| Kommentar |
In his seminal work ‘Culture and Nationalism’ the Jewish-German philosopher and political activist Rudolf Rocker outlined the historically close relationship between culture production and nationalism. Not only restricted to violent outbursts in many parts of the world, nationalism constitutes an “endemic condition” (M. Billig) even of modern and ‘peaceful’ democratic nation states. This endemic condition very often has clashed with parts of the cultural production that challenge the very foundation on which the ideological fabric of a nation is built upon. So, historically, we find artistic protagonists who in their works opposed or were ignorant about nationhood, but posthumously were heralded as national or cultural heroes – Goethe, for example, had no clue about German ‘identity’. Today, Western democratic nation states tend to display their ‘internationality’ and their membership in the so called ‘international community’ as a mode of its national make up, and perhaps at the forefront of it the current German nation state. However, despite all of its internationality, there are tendencies in Germany that follow cultural identification patterns that are reminiscent of traditional 19th century European nationalism. In this seminar we will examine particularly national or cultural identity references in Germany that appear in the realm of popular culture (from movies to pop songs, from novels to art works). We will try to embed those contemporary phenomena in the broader historical context and try to make comparisons to other countries in order to understand what constitutes the ‘urge’ for cultural or national identification and possibly where the danger of this ‘urge’ lies. |
