Page 99 falls in chapter two of my dissertation. This chapter, “Moments of Disruption,” describes how members of the radical right group, Alternative for Germany (AfD), message a different view of Germany’s Nazi past to promote patriotism. Messaging refers to the crafted image political actors communicate through broad communicative methods such as video, clothing, gestures, and speech patterns (Lempert and Silverstein 2012).

In chapter two, I describe Germans’ changing perception of history, including German victimhood during World War II alongside narratives of the country’s aggression. AfD members participate in these changing narratives to disrupt how Germans think about Nazism. The two ethnographic examples in this chapter focus on how people across the political spectrum took part in AfD meetings to sonically and linguistically disrupt, silence, and articulate competing narratives about Germany’s past to gain control over its future.

Since page 99 is the last page of the conclusion, the “page 99” test is only slightly accurate. Page 99 is the final page of this chapter’s conclusion where I iterate my discussion of structural nostalgia (Herzfeld 2016). I understand structural nostalgia to be “a competition between hegemonic and counter narratives, images, and interpretations of Germany’s past and future which openly reveal the nation’s imperfections and through which, one can see Germans’ changing self-image” (Reber 2022: 99). Structural nostalgia is one way that AfD members message normalcy and democratic legitimacy. It creates a societal space in which members can draw on and substantiate already-existing normative notions in Germany.

In the broader dissertation, I examine how radical political actors messaged normalcy and democratic legitimacy to reframe their image through social media, in-person campaigning, and repurposed everyday materials and national symbols. These emergent radical politics, framed as “normal,” reveal schisms and skepticism about nation-building, liberal democracy, and national identity. The intellectual intervention I make is to examine ethnographically how radical political actors engage time-sensitive projects of normalcy and democratic legitimacy in structures that already support these actors. I build on contemporary scholarship that investigates how democratization is a process of exclusion (Partridge 2022), leading to already-partitioned democracies built on historically normative notions in each country. The social intervention I point to in this dissertation is that normalcy and democratic legitimacy, being unwieldly terms, can be and are manipulated by political actors to transform the future of communities and countries.

Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein. 2012. Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Bloomington:Indiana University Press.

Partridge, Damani. 2022. Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin. University of California Press.

Reber, April L. 2022. “The ‘Extremist’ Next Door: Normalcy and Democratic Legitimacy in Germany.” University of California, Santa Cruz.