blood and soil (antedating)

[Victor Steinbok]

Blood and Soil is a calque from German Blut und Boden that was used in
Nazi ideology to refer to shared characteristics of all Germans (and the
"right of return" to German territories). However, a quick investigation
reveals that it is much more than that.

OED has quotes from 1940 and 1957 (blood n. 3.f.)

> 3. f. blood and soil  [German /blut und boden/] , a Nazi catchphrase,
> used /attrib./ to denote Nazi members or ideology.

This can easily be pushed to 1936--with a lot of ghits from 1938-9.

http://goo.gl/0qfgF
German Agricultural Policy, 1918-1934: The Development of a National
Philosophy Toward Agriculture in Postwar Germany. John Bradshaw Holt. 1936
Chapter XIX. "Blood and Soil".

There is also a subsection on /"Blood and Soil" Ideology/.

Note the use of "postwar" in the book title--this suggests, along with
the book's font, that the GB date tag is correct. WorldCat confirms the
date for the UNC publication but also adds a listing for the 1975
reprint. http://goo.gl/yKhsu


References to "blood and soil" can also be found in the Christian
Century for 1936 http://goo.gl/0Ff46 (GB says 1935, but that's almost
certainly wrong for the hit pages.) They also show up in the 1936
biography of Hitler:

http://goo.gl/ZevGd
p. 8
> "/Blood and soil/" haunts politics and literature, and gives literary
> men of all tendencies a welcome outlet for their aversion to tenements
> and intellect alike.
p. 17
> This again is a concession to the belief in the blood and soil which
> the Party worships and is not without a streak of boastfulness.
p. 165
> The theory of "blood and soil," a revival of Rousseauesque aspirations
> united with old Prussian aggressiveness, is set forth in Hitler's
> political testament in the exalted idiom of the ..."

It shows up a bit earlier in the 1934 Educational Yearbook of the
International Institute of Teachers College. http://goo.gl/Rh8a6

Exactly the same text shows up in another book tagged as 1934, whose
author is the editor of the Yearbook:

http://goo.gl/OV9IH
The Making of Nazis. By Isaac Leon Kandel.

In fact, there are quite a few hits from 1934 (although some of them are
listed as 1933). Simple search also reveals a number of 1933 hits, but,
when checked, I found some of them to be actually from the following
year and the rest I could not confirm at all. All of these, however,
follow the same pattern, as identified in the OED lemma.

There is one from 1931 ( http://goo.gl/3vSw2 ), but the usage is a bit
different with blood and soil serialized along with totalitarianism. The
snippet is too short to figure out the entire context.

Another 1931 publication (The Forum and Century http://goo.gl/txOvP and
http://goo.gl/90M7b ) identifies "blood-and-soil Germanism", but the
text does not show up in the snippet--needs to be confirmed on paper.

> Yet Jews commit the unpardonable offense of standing for something
> which is foreign and hateful to blood-and-soil Germanism.

The puzzling ones come much earlier.

http://goo.gl/zSTox
Saturday Review of Literature. 1924
p. 907
> In "The Voice of the People," the stage is set for the clash between
> the upper and lower strata of society; they impinge upon each other
> and fall apart, rudely shaken, shattered. In many of her stories we
> are circumspectly led up to that crucial episode in the life of
> individuals and of the race when "blood" and "soil" come nobly to the
> grapple.

This is interesting because "Ms. Glasgow" (as the author is identified)
is not German (she is, in fact, from Virginia). The Voice of the People
was published in 1922 and is fully available in GB http://goo.gl/QYibM
but it does not contain any references to "blood and soil".

Not so for the next earliest hit.


http://goo.gl/S1tOR
The Church and War: A Catholic Study. By Franziskus Maria Stratmann.
London: 1928
> The workings of internationalism just consist in this : that they do
> not draw enough strength from their own /blood and soil/ and,
> therefore, all their productions are weak and bloodless, whilst those
> who are rooted deep in the soil of their own country, physically and
> spiritually, are strong and full of character.

Stratmann has another book, War and Christianity Today, published in
1956, so I have no idea if the date tag is accurate. German Wiki gives
the dates (1883-1971), but no further details. Stratmann's Regina Pacis
was published in Berlin in 1927, Veritas in 1917, and four other books
published in 1924, 1925, 1932 and 1937. So the 1928 date is certainly
plausible--and "1928" does appear in the frontmatter, although it's not
clear where.

Another one may also be from 1928--in fact, the volume number matches
exactly (Issue No. 3 starts on p. 295).

http://goo.gl/sjc5L
  The Journal of English and Germanic philology, Volume 27 (3). 1928
p. 299
> Their germ and the spiritual structure which acquired life and form
> through them are fructified by blood and soil like all nature. For it
> is an axiom that life can never transcend nature.

