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It must attempt to develop an inclusive understanding of those living within its territory to erase the memory of the horrors of the Nazi regime. Violent behaviour by football fans kindles fears of a resurgent Third Reich. Only in the realm of food is the national socialist past not expressly present, but as a reading of the reviews analysed by the author will show, even there the history of German food appears to begin in the last years of the German Reich.
In fact, the power of the Nationalist Socialist past regarding the deployment of history in these various discourses analysed is quite astonishing. While Scottish football fans and journalists will often interpret games between Scotland and England through reference to the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), and Portuguese journalists and fans will make sense of matches between Spain and Portugal by evoking the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), their German counterparts seem unable to move beyond footballing hero Fritz Walter and his role in the Battle of Berne in 1954 (an event described by one journalist as taking place “a long, long time ago” [Schulze, 2002a, p. 33]). When they do attempt to see beyond 1945, they leap centuries back to the Dark Ages of marauding Germanic tribes. Great swathes of history are missing, with perhaps only Prussia as a possible exception as source of “virtues”, such as discipline, order, and hard work.
However, as Inthorn shows, the deployment of the national socialist past is often part of much larger political strategies, and its negation—whether in the adversarial world of politics or the colourful world of football—can itself be, at least in part, in response to commercial and economic imperatives. Thus, German politicians use Germany’s selfless “European credentials” as a cover for pursuing what is invariably referred to as the country’s “national interest” (a widely used code now employed everywhere to designate the interests of domestic capital). In the meantime, transnational corporations based outside Germany mobilise the ethno-cultural nation to sell snacks. Indeed, reading Inthorn’s analysis one can understand better how, for French theorist Michel Foucault (1989), discourse “allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry” (p. 118).