German Nationalists Got Inspiration from Frederick Barbarossa, the Notion of Volk, the Blood-and-Soil Ideology, and the Superior German Essence

German nationalists drew on romantic myths of past German heroism and sacrifice. They harked back to the saga of Frederick Barbarossa, the crusading medieval Holy Roman Emperor who united warring Germanic factions and established peace in the German lands. Barbarossa was said to be sleeping in a mountain awaiting the rebirth of German glory. German nationalists also linked Germanness to the notion of Volk (variously translated as “nation,” “people,” or “race”). They championed a “blood-and-soil” (Blut und Boden) ideology: the notion that peasants (“blood”) who farmed the countryside (“soil”) were the true repository of traditional German values and authentic folk culture. In addition, some nationalists claimed a superior German “essence” that was rooted in the cosmic nature of the German forest landscape.

--Catherine Epstein, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, Wiley Short Histories (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 4.