Fascination with what makes the Germans tick has produced a vast range of texts that explore German postwar politics, culture, and society. Yet within this considerable body of work, there is a paucity of academic analysis that acknowledges the role of media discourse in the representation and construction of German identity. This book makes an important contribution to the study of German national identity by offering a detailed and large-scale academic analysis of how German media discourse between 1998 and 2005 represents German national identity. It brings together a variety of case studies: European integration, citizenship and immigration, sports and consumption. It makes the case for the role of popular culture in the discursive formation of national identity and demonstrates that the nation is constructed against political and non-political subjects. By looking at a variety of topic contexts, this book identifies a master narrative of the German nation. It tells the story of a nation that has its roots firmly in the memory of National Socialism and constructs ethnocentric nationalism as taboo. Yet at the same time it cannot escape the past as it harbors racist images of "self" and "other." This is an important book for collections in European studies and media studies, as well as scholars engaged in studying the impact of media on culture. This book demonstrates that reports of the death of the nation-state are without any doubt exaggerated. The particular complex of discourses analysed here was and is only present in Germany. It could not be found in Germany's German-speaking neighbours such as Austria or Switzerland, or indeed anywhere else. While the influence of globalisation is undeniable, the nation-state and its media remain a key location for the negotiation of national identity and much more. This wide-ranging and engagingly written book offers us an exceptional insight into that process." - Professor Hugh O'Donnell, Glasgow Caledonian University

This book shows that German national identity has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world but also due to domestic developments such as recent dynamics of collective memory, Germany has re-emerged as a confident nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.

German colonialism is a thriving field of study. From North America to Japan, within Germany, Austria and Switzerland, scholars are increasingly applying post-colonial questions and methods to the study of Germany and its culture. However, no introduction on this emerging field of study has combined political and cultural approaches, the study of literature and art, and the examination of both metropolitan and local discourses and memories. This book will fill that gap and offer a broad prelude, of interest to any scholar and student of German history and culture as well as of colonialism in general. It will be an indispensable tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. .

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state. Newly written and researched by experts in their respective fields, individual chapters trace developments in German culture - including national identity, class, Jews in German society, minorities and women, the functions of folk and mass culture, poetry, drama, theatre, dance, music, art, architecture, cinema and mass media - from the nineteenth century to the present. Guidance is given for further reading and a chronology is provided. In its totality the Companion shows how the political and social processes that shaped modern Germany are intertwined with cultural genres and their agendas of creative expression.

Through analysis of newspaper coverage on the debate over the future of Europe in Great Britain and Germany between 2000 and 2005, this book explores the intricate ways in which national identities shape media discourses on European integration. In doing so, it provides some compelling insights into Europe's emerging communicative space(s).

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

Concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire: composers like the three "Bs" of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, all of whom are German. Over the past three centuries, many supporters of German music have even nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music. This book brings together seventeen contributors from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and German literature to explore these questions: how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated "the most German of arts." Unlike previous volumes on this topic, many of which focused primarily on Wagner and Nazism, the essays here are wide-ranging and comprehensive, examining philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, rock, and pop. The result is a striking volume, adeptly addressing the complexity and variety of ways in which music insinuated itself into the German national imagination and how it has continued to play a central role in the shaping of a German identity. Contributors to this volume: Celia Applegate Doris L. Bergen Philip Bohlman Joy Haslam Calico Bruce Campbell John Daverio Thomas S. Grey Jost Hermand Michael H. Kater Gesa Kordes Edward Larkey Bruno Nettl Uta G. Poiger Pamela Potter Albrecht Riethmüller Bernd Sponheuer Hans Rudolf Vaget