Blood and Soil

Fülszöveg

Ecological ideas were being put forward in National Socialist Germany - often in identical words to those used today - by Ricardo Whither Darre, Minister of Agriculture and Peasant Leader from 1933 to 1942. As a scientific racialist who took up and popularised the phrase 'Blood and Soil', he wanted to abolish industrial society altogether and replace it with a purely peasant society based on a system of hereditary peasant nobility.
When Bohemia and Moravia were incorporated into the Reich Darre wrote in his diary that Germany was making the mistake England had made when she had acquired an empire which destroyed her as a nation. Germany had become 'a colossus with feet of clay'. He described Him-mler and the SS as a 'Jesuit in charge of a Praetorian Guard'. Between 1940 and 1942 he was disowned by Hitler and his dream of a Jeffersonian republic of small farmers seemed to belong to another era.
It may be argued that it is impossible to take seriously any ideas put by a minister... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Ecological ideas were being put forward in National Socialist Germany - often in identical words to those used today - by Ricardo Whither Darre, Minister of Agriculture and Peasant Leader from 1933 to 1942. As a scientific racialist who took up and popularised the phrase 'Blood and Soil', he wanted to abolish industrial society altogether and replace it with a purely peasant society based on a system of hereditary peasant nobility.
When Bohemia and Moravia were incorporated into the Reich Darre wrote in his diary that Germany was making the mistake England had made when she had acquired an empire which destroyed her as a nation. Germany had become 'a colossus with feet of clay'. He described Him-mler and the SS as a 'Jesuit in charge of a Praetorian Guard'. Between 1940 and 1942 he was disowned by Hitler and his dream of a Jeffersonian republic of small farmers seemed to belong to another era.
It may be argued that it is impossible to take seriously any ideas put by a minister of the Third Reich. Darre was a racialist; does this not put his ideas 'beyond the pale?' Can his interest in organic farming be anything other than window dressing for a vicious brutal regime? What is the connection between Hitler's 'Green Party' . and the popularity of ecological politics in Germany today?
M
This is a work of high merit. A magnific ently thoroughgoing research approach, coupled with a strongly independent yet balanced judgement have been brought to maximal effect by the author's impressive organisational and stylistic capacities. The whole effect is of a lighted torch of veracity put to the celluloid fronts of stuffed-shirtery. Conventional wisdom on the Nazi phenomenon should never fully recover from this devastatingly wry and comprehensive treatment of themes so central not to German history alone, but to much of world society in the present as well as the past. No one aiming to be respectably informed on agriculture, poli' tics and ecology in our times can afford to ignore Dr. Bramwell's findings.
MICHAEL HURST.
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Dr Anna Bramwell, 38, born in London« daughter of Arctic explorer, anthropologist] Dr David Lewis; educated Arts Educational' School, University College Buckingham doctorate in twentieth century German history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; is now a Junior Research Fellow in history at Trinity College, Oxford. She is married, and and lives in Oxford. Vissza