“The liberal student movement of the late 60’s was different in Germany from how it happened in other countries in that the post-War generation confronted their parents about their (personal) past, and finally began to process the history of the Third Reich. As a part of this process, a lot of the blame was laid on nationalism, and the concept itself was questioned. Mainstream opinion was, and to a large extend still is, that nationalism is a very primitive emotion rooted in prehistoric tribalism which you only express if you have no achievements of your own, is not based on reason, and almost always yields negative results. Why would you fly a flag, after all? Odds are, somebody walking past your house already knows which country s/he’s in. So, that’s the climate I grew up in. I had no role models, and there was nobody in my personal environment, that ever expressed even a hint of patriotism. The very few people that I’ve met who did were pretty dumb and indeed had nothing else they could possibly be proud of — if the mainstream rejects patriotism, it turns into a brand that is owned by the far right, which in turn fuels the rejection by the mainstream.”
Commenter on Reddit, Deutschlanders, is it ok to be patriotic/nationalistic like we are in the states, or is it still taboo?
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