The Extreme Gone Mainstream
Subtitle: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Feb 13, 2018
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780691170206
Description: How extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbolsThe past decade has witnessed a steady increase in far right politics, social movements, and extremist violence in Europe. Scholars and policymakers have struggled to understand the causes and dynamics that have made the far right so appealing to so many people-in other words, that have made the extreme more mainstream. In this book, Cynthia Miller-Idriss examines how extremist ideologies have entered mainstream German culture through commercialized products and clothing laced with extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols and references. Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of historical and contemporary images, as well as scores of interviews with young people and their teachers in two German vocational schools with histories of extremist youth presence, Miller-Idriss shows how this commercialization is part of a radical transformation happening today in German far right youth subculture. She describes how these young people have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy coded extremist symbols. Virtually indistinguishable in style from other popular clothing, the new brands desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas and dehumanize victims.
Notes: Source title: The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)