Volkstum

Volkstum (lit. folkdom or folklore, though the meaning is wider than the common usage of the term "folklore") is the entire utterances of a Volk or of an ethnic minority over its lifetime, expressing a " Volkscharakter" which the people of such an ethnicity allegedly have in common. It was the defining idea of the Völkisch movement. German nationalists coined the term in the context of Germany's "Freedom Wars" of 1813-1814, in marked and conscious opposition to ideals of the French Revolution such as universal human rights. This sense of the word is now criticised in academia, though it is still in use in the protection of ethnic minorities and is a legal standard in Austria. In the Age of Enlightenment the adjective volkstümlich usually meant the cultural achievements of uneducated Germans as well as popular culture. The "Volksdichtung" (People's Poetry) was 'high' literature, the culture of distinction, and partly devalued the elite education and partly idealised it. The concept was not yet tied to a certain nation, and attributed some of its characteristics to non-German culture. Justus Möser (1720–1794), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) and other German Romantics gradually increased the concept by their actions into an unspoiled, organic, person liable closed and eternal "People's character" (Volkscharakter) and charged against the monarchies then dominating Germany. Möser already bordered on being the "Vater der Volkskunde" (Father of Ethnology) the Deutschtum against the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and against the French Revolution. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Deutsches Volksthum 1810) is considered the inventor of the noun Volkstum. He translated the foreign word Nation and thus moved it into an "unerring something" in every Volk. For him and for Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), German Volkstum was a revolutionary source not only against the foreign domination of Napoleonic France, but also against dynasties and the church, with the word Enlightenment becoming less and less used.