The language of Völker is translated as folk, peoples, or nation, but its meaning is more complex in the German, as the excerpt from “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic” illustrates. It has connotations of a national essence, or people’s spirit. In the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder developed the concept of a German Volksgeist (national spirit) to describe the natural, hereditary, or ethnic grouping to which every people belongs as a reason for political distinctiveness. His argument also spoke of the pride of the distinctive German Volksgeist within the German Völker.
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