ABSTRACT
It is particularly difficult in Germany to deal impartially with village history or the history of rural society in general. The historian is confronted at the outset with a complex web of stereotypes and clichés which has been spun over almost 200 years of work on the village. It is all too easy to become ensnared in academic, literary and ideological traps of various kinds without really noticing it. There exist in the literature innumerable and varied images of village life, rooted in peasant tradition. Above all, perhaps, there is the contradictory combination of a harsh material life and the comforting atmosphere of the village community. To some extent, this carefully stylised ‘image of the peasant’ deserves acknowledgement as an historical, ideological and cultural achievement of the highest order. However, the overall effect of this stubborn tradition in the historical analysis of the homeland and the village has been unfortunate. It has served in the end to frustrate a deeper analysis of peasant society and barred the way to the historical uncovering of its inner structures. The same can be said of the argument that rural Germany was the fountainhead of Nazism, a view encouraged by the Nazi cliché of ‘blood and soil’. Seen in these global, general terms, the view that places the peasant at the heart of Nazism is really so undifferentiated and unhistorical as to negate any possible conclusions. Once again it prevents us from asking who were the agents and who were the victims of Nazism in rural Germany, and what was the cause and effect of the Nazi appeal. I have already discussed these particular problems elsewhere:1 it remains important, however, to look in more detail at the Nazi image of the village community, the reasons why it was developed, and above all the extent to which it accorded with reality.
