The Extreme Gone Mainstream
Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany
Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany
How extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbols The 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. Required reading for anyone concerned about the global resurgence of the far right, The Extreme Gone Mainstream reveals how style and aesthetic representation serve as one gateway into extremist scenes and subcultures by helping to strengthen racist and nationalist identification and by acting as conduits of resistance to mainstream society.
Reviews with the most likes.
Miller-Idriss walks a tightrope in her illuminating book on the commercialization and fashion of far-right German culture. On one hand, she repeatedly implies that the tangible results of this commercialization have the power to create or shape far-right ideologues. On the other hand, the evidence Miller-Idriss presents paints the word shape to be a misnomer - as it doesn't seem that clothing or other commercialization has the power to mold something from a tabula rasa. Instead, the argument created from the empirical evidence presented seems one that clearly demonstrates fashion strengthening far-right views of nationalism and xenophobia, but not without the previous existence of those views. Perhaps this disconnect between initial thesis and evidence is exacerbated by the structure of the argument. The structure is such that the chapters sometimes seem an effort to describe the clothing physically rather than use it as evidence in a larger argument, so the argument occasionally gets lost.
Although I've been mostly negative, that's only because the negative aspects require more words to point out. The good aspects of the book are much easier to show, and there are many more. The book has tremendous value as an illustration of a purposefully insider culture, as a deep-dive into far-right semiotics, and as a dissertation ripe for extrapolation into other fields, regions, and studies. The methodology is concise and holistic (although the casual reader unfamiliar with social sciences may find the empirical discussions difficult). The chapters on coded messages (2), connections to Norse mythology (3), and issues with banning far-right symbols (5) are especially interesting from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with contemporary German culture. Overall, a good book with a single misstep.
