Volksgeist
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- “Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians”.
Volksgeist is a concept first put forward by German folklorist and romanticist Johann Gottfried Herder and is associated with the concept of national, racial or ethnic stereotypes based on generalizations. Compare Zeitgeist. The premise is simple: is there any truth in German gründlichkeit and pünktlichkeit, are the French good lovers or do they more frequently make love than the rest of Europe, do Italians really have better aesthetic judgement, are Belgians averse to authority, are the Dutch candid and permissive?
See also
- The Englishness of English Art, Nikolaus Pevsner, 1956
- national stereotypes
- Occidentalism
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