they seemed to offerthe guarantee of completing one's alternative to regular militaryservice not only more safely but closer to home.

Setapart from the familiar social contexts of family, work, and school,the closed camp was designed to break down identifications withsocial milieus and to promote Entbürgerlichung (purging bourgeoiselements) and Verkameradshaftung (comradeship) as part of theprocess of Volkwerdung, “the making of the people,” as the pecu-liar idiom of National Socialism put it.

The idea of normality had become racialized, so that entitlement tolife and prosperity was limited to healthy Aryans, while newly iden-tified ethnic aliens such as Jews and Gypsies, who before 1933had been ordinary German citizens, and newly identified biologicalaliens such as genetically unfit individuals and so-called “asocials”were pushed outside the people’s community and threatened withisolation, incarceration, and death.

one of the key purposes of popu-lar entertainment in the Third Reich: the creation of a commonlyshared culture to define Germans to one another and mark themoff from others.

Arbeitsdienstmänner worked together as a unit, marched toget-her, and relaxed together, an unending group existence designed topull together the people’s community.

Boththe Hitler Youth and the Reich Labor Service aimed to mix bour-geois and working-class youths in order to pull down social barriersto the formation of national race consciousness.

Nazi pedagogues extolled das Lager, “the camp,”as the privileged place where the “new generation was finding itsform.”

But it also made demands on ordinary Germans, who neededto visualize the Volk as a vital racial subject, to choose appropriatemarriage partners, and to accept “limits to empathy.”

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century

cultivate racial solidarity by overcoming social divi-sions, prohibiting racial mixing, and combating degenerative bio-logical trends

Family archives, racial categories, and individual identitiesbecame closely calibrated with one another over the course of theThird Reich

As a result, Germans could imagine one another infront of the radio listening to the same program: “Sunday isWunschkonzert,” wrote one soldier to his family back home; “youcertainly will be listening too.”

He believed Germans feltthat “it’s just us now” when they lived without Jews. “Just us” alsoexpressed the closed circle in which Germans could see and experi-ence “ourselves” as “we are” and as “we have become.”

With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

On these occasions, friends and neighbors knew they wouldfind one another in front of the radio and could later share im-pressions—in this sense, Gemeinschaftsempfang, collective recep-tion, had been achieved.

collectively solve a local environ-mental problem

The question, 'What is library and information science?' does not elicit responses of the same internal conceptual coherence as similar inquiries as to the nature of other fields, e.g., 'What is chemistry?', 'What is economics?', 'What is medicine?' Each of those fields, though broad in scope, has clear ties to basic concerns of their field. [...] Neither LIS theory nor practice is perceived to be monolithic nor unified by a common literature or set of professional skills. Occasionally, LIS scholars (many of whom do not self-identify as members of an interreading LIS community, or prefer names other than LIS), attempt, but are unable, to find core concepts in common