This panel examines lessons and influences from the National Socialist and communist pasts on German national pride since unification in 1990.  In the post-war years, both at home and abroad, German nationalism was associated with acts of destruction and degradation inspired by National Socialist ideology.  So intense was the disapprobation in the west that concepts of nation were not amenable to constructive deployment by political elites.  These effectively remained taboo until German unification, when geopolitical and attitudinal changes began to reflect a definite, if modest, rise in national confidence. This panel explores contemporary political elites’ resurrection, reconstruction and deployment of the national in Germany in public discourse, for purposes of internal (particularly east-west) integration, partisan mobilisation, policy justification, or external representation.   Political elites may highlight the ‘false’ nature of certain representations of the past in order to affirm by contrast the possibility of an ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ portrayal (Assmann, 2008: 66).  Do notions of German ‘nation’ now resonate sufficiently positively with the wider population to be construed constructively by political elites?  If so, how is ‘nation’ constructed so as to promote national confidence in Germany? What is included and excluded in new concepts of the national? What relevance does national confidence have in a contemporary context of east-west integration, a loosening of national ties, and a pluralisation of political cultures? This inter-disciplinary panel combines memory studies with approaches from cultural studies, history and political science to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the concept of nation in contemporary German politics.