Odal Law: Volkish Land Cooperatives

In SS circles, then, there was a constant campaign directed against the so-called asphalt intellectualism, Jewish-capitalist liberalism, and creeping volkish genocide of the big cities—a campaign whose compliment always included demands for the “conquering of new land for settlement,” a “strengthening of the idea of the family farmstead,” and a “return to rootedness in the native soil.” 

The employment of this particular rhetoric reveals what at first glance might seem to be a highly paradoxical situation. Since many of these concepts included a decidedly anti-capitalist element, they often served as intellectual points of departure for those enthusiasts and utopians among the National Socialists who were trying to establish an idea of the Volk based on the principle of a socialist cooperative. Of particular importance was the circle that, after 1933, contributed to “A Monthly Magazine for Blood and Soil” known as Odal, published in the “Reich’s Peasant City” of Goslar and devoted to the notion of a radical “return to the peasant spirit” of the German Volk that Himmler and Darre had proposed in the 1920’s. The Odal circle vehemently denounced all things “Roman,” which meant everything urban, materialistic, and capitalist-liberal. As Ferdinand Oppenberg explained in his 1937 Odalarticle, “Jugend and Bauerntum” (Youth and Peasantry), “Roman” concepts such as these degraded even the soil to a mere “commodity” that could be sold to anyone. To counter this, Oppenberg and his ilk demanded a return to a Teutonic “Odal law” treating the soil as the inalienable “property of the community of the Volk.” 

Such notions often resulted in a specifically cooperative understanding of the principles of land use, but such “native soil” fanatics rarely based their views on the widely disseminated NSDAP slogan “the common good comes before self-interest.” Rather, they were preoccupied with lending a mystical aura to their Teutonic notion of Odal law, and effort which involved the free use of metaphors such as “eternal fields” and “holy soil.” In fact, some derived this Odal law from the notion of a “feudal tenure of the sun” handed out by some divine “cosmic father,” a derivation meant to call up images of a primeval Teutonic custom. 

The journal Odal was not the only publication active in this field, however. A series of manifesto-like books joined Odal in promoting “back to the land” ideas that were constantly bordering on the utopian. Such books included among others, Hermann Gauch’s Die germanische Odal- und Allodverfassung (The Germanic Odal and Allod System; 1934), Johann Von Leer’s Odal. Das Lebensgesetz eines ewigen Deutschland (Odal: The Life Principle for an Eternal Germany; 1935), and Kurt Holler’s Rassenpflege im germanischen Freibauerntum (Racial Cultivation in the Germanic Freeholding Peasantry; 1942). In order to wipe out the “materialistic” worldview of a dominate urban population once and for all, these writings insisted on the return of “Teutonic-Germanic common law” based on concepts such as the “march” or “Allmende” (land held in common) or the “Allod” (land free of feudal duties) and designed to usher in a true Volksgemeinschaftor “volkish cooperative.”

-excerpted from Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism by Jost Hermand.

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