“Our National Feeling is a Broken One:” Civic Emotion and the Holocaust in German Citizenship Education

Abstract

This article examines how collective memory narratives about the Holocaust and corresponding performances of classroom emotional labor and emotion management are used to teach immigrants in Germany the normative civic emotion associated with citizenship. In 2005, following legal changes which increased naturalization opportunities, Germany created a series of nation-wide orientation classes and integration projects aimed at preparing foreign residents for membership. This research, based on participant observation in orientation classes and interviews with integration workers in Frankfurt am Main, shows that civic emotion and associated practices of feeling management play a key role in citizen-making projects. Although the emotional content of citizenship in most countries is largely positive, consisting of feelings like national pride and loyalty, German civic emotion is both unique and contested. Most integration workers taught migrants a distinctly negative form of civic emotion, which combined sadness and shame for the Nazi-era with a rejection of national pride. Some attempted to negotiate alternative forms of “safe,” specifically non-national pride, and a minority of subjects argued that it was time for Germans to “stop carrying shame” for the Holocaust altogether and re-embrace patriotism. Thus, the emphasis that subjects put on teaching the “correct” kinds of civic emotion, along with their disputes over what those were, show that even the most intimate and invisible aspect of belonging, what individuals feel toward their country, can become fertile ground for struggles over citizenship and national identity.