“Terms such as ‘true German’ […] belong in the history books”: How Germans with and without migrant backgrounds understand concepts used in survey research on national attachments

Whilst survey research on national attachments has used various measures, the question of how respondents understand these measures, and especially the highly ambiguous concepts they entail, has remained understudied. Moreover, scholars have used samples consisting of “citizens”, thereby not distinguishing between citizens with and citizens without a migrant background. Drawing on qualitative evidence from six focus group discussions in Germany in 2023, we seek to contribute to filling this research gap and investigate the understanding of selected measures of national attachments and the terms they entail from the perspective of Germans with and without migrant backgrounds. In so doing, we explore the meaning of three concepts – namely, “true German” (wahrer Deutscher), “German people” (deutsches Volk), and “fatherland” (Vaterland). Our discussions indicate differences between these groups and show, among other things, that the understanding of Germans with a migrant background tends to be driven by an ethnic and ethnocultural notion of nationhood, while the understanding of those without a migrant background often has a more civic notion. Moreover, the latter were more likely to question the three terms than the former. Overall, our study calls for refining extant measures to ensure they do justice to an increasingly multicultural society.