Perhaps no aspect of Nazi society seems more alien to us today than its emphasis on racial identity. Simply put, the Nazis promised to unlock new realms of human potential by reorganizing German society around the notion of Aryan belonging. But what did it mean to be Aryan? How could this abstract idea be transformed in practical politics, something that could be realized in daily life? What were some of the potential consequences of this effort?
This episode examines how Hitler's regime approached the project of "becoming Aryan," exploring both its legal and cultural dimensions. As we'll see, the Nazis solved the first issue by racializing citizenship, punctuated by the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in Sept. 1935. They also developed a schema to classify individuals based on their grandparents' identity, adopting a "practical" rather than "scientific" approach to race (in other words, they thought it better to use easily locatable data - i.e. if your grandparents were baptized - rather than complicated physical-anthropological standards like the Cephalic index).
At the same time, they also wanted to awaken in individual Germans a "racial" consciousness. To do so, they relied heavily on visual imagery to construct notions of separate German and Jewish, Roma and Afro-German belonging. They also emphasize the need to cull the "Aryan" group, developing a set of eugenic practices like sterilization to perfect their racialized society. Finally, the episode notes the active role Germans themselves played in this process of gaining racial identity; through for example activities like the creation of their racial passports (Ahnenpass).
For more information on History Off the Page, check out our website www.historyoffthepage.com! Or you can support the show via Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/historyoffthepage?fan_landing=true.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Dr. Jason Hansen. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Dr. Jason Hansen och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
