I think this is where me being a bit of an oddball comes into play. I am german by birth, but I grew up in Turkey as the lone german in my social network.

Here it gets so messy, because one’s lived experience can alter things a great deal. I think being raised in two cultures like you’ve described can actually be an advantage, in that it lets one see outside the parochialisms inherent in any society. Right-wingers will of course say that such an upbringing leads to liberalism and faux-cosmopolitanism, but everybody in capitalist society is in danger of that; and fascists, in my experience, are some of the worst offenders, the libbiest of cosmopolitan libs. For to talk about the “white race” rather than Germans, Poles, Italians, and so on is after all to engage in the most artificial and idealistic of constructs. I think that, as touchy-feely as it sounds, the important thing is to be true to yourself. Recognize, sure, that your upbringing is unusual, but it’s part of you; embrace both it and the insights it gives.

In a small way, I think, I kind of get where you’re coming from, because I’ve never really identified with mainstream American culture. It’s as you described modern German culture, artificial and imposed from the top. The flag doesn’t stir me; movies aren’t really my thing; and the over-the-top brashness and sexuality of American music really rubs me the wrong way. Plus, the performative nationalism of it all – “we’re the bringers of FREEDOM, Yee-HAW!” – is extremely hard to take seriously, even if you ignore (as most of my countrymen seem able to) the associated crimes and bloodshed. To me, accepting my “American-ness” is sort of like accepting one’s descent from a dysfunctional family. I recognize the horrible problems with this place – the imperialism, racial injustice, settler-colonialism, and so on – but also accept that, like it or not, I am intimately connected with these problems. Thus it is my duty, not to hold myself aloof, but to try in whatever small way I can to fix them. And there are things to love, not the government or the constitution, but certain small material things: night in the great western deserts with the smell of dust and sage, wandering through a small midwestern town at dusk and mingling with the people returning homeward, sitting at a bus stop and talking to the stranger next to you. It’s a strange balancing act, but as a communist I try to maintain it, usually poorly.

typically people see themselves not just as german but as “thuringian” or “swabian”, the less mutually intelligible the dialect the stronger such an identification and the need to feel superior to some other state

Take this for what it’s worth, because I see things purely as an outsider. But I get the sense that German culture, in its authetic form, has always been local, with “German-ness” itself being largely a literary and artistic phenomena. Hence the saying (by Goethe, I think?) that there existed a “Germany of the mind;” i.e., that Germans had no common political identity, but did share a kind of common artistic language, especially where music was concerned. This is a real, though unusual, sort of bond. It was presumed, I think, that this bond would exist through unification and the annihilating of the old feudal order, and modern Germany would usher in a different kind of modernity: fully of the moment, but also in continuity with the past. This did not happen, because the architects of German unification were, like everyone else in Europe at the time, liberals with absolutely no sense of superstructure and base. Hence the odd, pathetic phenomena of World War I era nationalists helming one of the most powerful countries in Europe and at the same time bemoaning the fact that their culture was disappearing. Even in music there is in the late 19th century a steep decline, with Wagner’s Parsifal and Brahms’ German Requiem being a kind of swan song. This is all the result of the attempt to remake Germany in the image of England, a modern liberal, capitalist, and imperialist nation; which attempt culminated in Nazism, and the modern German state with its wholly artificial form, not just of nationhood, but of national identity itself.

(Sorry for the very very late reply – life, work, and the flu all happened together).