What gave Darré’s thinking its particularly impractical, archaic feel was his inability to articulate a clearer vision of how the ‘eternal characteristics of the German race’, defined by their archaeological and biological origins, were related to the historical process of modernization that had had such a transformative impact on German society since the early nineteenth century. It was this inability to provide a convincing historical narrative of modernization that created the impression that Darré intended to bring about a wholesale return to the past. But in fact this characteristic
...more
