I’ve not read him at all before, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ aside. It was the art that drew me!

Some exciting post today - the latest @plough.bsky.social and from @beehivebooks.bsky.social a really beautiful edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Wonder Book’ illustrated by the marvellous Das Pastoras.

Oh no. Not this again.

I wouldn’t know; I didn’t see that. Though even so, it’s hardly relevant to the question of whether today’s Germans, living as they do in post-reunification boundaries, are essentially non-nationalist.

Given that you’re effectively equating German with German-speaking I can see that that would be tricky. At the same time, I think 1990’s reunification and all that led up to that seems about as clearly nationalistic as anything I’ve ever seen. Even more so than the World Cup ;)

So are you talking about German identification in three senses: administrative, linguistic, and ethnic? Or two, administrative and linguistic-ethnic are essentially the same?

So if a Sorb spoke German he or she would be German?

So, wouldn’t that mean that a German by that definition is simply somebody who uses German - as a first language, if nothing else?

We’ve been a people identified as conterminous with the land, and with a common culture, language, legal system, etc, since at least the fifth century. Since then there have been Gaels and Vikings and Old English and new English, and various other ethnic groups, but they’ve all become Irish.

To explain my confusion, for instance, I don’t think there’s an ethnic group called “the Irish”, even though we probably have at least a good a claim to national identity as anywhere in Europe, certainly Western Europe.

How odd.

I don’t think I understand that question. You’ve said you’d get rid of the Federal Republic if you could, so I’m not sure citizenship can be a meaningful category for you. Are you trying to suggest that people can be administratively German but not really German?

So people can’t become German?

Question. You’ve already identified Germans with German-speakers. You would also identify them as an ethnic group?

You’ve done a shift there too, which is interesting. You’ve described Austrians as German-speakers, but earlier referred to them as Germans. There was a time when the latter would have been a reasonable thing to do, but not lately; I’ve never known any Austrians to do that.

Why am I not convinced? Because it doesn’t tally with my experience or my reading. And your point about arbitrariness could be said about almost anything - what states exist for anything other than historical reasons?

Well, ish. There was an element of engineering in that. I often cite the example of a friend’s grandfather who was in the SS and left when the war started so he could serve in his local Swabian unit, because at a certain level his loyalty was more to Swabia than Germany. So it’s blurry, I think.

(Ten if you count walking to Kehl from Strasbourg when over for Council work, and hanging out at a wonderful parish Christmas market for a morning. I probably wouldn’t count that, though.)

That’s not calling you a liar, I should stress, merely that you are the first person I have ever known to actually present themselves as primarily other than German. And I’ve not lacked in knowing Germans, having studied, worked, holidayed, and lived with Germans, and visited nine times.

Thing is, I fully appreciate the line that Germans tend to be locally rather than nationally patriotic - I’ve been told that plenty of times, and often cited a curious example of such when explaining it to others. But I’m not convinced by the idea that it is - as a rule - the primary identification.

And yet in summarising yourself on your profile, Rhinelander doesn’t get a look in.

I’m always told that, and I know there’s something to it, and yet I’ve never met a German who has done so when talking to me or in my vicinity.

And that’s fair, though it does mean that whenever Americans talk about nationalism, “Christian” or otherwise, it’s usually the case that I’m left utterly at a loss as to what they mean.

I remember years ago - thirty years or more - Scott McCloud giving a talk in connection with UKCAC in which he was looking forward to us being freed of “the tyranny of objects”. I don’t think many of us envisaged the tyrannies of licenses, passwords, and surveillance capitalism.

As for the idea that “nations are a thing and should have some consideration with regard to how states are arranged” being a view that’s present to most modern Western people, this wasn’t the case until around 1800 or so - with it being called nationalism from then on.

I don’t think that works. Every country is a special case one way or another. And I think there were only a few dozen nation states before 1871.

If that were the case, there would have been no impetus - as there was for decades - for Germany to reunify. That was an explicitly and obvious nationalist cause and action, and nobody was under an illusions about that.

This makes it very hard to have conversations across the Atlantic. Things like the United Nations and previously the League of Nations, and the EU all presume a nationalist world, made up of countries that are nation-states to a degree that states are referred to as nations all working together.

It can have negative connotations, yes, but it’s generally understood as a pretty generic term that can have a range of expressions ranging from inclusive and collaborative nationalisms, to exclusive and imperial nationalisms. Some of these are bad, but by no means all.

Well, unless they think German reunification shouldn’t have happened, and indeed that the various federal Länder shouldn’t be joined together as a single state? Like most of us in Europe the main model favoured there is a collaborative nationalism, pooling sovereignty with other EU states.