Shaping Aryan Race

Affect and Embodiment in the Voelkisch Movement (1900-1935)

Abstract

English abstract: The formation of subjectivity in 19th and 20th century Germany evolved in the context of various discourses and practices of racialization and their transnational genealogies. In the ‘Voelkisch movement’, the supposed threat of ‘racial degeneration’ was opposed by a specific education of the individual and collective body, temper, and emotionality. Such education was to yield an affective and corporeal habituation of race. ‘Race-appropriate practices’ such as rune-gymnastics’ primary goal was to cultivate Aryan interiority as a condition for a moral, racial community. Connecting racial nature and culture in a ‘holistic education’, the Voelkisch aimed to cultivate a White German self. This article traces epistemological assumptions of ‘Ariosophy’ and analyzes how the practice of rune-gymnastic was experienced to emotionally, practically, and materially produce racial subjectivity. In turn, it shows how the concepts of subjective interiority and affective intentionality were themselves racialized as White.