Cultural performances of German national identity: Popular music, body culture, and the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

摘要

This thesis explores the intersection of nationalism, popular music, and sport as they collided with German identity politics and discourses of twentieth-century history. I contextualize public performances of German national identity during the 2006 World Cup within the broader historical context of national identity construction through music and sport in the last two hundred. I contextualize Germans' public performance of national pride and hospitality during the World Cup as the latest in a long line of cultural performances of German identity that have shaped and been shaped by historical circumstances and socially conditioned discourses of national identity. Taking a broad historical and conceptual perspective on cultural performance, I argue that cultural performances of German national identity---communicated in music, sport, and visual symbolism in the public landscape (i.e., through the use of posters, ads, popular press, etc)---have been tailored to and contingent on the social and discursive exigencies of particular historical and political junctures of the past two hundred years. Likewise, cultural performances during the 2006 World Cup must be seen as particular to twenty-first-century German society. Analyzing the Germans' public performance of national identity as well as popular songs and their audio-visual texts (i.e., music videos), I argue that some supposedly nationalist performances of German identity gained traction and popular support during the World Cup because of the strong role played by popular music and sport in framing the terms of their performance and interpretation.