Gemeinschaftsdenken in Europa: Das Gesellschaftskonzept ‘Volksheim’ im Vergleich 1900–1938, ed. Detlef Lehnert

Abstract

The concept of community or Gemeinschaft tends to ring alarm bells for historians of twentieth-century Germany. It is hard to ignore its invocation by National Socialists who conceptualised the national or folk community as a racial group in whose name racial and ideological ‘enemies’ could be killed en masse. But even before the Nazis outlined their version of community, the term evoked the pre- or anti-modern. According to völkisch thinkers (among others), people in folk communities knew each other and knew their place, whereas individuals in modern societies were increasingly anonymous and atomised. As a result of the valorisation of community by these now discredited German intellectuals, the term has long been somewhat toxic. Yet, as Detlef Lehnert, the editor of this refreshing history of concepts of community, argues, we lose much if we assume that all early twentieth-century communitarian thinking ultimately tended towards the racial. Accordingly, this book sets out to decontaminate the term Gemeinschaft. The various contributions do this by re-examining the multiplicity of ways in which ideas of community were developed in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors make the interesting decision to use Sweden as the primary case-study for analysing this concept in the first section of the book. They then investigate comparable communitarian concepts in Germany in Part Two before rounding off the volume by considering a number of other international comparative case-studies. Sweden serves as a useful counterpoint to Germany, precisely because communitarian thinking in this north-European state did not lead to exclusionary racism but sustained an exceptionally stable and consensual form of social democratic governance. In spite of this striking difference, the volume highlights the noticeable similarities between the invocations of national community used in Sweden and Germany and between the corporatist practices such language inspired. Furthermore, chapters by Peter Brandt, Lehnert and Wolfgang Hardtwig illustrate how groups across the ideological spectrum in both countries justified their policies or sought to win over opposition by appeal to the national or folk community. Such appeals were often made most forcefully by left-wing, rather than right-wing, groups who contrasted the interests of the community with the interests of pre-existing elites.