Volk is an ambiguous word in German, torn between the social and the national. The fact that the term could be an ideological keyword both for Nazism – with its Volksgenosse, Volksgemeinschaft, Volksgerichtshof, Volkssturm – and shortly afterwards for the East German communist state – Volkspolizei, Volkskammer, Volksarmee, Volkseigentum – points to the word's flexibility – but also to its power in German as a signal of that with which one should identify. In the parlance of the ideologically hazier modern Federal Republic, ‘Volk’ still appears in key political compounds: the leading parties call themselves ‘Volksparteien’ – indicating simultaneously their non-regionality and the breadth of their social appeal; Germany's biggest daily newspaper consistently terms itself a ‘Volkszeitung’; referendum votes are Volksabstimmungen or Volksentscheide; the census is a Volkszählung.

Other languages, it is true, are not entirely without such ambiguities. ‘People’, ‘peuple’ also have semantic uncertainties; but they are weaker words, standardly supplemented with adjectival or other glosses (the common people, ordinary people, the British people) or supplanted by more specific synonyms (folk, popular, proletarian, mass) which delimit meaning. German ‘Volk’, on its own or in compounds, can encompass all these connotations – and betray the tensions between them.

Volk in either of its nineteenth-century senses, social or national, is a Platonic idea, an imagined ideal entity which reality in its complexity may aspire to become. Who is the Volk? All of us except the aristocracy, says the poet and novella-author Theodor Storm in the early 1860s.