Rise
The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts espousing racialism and national romanticism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism. This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis. Major figures in 19th century German agrarian romanticism included Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who argued that the peasantry represented the foundation of the German people and conservatism.
Ultranationalists predating the Nazis often supported country living as more healthy, with the Artaman League sending urban children to the countryside to work in part in hopes of transforming them into Wehrbauern.
Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise of Nazi Germany; he wrote a book called Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility Based On Blood And Soil) in 1930, which proposed a systemic eugenics program, arguing for breeding as a cure-all for all the problems plaguing the state. Darré was an influential member of the Nazi party and a noted race theorist who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities. Prior to their ascension to power, Nazis called for a return from the cities to the countryside. This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.
Read more about this topic: Blood And Soil
Famous quotes containing the word rise:
“Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himself be raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“... the French know that you must not succeed you must rise from the ashes and how could you rise from the ashes if there were no ashes, but the Germans never think of ashes and so when there are ashes there is no rising, not at all and every day and in every way this is clearer and clearer.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)