At 08:08 PM 10/18/2002, Barry E. Muller wrote:
>And this from a Beierl!  ;-)

My folks left Bavaria in ?mid-19th c? and the last vestige of Germanness
died with my father's mother, I think; possibly before that.  My mom's
people were Sassenachs...

>What did you read in this book that would lead you to suspect a different
>meaning than "people"?

I'd always taken the Volks in Volkswagen and Volksempfaenger to mean
something like "proletariat's" or possibly "citizens'" -- but it seems to
have much more of the sense of "Nordic Aryans (preferably tall, blue-eyed,
blond, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped) with characters of iron
self-restraint and belief in reincarnation down through the generations of
the clan" -- that is, in the sense of *a* people defined genetically and by
history.

But I'm struggling a bit with the whole thing because the entire story of
Himmler and his...um...private universe is quite surrealistic, as is (to
me) the entire German history encompassing the Wars.

david

--
David Beierl - Providence, RI
  http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"