ABSTRACT
The prominence of football in Germany's daily media landscape has continued to rise steadily in recent years. This is accompanied by an increase in the potential for identification, but also, at the same time, a detachment from traditional local references. Anderson's concept of an 'imagined community' has, in fact, been an important building block for a 'cognitive turn' in nation and ethnic research. In particular, collective self-categorizations are associated with a constant necessity to determine and weigh loyalties and localizations against each other. Speth draws on Durkheim, who laid the foundation for the inclusion of rituals and collective emotions in the analysis of the construction and renewal processes of collectives. The diagnosis has been made that modern democratic societies have gone through a process of de-sacralization and that rituals in these societies have been integrated less and less into society's large controlling institutions.
