrative Normalität und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung 1933-1945, which reevaluates the impact of urban administration in Nazi Germany. As well as several books on economic history in the 20th century, he has co-edited two volumes on crisis and the perception of crisis in Germany and France in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2012 he has coordinated a Leibniz Graduate School on Disappointment in the 20th Century. His current research project scrutinizes the effects of disappointment on democracy in West Germany from 1960 to 1989.

- Preface - Glossary - 1: Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto: Volksgemeinschaft: Writing the Social History of the Nazi Regime - Part I: Volksgemeinschaft: Controversies - 2: Ian Kershaw: Volksgemeinschaft: Potential and Limitations of the Concept - 3: Michael Wildt: Volksgemeinschaft: A Modern Perspective on National Socialist Society - 4: Ulrich Herbert: Echoes of the Volksgemeinschaft - Part II: A New Frame of Reference: Ideology, Administrative Practices, and Social Control - 5: Lutz Raphael: Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung - 6: Armin Nolzen: The NSDAP's Operational Codes after 1933 - 7: Thomas Schaarschmidt: Mobilizing German Society for War: The National Socialist Gaue - 8: Jane Caplan: Registering the Volksgemeinschaft: Civil Status in Nazi Germany 1933-9 - 9: Gerhard Wolf: Exporting Volksgemeinschaft: The Deutsche Volksliste in Annexed Upper Silesia - Part III: The Individual and the Regime: The Promises of Volksgemeinschaft - 10: Andreas Wirsching: Volksgemeinschaft and the Illusion of 'Normality' from the 1920s to the 1940s - 11: Birthe Kundrus: Greasing the Palm of the Volksgemeinschaft? Consumption under National Socialism - 12: Nicole Kramer: Volksgenossinnen on the German Home Front: An Insight into Nazi Wartime Society - 13: Frank Bajohr: 'Community of Action' and Diversity of Attitudes: Reflections on Mechanisms of Social Integration in National Socialist Germany, 1933-45 - 14: Rüdiger Hachtmann: Social Spaces of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft in the Making: Functional Elites and Club Networking - Part IV: Volksgemeinschaft: A Rationale for Violence - 15: Christopher R. Browning: The Holocaust: Basis and Objective of the Volksgemeinschaft? - 16: Sven Keller: Volksgemeinschaft and Violence: Some Reflections on Interdependencies - 17: Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann: Social Control and the Making of the Volksgemeinschaft - Part V: The Limits of Volksgemeinschaft Policies - 18: Johannes Hürter: The Military Elite and Volksgemeinschaft - 19: Willi Oberkrome: National Socialist Blueprints for Rural Communities and their Resonance in Agrarian Society - 20: Richard Bessel: The End of the Volksgemeinschaft - Bibliography