German Media and National Identity By Sanna Inthorn

Here is the ethno-cultural nation at its most concise: an ancient community of blood relations to which the state is merely an institutional and bureaucratic approximation. Members of the national community might well live outside the state, while the state itself might harbour others who do not belong to the nation. The Other is understood in ethnic, rather than in political terms. As the author, Sanna Inthorn, shows in her fascinating study of discourses regarding national identity circulating in (and circulated by) the German media, such conceptions of the German nation are still commonplace today. Over a decade later—a decade which has seen great changes not only on a geopolitical level, but also within Germany itself (a number of which the author addresses in this book)—trainers of the German national team still routinely refer to “old Germanic virtues”, and understand them in the same terms.

Against this ethno-cultural concept of the nation—and indeed enjoying a complex dialectical relationship with it—we find the civic understanding of the nation as a community bound by physical frontiers and commitment to a democratically agreed political project, a “population” whose ethnic variety is irrelevant, where nationhood is understood in terms of goals rather than origins. Although, as the author points out, such civic definitions of the nation are often seen as expressions of “good nationalism”; they do not imply the disappearance of the Other. The United Kingdom and the United States remain Others even for the civic German nation, but the difference is no longer one of essences, but rather one of political agendas.

This book offers a detailed and highly enlightening analysis of how a range of actors—primarily politicians, as well as both print and television journalists working in a variety of fields—circulate these discourses, not only reproducing them but also inflecting them at the same time, among readers and viewers from varying sectors of German society and in relation to a number of themes. Indeed, this multifocal approach is one of the great strengths of the analysis.