ABSTRACT
An important propagandist function of blood and soil literature in the Third Reich was to counter that ‘most serious consequence of the industrialization of Germany’, ‘the weakening of the peasantry as a class’. The particularized local setting is a general feature of Blut und Boden writing, as it had been of the Heimatroman or Bauernroman of the Wilhelmine era; both are set either in the time of writing or at alleged ‘historic’ moments in the history of the German race and its ‘destiny’. The prestigious German literary historical periodical, Euphorion, changed its name to Dichtung und Volkstum in 1934; in the following years to 1945 its pages abound with analyses of blood and soil literature and its alleged literary predecessors. For the socially conservative German women readers and for Nazi propaganda purposes, one of the attractions of such literature was the idealized role it appeared to afford its heroines.
