Volksgemeinschaft

Volksgemeinschaft (German pronunciation: [ˈfɔlksɡəˌmaɪnʃaft]) is a German expression meaning "people's community". This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and it appealed to the idea of breaking down elitism and uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose.

The concept is believed to have originated in Ferdinand Tönnies' theory in his work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft ("Community and Society") of 1887. Decades later, in 1932, Tönnies joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Nazism and protest against their use of his concept. He had his honorary professorship removed when Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1914, the Emperor Wilhelm II proclaimed before the Reichstag the Burgfrieden ("the peace within a castle under siege"), announcing that henceforward all of the regional differences between the different states of the Reich; between rich, middle class and poor; between Roman Catholics and Protestants; and between rural and urban no longer existed and the German people were all one for the duration of the war. During the war, many Germans longed to have the sense of unity that the Burgfrieden inspired continue after the war, and it was during this period that many ideas started to circulate about how to convert the wartime Burgfrieden into a peacetime volksgemeinschaft.

In the aftermath of World War I, the idea of Volksgemeinschaft was used to interpret economic catastrophes and hardship facing Germans during the Weimar Republic era as a common experience of the German nation and to argue for German unity to bring about renewal to end the crisis. It was adopted by the Nazi Party to justify actions against Jews, profiteers, Marxists, and the Allies of World War I, whom the Nazis accused of obstructing German national regeneration, causing national disintegration in 1918 and Germany's defeat in World War I.

...
Wikipedia