has a space that belongs to it. Persons who live by the sea, in the mountains, and on the plains are different. History teaches us that nomads have not only been made nomadic by the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but they have also often left wastelands behind them where they found fruitful and cultivated land—and that human beings who are rooted in the soil have known how to make a home for themselves even in the wilderness. Relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming marked by space, belong together with the essence and the kind of Being of a people. So it is not right to see the sole ideal for a people in rootedness in the soil, in attachment, in settledness, which find their cultivation and realization in farming and which give the people a special endurance in its propagation, in its growth, in its health. It is no less necessary to rule over the soil and space, to work outwards into the wider expanse, to interact with the outside world. The concrete way in which a people effectively works in space and forms space necessarily includes both: rootedness in the soil and interaction.
Only on this basis can we start moving in the direction of the state. The people and the state have a space that belongs to them. But it has not been decided whether the space of the people coincides with the space of the state. So the state cannot be an intellectual construct, or a sum of legal principles, or a constitution. It is essentially related to space and formed by space. Its space is, to a certain extent, the space of the people rooted in the soil, insofar as it is grasped in terms of the will to work out into the expanse, in terms of interaction, in terms of power. This space we call land, sovereign dominion, territory; in a certain sense, it is the fatherland. The homeland is not to be confused with the fatherland. The homeland will in [82] most cases, from a purely external point of view, be a narrower region of the space of the state. But it is never this in principle; it need not have anything to do with the state. There are completely different relations at work in the two. We can speak of the state only when rootedness in the soil is combined with the will to expansion, or generally speaking, interaction. A homeland is something I have on the basis of my birth. There are quite particular relations between me and it in the sense of nature, in the sense of natural forces. Homeland expresses itself in rootedness in the soil and being bound to the earth. But nature works on the human being, roots him in the soil, only when nature belongs as an environment, so to speak, to the people whose member that human being is. The homeland becomes the way of Being of a people only when the homeland becomes expansive, when it interacts with the outside—when it becomes a state. For this reason, peoples or their subgroups who do not step out beyond their connection to the homeland into their authentic way of Being—into the state—are in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perishing. This is also
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