“Blut und Boden” (“Blood and Soil”)

The slogan “blood and soil” incorporates, as Cornelia Schmitz-Berning writes in her book Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (2007), the “mythically exaggerated [idea of a] bond between the [so-called] ‘blood community’ of the people [...] and the settled territory,” a notion that was central to National Socialism. The idealization of the figure of the German peasant and the imagined intimate bond between “eternal land and eternal blood” served as a model for the anti-Semitic and racist agrarian and cultural policies of the Nazis. It found direct expression at the Kunstverein in the form of the propaganda exhibition organized there by the National- Socialist Kulturgemeinde in 1935 under the very title “Blut und Boden,” with works by artists from the region.