The Damaged Image: Germany and the Problem of Self-Representation.

For several years now, the idea of the “nation as brand” has become part of the established vocabulary of place promotion, tourism marketing, and communication consultancy. States increasingly appear like corporations: they compete for attention, investment, talent, and sympathy; they develop logos, campaigns, slogans, and narratives. Books such as Brand New Nation: The Art of Branding Nations (2003) by Simon Anholt and, more recently, Jessica Gienow-Hecht’s Vom Staat zur Marke. Die Geschichte des Nation Branding (2025) demonstrate how deeply the notion of the strategically manageable national image has entered academic discourse. At the same time, the debate often remains surprisingly superficial. Nations appear as oversized consumer goods. They are treated as communicative constructs that can supposedly be optimized through the right images, slogans, and campaigns. History is reduced to a usable backdrop, culture becomes content, and identity turns into a question of consistent brand management.

Not only in the German case does such an approach fall short. Germany does not simply suffer from an image problem or an unclear positioning. Rather, it possesses a historically deep-rooted problem of self-representation. Anyone seeking to understand why national symbolism in Germany continues to oscillate between suspicion of pathos, didacticism, and embarrassment cannot avoid Peter Reichel. He belongs to that generation of intellectuals in the Federal Republic whose thinking was shaped by the experience that, after 1945, Germany not only had to find a new political order but also new ways of representing itself.

Born in 1942, the political scientist taught for many years at the University of Hamburg. What is remarkable is the extent to which Reichel, as a political scientist, turned toward the symbolic, cultural, and historical dimensions of politics: political images, rituals, memory culture, national representation, and public symbolism. His work deliberately moves between disciplines – an approach that would greatly benefit contemporary debates on brands, reputation, and national self-representation.

His most important books can be read as a loose trilogy. Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches. Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (1991) analyzes the aesthetic self-staging of National Socialism; Schwarz-Rot-Gold. Kleine Geschichte deutscher Nationalsymbole (2005) examines the conflict-ridden history of German national symbols and rituals; and Glanz und Elend deutscher Selbstdarstellung. Nationalsymbole in Reich und Republik (2012) traces the long and contested history of German self-representation – from the symbolic struggles of the nineteenth century through the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the postwar era to reunification. The present essay focuses on this latter study.

Reichel reconstructs with remarkable precision the political and cultural struggles surrounding colors, flags, anthems, national holidays, monuments, the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and the Holocaust Memorial. What becomes visible are not only competing notions of national identity but also the interests, power shifts, winners, and losers behind these symbolic conflicts. Places such as Frankfurt’s Paulskirche reveal how many possible national narratives, political traditions, and symbolic meanings have been displaced, overwritten, or marginalized over time. Reichel thus demonstrates that national symbols are by no means natural or linear developments. Their later status often appears self-evident only in retrospect—an effect Baruch Fischhoff described in his classic essay “Hindsight ≠ Foresight” (1975), written in the context of the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. For contemporaries, the course, significance, and success of these symbols remained open, contested, and highly unpredictable. Or, as Reichel puts it, “historical processes do not follow the wishes and fantasies of those who later write about them” (2012, p. 121). Glanz und Elend deutscher Selbstdarstellung therefore tells not only a story of German politics but also a story of Germany’s uncertainty toward its own images.

It is hardly surprising that Reichel does not speak of “brands.” His vocabulary does not come from the worlds of marketing, positioning, or strategic communication. He is interested in flags, rituals, architecture, memorial sites, state ceremonies, world exhibitions, national imagery, and political symbolism. This is precisely what makes his work so productive for contemporary debates. While much of the recent nation-branding literature treats states as objects of strategic communication Reichel reminds us that national self-representation is the result of long historical sedimentations, conflicts, and symbolic transformations. Germany appears in his work not as a poorly managed brand but as a nation burdened by a historically troubled relationship with its own visibility.

For the mid-nineteenth century already, Peter Reichel describes “nationality” as a “one of the great driving forces of the age” (2012, p. 20), mobilized by a wide range of political and social interests. Nationhood appears not as a logical or necessary stage in the development of modern societies but as a historically produced and interest-driven social construction. In doing so, Reichel avoids one of the central pitfalls of what Ulrich Beck, Andreas Wimmer, and Nina Glick Schiller have described as “methodological nationalism”: the assumption that the nation constitutes the natural and self-evident order of modern societies.

Instead, Reichel is interested in how the national is produced communicatively, symbolically, and culturally in the first place. He emphasizes the enormous significance of symbolic forms – from flags and anthems to rituals, images, and political performances – through which the nation becomes visible, emotionally charged, and collectively effective. Without using the concept of the brand – and rather malgré lui – Reichel ultimately tells a history of national brand formation avant la lettre: a story about how political communities are communicatively constructed through signs, symbols, and cultural condensation. Here his work intersects with Benedict Anderson’s reflections in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), where nations are described as imagined communities that become collectively imaginable through media, symbols, rituals, and shared narratives.

Against this background, the contemporary debate appears less as a radical new beginning than as a historical shift in language and semantics. Much of what Peter Reichel describes in terms of political symbolism, national imagery, and collective self-staging has, since the 1990s and 2000s, increasingly been reformulated in the vocabulary of branding, reputation, and strategic communication. Given the obvious thematic proximity, it is striking how rarely the more recent nation-branding literature explicitly engages with the older or parallel traditions of research on political symbolism, national myths, and collective self-description represented by scholars such as Peter Reichel or Herfried Münkler. This suggests that an entire discourse on national self-representation developed for decades largely alongside the newer language of branding without ever being fully integrated into it. Nation branding therefore appears less as the invention of national self-representation than as its translation into the language of management, reputation, and strategic communication.

