German race-thinking arose to unite people against foreign domination, unlike French class weapon

Evidence

RACE-THINKING in Germany did not develop before the defeat of the old Prussian army by Napoleon. It owed its rise to the Prussian patriots and political romanticism, rather than to the nobility and their spokesmen. In contrast to the French brand of race-thinking as a weapon for civil war and for splitting the nation, German race-thinking was invented in an effort to unite the people against foreign domination. Its authors did not look for allies beyond the frontiers but wanted to awaken in the people a consciousness of common origin. This actually excluded the nobility with their notoriously cosmopolitan relations—which, however, were less characteristic of the Prussian Junkers than of the rest of the European nobility; at any rate, it excluded the possibility of this race-thinking basing itself on the most exclusive class of the people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 443

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Contrasting unifying vs. splitting functions of race-thinking feeds the imagined-community concept (Anderson) and national-popular readings in Islamophobia.

Related

• German race-thinking emerged to unify and resist foreign rule, not to split the nation. (similarity 0.94)
• Early German race-thinking was so entangled with nationalism that the two become nearly indistinguishable. (similarity 0.84)
• Racism was pan-European public opinion before it was German state doctrine (similarity 0.83)
• German race-thinking arose as a substitute for missing political nationhood (similarity 0.83)
• Nations hostile to the French Revolution developed race-thinking along national lines (similarity 0.82)
• Race-thinking preceded and differs from racism as a full ideology (similarity 0.81)
• German Romanticism’s playful arbitrariness made race-thinking one of many free-floating opinions (similarity 0.80)
• England needed race-thinking as a unifying theory for distant colonies (similarity 0.79)
• German national romantics paired naturalistic race-talk with anti-domination principles. (similarity 0.78)
• French racism was more consistent than other national racisms because it stayed antinational (similarity 0.78)
• Race-thinking emerged across the West before it hardened into racist ideology (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• German and French race-thinking served opposite political purposes #expands (0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 448