The Body of the People and Its Borders. Racism and Nationalism in the Weimar Republic

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My project proposes a genealogical study of the structural connection between racism and nationalism through an interdisciplinary analysis of the Conservative Revolutionaries' construction of community in the Weimar Republic. It presents the first study of the concept of Volkskörper (the people's body) as a discourse on borders and offers a critical insight into the nationalist discourse on corporeality and the constitution of an organic community in the writings of two key representatives of Conservative Revolutionaries: Grimm and Zöberlein, whose bestselling novels (Volk ohne Raum, 1926; Der Glaube an Deutschland, 1931) forged the fascist imagery of NSDAP in the Weimar Republic period. In regard to Grimm's discourse on territorial belonging of "the people" and to Zöberlein's construction of an "inner" community, my project will locate the constitution of a fascist community in a dual construction of its borders: the "inner" border of "Germanness" (in Zöberlein's organic discourse on German martyrdom) and the external border of its territory (in Grimm's colonial discourse on Lebensraum - living space). The comparative analysis of their interwar writings (including Zöberlein's unpublished pre-1931 letters and Grimm's notes from German Southwest Africa in Marbach Literaturarchiv) will be considered in a broader historical context as a reaction to a crisis of geopolitical border-regimes. My project will develop an account of the relationship between racism and a crisis of borders through an application of post-colonial and critical theory to the question of a fascist body-politic. In this regard I will analyse the relation between organicity and the political subject of Volk (the people) in regard to bodily metaphors as well as to the discourse on borders and territory in Grimm's and Zöberlein's writings.