Who They Are in Their Collective Memory: A Qualitative Study of German National Identity

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 22. Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the German Context

Abstract

Before 2005, the people populating Germany had been counted as ‘Germans’ (citizens) and ‘foreigners’ (non-citizens). In 2005, a new category was added to the census—‘people with a migration background’—into which were placed some German citizens along with all non-citizens. With the new categorization, German citizenship was rendered multi-tiered. The aim of the qualitative study from which this paper is drawn was to determine how Germans imagine their national community, who they see as belonging to it, where they draw the boundary lines and why they draw those lines where they do. Data was produced through in-depth interviews of a sample of German citizens living in a city in southwest Germany. In this paper, I examine the sense of the nation in the collective memory. Individual members of the nation, in talking to me about Germanness over the course of an interview could only do so through social frameworks. Their words inevitably reflect the sense of the nation that has reached them not only through their own direct experience but that which has been inculcated through words, images, events and myriad other avenues. What people revealed over the course of an interview was thus the common-sense, shared knowledge or, one might say, collective memories of the nation.

Author

• Carol Christine McKetty, Independent Scholar