Since its founding in 2014, Pegida has positioned itself as a populist movement striving to limit immigration and to preserve Germany’s cultural heritage. It has also aligned itself with other right-wing European political groups whose exclusionary views are rooted in theories of a civilizational clash between the West and the Islamic world. Pegida’s pushback against immigration also includes appeals to resist globalization and the growth of multiculturalism by embracing what Verena Stolcke has termed “cultural fundamentalism.” This ideology assumes cultural hierarchies and segregates religious and ethnic groups spatially and geographical as a means to maintain cultural uniformity. In doing so, Pegida posits that it is not racist or xenophobic, rather that it seeks solidarity in maintaining Western cultural values. The danger in Pegida’s ideology is that it rejects not only constitutional principles and notions of cultural pluralism, but that it furthers a cultural divide that need not exist and, in fact, embraces an exclusionary nationalism that is not unlike the values that they purport to reject.
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Myra Marx Ferree, Jeffrey Luppes, Randall Newnham, David Freis, David N. Coury, Carol Hager and Angelika von Wahl
Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) Reviewed by Myra Marx Ferree
Despina Stratigakos, Hitler at Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) Reviewed by Jeffrey Luppes
Carolin Hilpert, Strategic Cultural Change and the Challenge for Security Policy: Germany and the Bundeswehr’s Deployment to Afghanistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Reviewed by Randall Newnham
Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott, and Kirsten Heinsohn, ed., Germany 1916–1923: A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016) Reviewed by David Freis
Esra Özyürek, Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) Reviewed by David N. Coury
Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Reviewed by Carol Hager
Clayton J. Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History 1880-1945 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016) Reviewed by Angelika von Wahl
James Bindenagel, Matthias Herdegen, and Karl Kaiser, ed., Internationale Sicherheit im 21. Jahrhundert: Deutschlands internationale Verantwortung (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016) Reviewed by Randall Newnham