German racial-biological nationalism emerged as a substitute for failed political nationhood

Evidence

It is noteworthy that only after 1814 is this common origin described frequently in terms of “blood relationship,” of family ties, of tribal unity, of unmixed origin. These definitions, which appear almost simultaneously in the writings of the Catholic Josef Goerres and nationalistic liberals like Ernst Moritz Arndt or F. L. Jahn, bear witness to the utter failure of the hopes of rousing true national sentiments in the German people. Out of the failure to raise the people to nationhood, out of the lack of common historical memories and the apparent popular apathy to common destinies in the future, a naturalistic appeal was born which addressed itself to tribal instincts as a possible substitute for what the whole world had seen to be the glorious power of French nationhood. The organic doctrine of a history for which “every race is a separate, complete whole” was invented by men who needed ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political nationhood. It was a frustrated nationalism that led to Arndt’s statement that Germans—who apparently were the last to develop an organic unity—had the luck to be of pure, unmixed stock, a “genuine people.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 446

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which organic/tribal definitions of nationhood are born: as ideological substitutes when genuine political nationhood fails.
• XREF: Connects directly to the Scaffolding Theory goal of how nationhood and imagined communities are constructed; parallels Anderson but with the added twist that biological race supplies the substitute when nationhood fails. — connects to: Germany’s ethnocultural homogeneity obsession made its empire exceptional. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 66; Nativism’s ideological enemies got remade as biologically fixed racial ones — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1580; The FRG’s citizenship law unified diverse German groups by descent — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 183 (+1 more)