Subject: blood and soil (antedating)

[Amy West]

On 2/7/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> 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-)

Victor, in reading all this, I was reminded of a similar/parallel
alliterative pair that pops up in, or regarding, medieval German
society: Land u. Leute. These are identified as the nobles' primary
resources.

In the American uses that you found, "blood and soil" seemed to me to
roughly correlate to the two main ideas for basing citizenship on:
parentage and place of birth.

I realize that I've probably gone off on a tangent as your message was
relevant to the antedating of the phrase.

--
---Amy West

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