Deutschtum is a German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 term meaning "Germanness". It may either refer to German character, the belonging to the German people or the entirety of German ethnic groups in foreign countries.

An anti-Western concept of a romanticized Deutschtum has been an important component of German nationalism

German nationalism

German nationalism refers to the nationalism of Germans or of German culture. The origins of the beginning of a sense of German identity began with the Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther that resulted in the spread of a standardized common German language and literature...

, when the conceptions of Volk (people) and Gemeinschaft (community) were driven to their racist extremes during the Third Reich.