Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany

Politics, History, and Culture

by Cynthia Miller-Idriss

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 , 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. Their students, on the other hand, want to take pride in being German. Miller-Idriss describes a new understanding of national belonging emerging among young Germans—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.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is associate professor of education and sociology and director of the International Training and Education Program at American University. Her books include Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany.

Reviews

[Michael]

I'll begin this by mentioning that I read this as an e-book, through the service called Ebrary. Ebrary has some definite advantages over other e-readers I've used, in that I could make notes and highlight the text, and these would be saved so that I can refer back to them and see them. If I were reading in preparation for a class, exam, or in order to use the book as a source, this would be invaluable. However, like other e-readers, it is not possible to easily access the endnotes from the point at which the reference is given, which makes it much harder to track the use of sources (for this book, specifically, this was less of a problem, because most of the references were given in-line, as APA citations).
The book itself is good, but has some problems, primarily a very deceptive title. Right-wing youth play a minor role in Miller-Idriss' narrative; this is ultimately a study of mainstream youth and generational change in terms of relationship to the nation. As she explains her thesis, "a younger generation is actively transforming the meaning of being German" (7). She places this discussion in the context of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, noting that for him a nation, once imagined, is presumed to remain static. She believes "that nations are not only imagined, they are continually re-imagined" and thus transformed over time.
This idea seems to make a lot of sense, to this author, but the question of how to prove it brings up the next problem with the book, its methodology. Miller-Idriss has interviewed and observed "119 working class youth and 31 of their teachers" from vocational schools in Berlin, collecting qualitative data in their civics courses about their feelings regarding Germany as a nation and expressions of nationalism. This is an interesting study, but rather limited in its scope and sample-size, and surely not conclusive enough to modify a major paradigm about nationalism. Berlin does not represent all of Germany, nor do vocational students represent the German working-class, nor do their teachers necessarily belong to the same class background, nor can one easily divide students and teachers between two distinct "generations," nor do classroom civics discussions represent the entirety of the imagining of nationhood.
To her credit, however, Miller-Idriss is aware of these problems, and collecting qualitative data from a small sample size does allow her to create a more nuanced narrative around her findings, which are nonetheless interesting, even if not conclusive. She finds that young people in Germany at the turn of the 21st century wish to be able to express their pride in their country, as do other Europeans, but feel that the legacy of the Holocaust makes the subject taboo. The teachers she interviewed mostly represent the "68'er" generation which challenged its elders to admit their complicity with the National Socialist regime, and this generation has rejected the idea of national pride as an element of that evil. They maintain that an individual should only be proud of their own achievements, not the achievements of others simply because they belong to an arbitrary category like "Germany." Miller-Idriss suggests that this attitude may be pushing youth into the arms of the extreme right, by denying them any healthier outlet to express their feelings of pride.
These findings are useful, so far as they go, but Miller-Idriss admits that further testing is necessary. Certainly, if her concept of "re-imagining" the nation is to gain wide acceptance, it must be tested in places other than Germany. Moreover, the German case itself deserves closer examination in other contexts. This author will confirm that he has found evidence online and in person of the generational divide she suggests, but it would be good to see this questioned. To what degree do youth from different backgrounds accept or reject the "anti-nationalist" stance of their elders? Does the question of East/West come into play (she considers this, in the context of divided Berlin, but further study is necessary)? Moreover, is the generational shift starting to be felt as more of the younger generation enter the workforce themselves and become fully adult citizens?
A final point should be raised in terms of definitions of the nation and the degree to which it is coded racially. Miller-Idriss addresses this through a complicated coding system, sampled in the appendix, but doesn't really seem to consider the full complexity or dangers inherent. Her data seem to conflict - which probably reflects the conflicted feelings of most Europeans on the subject. On the one hand, many of her subjects express "liberal" ideas that "foreigners" may "become German" through assimilation, but often they do not interrogate the underlying cultural assumptions they carry (such as that no one could be Muslim and German - in spite of the fact that German Muslims first translated the Koran into German in 1939 during National Socialism). This is shadowy territory, and in fact the teachers she looks at have some of the same problems, although in some cases they emphasize the historically constructed nature of German identity and question students' attitudes towards "foreigners" (which category rarely included the white American author, for example). This ambiguity and creeping racism, however, lead this writer to question the author's assertion that German youth can embrace a "healthy" nationalism with no taint of the racist past. If the younger generation wishes to claim "pride" in their nation's achievements, they must at least accept some of the guilt for its failings as well.