ABSTRACT
The very fi rst time I was confronted with, as Adorno (1998) once famously put it, ‘the question: what is German?,’ was when I was twelve years old. At my school we were asked to write an essay entitled ‘Are you proud to be German?’ Besides the peculiarity of the task as such, the diffi culty with this seemingly open question was that, although not explicitly stated, we were expected to write why we were not proud to be German-a positive answer was, without a doubt, impossible. I do not recall what I wrote in the end, but I distinctly remember envying a classmate who put forward the argument that you cannot be proud of your nationality because it is not the result of your personal efforts. National identity thus seemed to be an arbitrary construct, which one was not to emotionally invest in. Instead, it needed to be rationally discarded. It was at this early point that we were made aware of the ‘strangeness of being German’ and started to develop a disconnected sense of self, fl oundering between national identifi cation and disidentifi cation.
