Over the past decade, immigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe’s cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of national belonging. In Blood and Culture, 2000 IDRF Fellow Cynthia Miller-Idriss provides a rich ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations. Drawing on research she conducted at German vocational schools between 1999 and 2004, Miller-Idriss examines how the working-class students and their middle-class, college-educated teachers wrestle with their different views about citizenship and national pride. The cultural and demographic trends in Germany are broadly indicative of those underway throughout Europe, yet the country’s role in the Second World War and the Holocaust makes national identity, and particularly national pride, a difficult issue for Germans. Because the vocational-school teachers are mostly members of a generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and hold their parents’ generation responsible for National Socialism, many see national pride as symptomatic of fascist thinking. Miller-Idriss describes a new understanding of national belonging emerging among German young people–one in which cultural assimilation takes precedence over blood or ethnic heritage. Moreover, she argues that teachers’ well-intentioned, state-sanctioned efforts to counter nationalist pride often create a backlash, making radical right-wing groups more appealing to their students. Miller-Idriss argues that the state’s efforts to shape national identity are always tempered and potentially transformed as each generation reacts to the official conception of what the nation “ought” to be. Buy it at Amazon.

Publication Details

Title
Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany
Authors
Miller-Idriss, Cynthia
Publisher
Duke University / Duke University Press
Publish Date
2009
ISBN
978-0822345442
Citation
Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany (Duke University / Duke University Press, 2009).
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