Between the Glasgow review and the pair of 1928 citations lies another
one and this one is suggestive (and the year correct).

http://goo.gl/JUPL9
The Bookman. Volume 63. 1926
p. 547
> What it was she did not know, but she had reached a quarter whose air
> was colored by alien thought forms. Not only were its people of
> distant blood and soil; the very complexion of their souls and their
> inward processes was of a hue to which the English eye is not
> adjusted. That is the whole "mystery" of the Asiatic quarter--that its
> mental shapes and hues are not our shapes and hues. So fully does it
> load the air that even this child was aware of discomfort.

The very passage appears again in The Sun in Splendour
(1926/7--NY/London) by Thomas Burke--I suppose, it is possible that
Burke published an earlier, incomplete version in The Bookman.

http://goo.gl/Pt2Ha
> What it was she did not know, but she had reached a quarter whose air
> was colored by alien thought-forms. Not only were its people of
> distant blood and soil; the very texture of their minds and their
> inward processes was of a hue to which the English eye is not
> adjusted. Looking up Maroon Lane, she saw, framed in a railway arch, a
> little alley, lit by dim lights; and figures ...

Burke seems to be attached to the phrase, as it was used in a later
book, City of Encounters (1932--the book is not included in Burke's
bibliography in Wiki, but his name clearly appears on the title page in GB).

http://goo.gl/HBVCw
> ... he would trace the marrow of his substance to the grey hills of
> Galway, the glens of Argyllshire, the lynns of Welsh Wales or the
> pastures of the Midland shires ; and, by indulging the popular
> county-family rubbish about blood and soil, he said that he could feel
> in his veins the spiritual tincture of any one of those countries.


Now, these 1924-8 citations certainly predate any Nazi propaganda that
used the symbolism. In fact, the meaning is matched--certainly in the
last cited passage, but race is mentioned in the others as well.

Wiki points to the origin of the phrase in late 19th century German
racialist literature that did not fully enter the Nazi collective
conscience until 1930, thanks to Richard Walter Darre (Neuadel aus Blut
und Boden ). But German Wiki has more detail, offering links to
Spengler's 1922 The Decline of the West and August Winnig's 1928 Das
Reich als Republik ("blood and soil are the destiny of nations (people)"
is the Google translation of "Blut und Boden sind das Schicksal der
Völker (Menschen)"). The phrase was formalized by Heidegger in 1933 and
became firmly tied to the Nazi racial ideology around that time. So any
appearance in English prior to 1933--particularly up to 1928--should be
viewed as significant.

GB finds the expression in Jacob Mark Jacobson's Development of American
Political Thought and gives the date of 1932. But the title page in GB
clearly shows "Second Edition" and "Thornton Anderson" as the author,
thus pointing to the 1961, not the 1932 edition. http://goo.gl/ddlJc

http://goo.gl/KLMmF
Blackwood Magazine. 1924
p. 141/2
> He loved the blood and soil of France.

No idea who is the antecedent of this reference, but it's someone who
thought himself to be an integral part of French history, according to
the author.

Just one more. This one is German. Although GB gives 1900 as the date,
it's obviously at least 1920--with no telling what the actual date is
(at least, not by someone with virtually no understanding of German).
But the Langenscheidt series that's identified in the ad at the end of
the book (the one listed below) includes the last three volumes about
"post-war" Germany and England, so it can't be much earlier than 1920.
And it can't be much later either, as the prices range from a few
pfennige to 3 marks.

http://goo.gl/XdEr3
Advertisement in endmatter
> Langenscheidts Neue Lesehefte für deutsche, englische und französische
> Sprache mit erläuternden Anmerkungen Diese neue Reihe bietet
> interessante Einblicke in das Wesen und Werden der Völker und ihre
> Denkungsart. Die deutsche Reihe bringt eine Auswahl von Schriften, die
> die Gedanken brüderlicher Volksgemeinschaft, die Bedeutung von Blut
> und Boden, von Rasse und Volkstum den Deutschen nahebringen. Auch die
> beiden fremdsprachigen Reihen sind auf dieses Ziel eingestellt

In any case, depending on the date, this may be significant. It seems
the expression "blood and soil" significantly predates Nazi
incorporation in both English and German. It is, however, used in
racial/ethnic contexts--sometimes with discriminatory intent, sometimes
not. The expression is obviously not transparent (i.e., idiomatic) even
prior to Nazi incorporation. The closest meaning I can muster is "roots"
or, as US official forms declare, "national origin". But the important
takeaway is that it predates Nazi ideology and propaganda.

     VS-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org