Horst Gies's latest book is about a slogan—Blut und Boden (blood and soil)—and its primary propagandist, Richard Walther Darré. With this work, Gies has made an immensely important contribution not only to the field, but to the world as a whole, for this phrase and its continued use represent the threat that racism and fascism pose to liberal, democratic societies.

Gies takes a hybrid approach, blending a biography of Darré with that of Blut und Boden. The first third of the book focuses on Darré. The second third is largely devoted to an intellectual history of the origins and pre-Nazi use of the slogan, and the last third covers the National Socialists’ employment of the phrase, especially Darré's use of it in his role as the Reichsbauernführer (Reich peasant leader). With this approach, Gies sets out to answer a number of important historiographical questions, which he lists in the introduction: 1) How did Darré find his way into the NSDAP, becoming one of Adolf Hitler's most important colleagues? 2) What sort of life experiences and ideologies most significantly influenced Darré? 3) What are the origins of the phrase Blut und Boden? 4) How did rural voters understand this slogan, and what role did it play in domestic politics? 5) What was Darré's contribution to Hitler's conquest of power?

The first two questions are answered in part 1, which covers Darré's life up to 1930. Interestingly, the biographical coverage essentially ends there, in 1930, when Darré first met Hitler and subsequently gained employment as an agricultural adviser for the NSDAP. This strategic decision on the author's part is telling, for it imparts on the reader the realization that Darré was ultimately subsumed by the slogan and his tiresome work to popularize it. To be sure, one of the most fascinating and informative parts of the book is the coverage of Darré's anguished path to the NSDAP. Here, Gies does an excellent job of humanizing a man who became infamous for his ominous scowl and use of racist slogans.

The takeaway from part 1 is that Darré was a man of great conflictions. Born in Argentina and educated at elite institutions in Germany and England, Darré was quite worldly. In fact, as a young man, his career aspiration was to work as a hybrid diplomat-agricultural expert. More specifically, he wanted to work in the “German East,” where he believed that he could, as he put it, “do something good for Germanity [Deutschtum] and thus for the world at large” (45). In another letter, Darré stated that his “life mission” was to link agriculture with diplomacy (49). Those career aims took him to East Prussia, Finland, and Latvia during the mid- to late 1920s, where he worked to advance agricultural trade on behalf of the German state and agricultural associations. But at the same time that he was living and working in the East, Darré became increasingly attracted to the ideas of the radical right. Gies shows that Darré was most influenced by the works of Julius Langbehn, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans F. K. Günther, who was an influential Social Darwinist at the University of Halle, where Darré studied.

Gies proves that “Chamberlain and Langbehn were his [i.e., Darré's] ideological godfathers, [while] Günther was the mentor of Darré's political worldview” (88). By 1927, Darré's interest in the völkisch-racist far right led him to join the association Nordischer Ring, as well as the Stahlhelm and Alldeutscher Verband. Those affiliations enabled him to publish various far-right ideological treatises, including his 1929 book, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race). Gies closes part 1 by making clear that Darré had attempted to pursue two paths: to work as an agricultural expert and diplomat while simultaneously participating in far-right circles. Unsurprisingly, this was not feasible in the long term, as Darré himself recognized by 1929. Fearing that his publications and social affiliations would mean that his civil service career aspirations were not bright under a Social Democrat–led government, Darré wrote in September 1929 that he was strongly considering “letting the whole lot swim with Berlin [den ganzen Krempel mit Berlin schwimmen].” For him, this meant fully entering “the nationalist movement [vaterländische Bewegung] and working and fighting therein for agrarian issues” (116).

Of course, Darré's best-known contribution to that fight was his propagandistic-political use of the slogan Blut und Boden. As Gies deftly covers in part 2, however, Darré was far from the first to use this phrase. In this part of the book, which constitutes almost four hundred pages, Gies explains that the earliest origins of this saying go back to the völkisch nationalism and Social Darwinist racism of the late nineteenth-century Kaiserreich. Darré first encountered such language within the far-right circles of the 1920s. Particularly influential in his discovery of the phrase was his association with the Artaman League and one of its most prominent and active members, August Georg Kenstler. In fact, Kenstler and Friedrich Schmidt were arguably the first to disseminate the phrase when they established in the 1920s the Artaman periodical Blut und Boden. When members of the far right used the slogan, they did so in reference to their ideological conviction that Germany, which they claimed was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan and industrial, needed a new racial “Nordic” aristocracy, whose wellspring would be the supposedly unspoiled farmers of the northern plains.

In part 3, Gies analyzes Darré and the Nazis’ agricultural platform and their employment of the slogan. He argues that Darré became integral to Hitler's conquest of power because he was able to use political framing to reach angst-ridden, disillusioned rural voters, who believed they were facing an existential crisis caused by modernization and capitalism. Gies posits that Darré was able, via strategic political framing, to uncouple the phrase Blut und Boden from its prior meaning, such that it became a multitudinous metaphorical slogan that resonated with voters who had diverse concerns. Rural voters interpreted the phrase as meaning “farmer and land” or “a people and their home [Mensch und Heimat].” Even many urban, middle-class voters found the slogan appealing, for they saw it as a synonym for “nation-state [Volk und Staat]” (629). Gies concludes part 3 with a controversial claim: that because of the “ambiguity of the slogan” and the sense of desperation that made voters “blind and receptive to a chimera,” ultimately voters, and particularly rural ones, misunderstood both this infamous Nazi slogan as well as “the reality of National Socialism” as a whole (630).

Here Gies hits on an important point about the syncretic nature of fascism, but because he does not fully develop this argument, some readers might mistakenly think he is excusing away popular support for the NSDAP. What needs to be made clearer is that German voters were not hoodwinked into supporting the Nazis. Rather, the syncretic nature of fascism enabled voters to consciously pick and choose elements they found appealing, while ignoring other aspects that they found distasteful. On this point, Gies's analysis would have been sharper had he consulted the newest scholarship on fascism as a syncretic, transnational phenomenon. To be sure, it is surprising that the book contains so little coverage of how Darré and others were influenced by the development of fascism and agricultural populism elsewhere in Europe. Despite these criticisms, Gies's book remains a masterful account of Darré and the Nazis’ long-lasting phrase.