In this rare work on `everyday' understandings of citizenship and nationhood, Cynthia Miller-Idriss helps to dispel stereotypes about allegedly `blood'-based and `racial' ideas of German nationhood. She shows that ordinary people (even those particularly suspected to hold `racial' ideas, such as working-class youth), espouse a cultural and behavioral, rather than biological, idea of nation. Moreover, in making generational experience key ... Read moreto national self-conceptions, she proposes a dynamic, change-centered notion of nationhood. -Christian Joppke, author of Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State Blood and Culture is an extremely important ethnographic account of a phenomenon that is often examined in a quantitative or theoretical manner. Cynthia Miller-Idriss talks to working-class German youth-high-school students in the process of studying for a `trade'-and elicits from them their experience of what it means to be German in a country that is increasingly diverse and where the memory of World War II can no longer serve as an `excuse' for not expressing national pride. She makes a convincing case that nation-ness differs not only across nations but across generations within the same nation-state. -Mabel Berezin, author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe Show Less