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Notes -
I feel...differently about Germany.
I'd certainly describe myself as a patriot. A nationalist even. But it's the culture, the language, the actual physical country, the people and their ways, and the everyday architecture that I love. Not the institutions, the state, the monuments and symbols. But that may have an obvious historical explanations. For the Americans, those things were always theirs - a democracy from the get-go, by the people and for the people. Tacky as their symbols might be, they are theirs. But for us Germans, the state was never truly a democracy; the most we ever managed was to be handed whatever form of democracy our betters thought suitable for us, by the state and against the people. We accepted it, of course, having always been a people of loyal subjects. We are now loyal subjects of our democratic constitutional order, but it's by social convention and pragmatism, and not in our hearts. As a people, we remain subjects, and our relationship to the state is little different to that our ancestors had to the Reich, or to their local princes. Those on high decide, and we obey. So what does that make the monuments, the symbols and the institutions? Those are the emanations of the ruling class, or the ruling gestalt entity anyways. They aren't truly ours. The local church, alright, that at least is or was relevant to people's lives. The ruins of a castle, picturesque and one can picnic there. But the statue of some Prussian Junker or King? Some neoclassicist monument to the Kaiserreich? A memorial to holocaust victims? The halls of government? None of that is of us and for us, but is of the state and against us. We are to obey in actions, but our hearts are irrelevant. Our constitution, our institutions, our relationship to the military, all that are artificial post-war creations installed to dictate specific behaviors to us. It's not from us. It's not for us. It's to make us behave.
At the most one could say that our tricolor flag, the black-red-and-gold, is by and for us. But in truth it was by a small subset of the population, ideologically charged and by no means organic. It's still our flag, we rally around it for identification and for sports, so I suppose we have taken to it.
Still, it's my country and my people and my language and my culture and my land, and all those are the best in the world. Obviously.
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