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.
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