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Zugl.: Bern, Historisches Inst., Lizentiatsarbeit, 2009.

The Nazi utopian ideal Volksgemeinschaft, both as a core concept in the Nazi ideology and a vocal point in German ideological history, attempting to build up the national community in the German particular way, has contributed as the key element to contrive people's consent both in achieving the Nazi power-seizure and in forming the dynamics in the Third Reich. The term itself involves, however, not only an exploration of shaping a national community of the German people united under denotations like Volk, Gemeinschaft, Volksgemeinschaft, but also redefined the boundaries and relations between the individuals within to this community. This paper aims to present the trials in the German ideological history in pursuing national unity through community building as a foreground, to put forth an explanation for Nazi reception in the interwar German circumstances: the Nazi interpretation of national community under Volksgemeinschaft, its similarities and divergencies from the former community concepts, the efficacy and power in winning public at its takeover and thirteen-year-long national practice. The analytical structure of the entire paper is tailored according to this research design, starting from national endeavor in the German ideological history, followed by extensive analysis of Weimar Germany...

Recent scholarship on the renewed Sonderweg theory does not approach the debate with a comparative analysis. This thesis therefore presents a new argument looking at the influence of British and Afrikaner tensions in South Africa, culminating in the South African War of 1899-1902, and how their treatment of the various African peoples in their own colony influenced German South-West African colonial native policy and the larger social hierarchy within the settler colony. In analyzing the language of scholarly journals, magazine articles, and other publications of the period, one can see the direct influence of the Afrikaners, including South African Boers, on German South-West African settlers, and their eugenically infused discussion of Herero, Nama, and Bastards, within their new home. Furthermore, the relations between the German settlers and the British settlers and colonial officials in the neighboring colony serve as a case-study of the larger rivalry between Berlin and London that would later culminate in World War I. In looking at how this British colony influenced German South-West Africa in socially, politically, economically, and scientifically, one can place this new research within the context of the renewed Sonderweg debated amongst scholars like Isabel Hull and George Steinmetz, extending the critique that Steinmetz argued in The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German State in Qingdao, Samoa, and South-West Africa