The idea of the nation as a brand did not emerge by accident. It belongs to a broader historical constellation in which economic ways of thinking expanded far beyond the sphere of business. Cities became brands. Universities developed corporate identities. Museums formulated mission statements. Politicians worked on their personal brands. Even states began to understand themselves as actors competing in a global marketplace of attention. Simon Anholt popularized this perspective through the concepts of “nation branding” and later “competitive identity.” States, he argued, should learn to manage their reputations actively, much as corporations manage their brands.

Germany remained curiously distant from this way of thinking for a long time. The reasons were historical. After 1945, national self-staging was not merely difficult; it was morally contaminated. Flags, anthems, grand narratives, and images of collective unity all carried the suspicion of ideology. The Federal Republic therefore developed a political aesthetics of de-dramatization. National identity was to manifest itself less through grand gestures and symbolic spectacles than through institutions, procedures, and political sobriety. The young republic defined itself more through stable institutions, economic reconstruction, and constitutional patriotism than through heroic national narratives. This very restraint became a form of national self-representation.

One could even argue that the Federal Republic became a brand of its own de-dramatization. Reliability rather than grandeur; procedure rather than pathos; export capacity and stability rather than national mission formed its symbolic grammar. The label “Made in Germany” became more important than national myths. Postwar German society developed a form of indirect self-representation. It presented itself through products, engineering expertise, infrastructure, economic performance, and institutional stability. Yet modern political communities still require symbolic condensation, collective narratives, and identity-forming images. This is a point Herfried Münkler explores in Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (2009). The Federal Republic appears there as a peculiar special case: a political order that could no longer simply continue traditional national myths after 1945 and therefore turned toward substitute forms of collective self-description. Münkler points to the Volkswagen and the Mercedes as objects that became symbols of West German identity far beyond their utilitarian function. “In the West, the Mercedes star replaced the Iron Cross of the war generation,” he writes provocatively. Economic success, technological competence, constitutional patriotism, and institutional stability thus assumed the integrative role fulfilled elsewhere by heroic narratives, republican pathos, or founding myths. The political myth did not disappear; it was de-dramatized, functionalized, and partially economized.

Reichel’s work makes clear that this restraint should not be mistaken for symbolic weakness. Rather, a distinctive political aesthetics emerged in the Federal Republic: restrained, pedagogical, morally controlled, yet highly self-conscious in its design. The absence of grand national pathos itself became a cultural signature. The nation appeared not despite but through its demonstrative caution.

This constellation came under pressure no later than the 1990s. Reunification reopened the question of German visibility. There was once again a larger Germany – politically sovereign, economically dominant, and internationally exposed. At the same time, globalization accelerated. Cities, regions, and states increasingly competed for investment, tourism, and international attention. In this context, the language of branding also gained influence within German political discourse.

What remains remarkable is how cautiously this process unfolded. Other countries embraced more assertive forms of national self-representation: the United Kingdom’s “Cool Britannia,” the aggressive place branding of Asian metropolises, or the patriotic imagery of the United States. Germany, by contrast, remained strikingly hesitant. Even campaigns such as “Germany – Land of Ideas” appeared technocratic and carefully moderated. The nation was expected to become visible without becoming loud. Attention should be generated without risking nationalism. German self-representation thus continued to be shaped by a distinctive dual impulse: visibility, yes – pathos, no.

This is the contemporary relevance of Reichel’s work. Nations are not brands in the classical sense because they are not freely designable communication artefacts. They consist of sedimented memories, historical ruptures, symbolic conflicts, and collective projections. Companies can change their logos. Nations carry their past with them. Germany especially.

For this reason, much of the nation-branding literature appears not only reductionist but historically and politically naïve. States are often treated as though they merely suffered from perception deficits or communicative inconsistencies that need correction. Reichel reminds us that the problem runs deeper. National self-representation is not a freely available surface of strategic communication. It is historically shaped, symbolically charged, and morally burdened. Germany’s challenge therefore does not primarily lie in generating a positive image. It lies in the fact that national images themselves carry historical burdens.

This is precisely why the history of German self-representation is so revealing. It demonstrates that modern societies do not simply possess identities; they must constantly perform, moderate, and control them. The nation is not a stable essence but an ensemble of symbolic practices: flags, architecture, sporting events, commemorative days, exhibitions, design, media images, and state rituals. All these forms generate visibility – and with it conflicts over what may become visible.

This points to Reichel’s significance beyond the German case. His books do not merely analyze German circumstances. They describe a more general problem of modern societies: the tension between political community and mediated visibility. In a world of permanent communication, the pressure toward self-representation continually increases. States are expected to be attractive, recognizable, and narratable. Yet this very logic simultaneously generates suspicion. When everything becomes communication, national identity itself increasingly appears as a form of staging.

Germany continues to respond to this legacy through a distinctive combination of distance and professionalism. It presents itself—but in a controlled manner. It communicates—but cautiously. Visibility is carefully crafted while remaining under constant suspicion of ideology. Perhaps this has become Germany’s true “brand”: a ritualized unease with national self-representation.

Or, to put it differently: Germany’s problem is not that its brand has been damaged. Rather, the experience of being damaged is part of the very core of the German brand. Yet the following is equally true: what appears as a deficit from the perspective of classical brand management is, from a historical and democratic perspective, an achievement. From the standpoint of the brand, this is a problem. From the standpoint of the open society, it is a solution.