ABSTRACT
Despite all its shrill nostalgia for a half-timbered Teutonic past, the main domestic aim of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) was a quintessentially modern one: that of nation-building. Arguably the first truly national party in German history, at least in so far as it attempted to direct its appeal in one way or another to all sections of society, the NSDAP repeatedly professed its intention to create the single German nation that eluded its predecessors. It would reconcile the differences that arose from the disorderly multiplicity of German identities based on class, regional loyalties, gender and confession, and unite all citizens - Volksgenossen ['national comrades'] in the tortured vocabulary of Nazi 'newspeak' - in a single transcendental national community: the Volksgemeinschaft. The Germans were to have not just greatness thrust upon them, but unprecedented national unity as well.
