'Drang nach Osten': towards a contrastive 'Discourse analysis with reference to the German 'Push to the East'

English and other languages, particularly in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, have a number of German words in general usage which are associated with German history like Anschluss, Blitz(krieg), Endlösung and Drang nach Osten. The present paper focuses on Drang nach Osten 'push to the East', proposing a new, comparative approach which starts from the precepts of 'Schlagwortforschung' (i.e. slogan or keyword research) while integrating constructionalist, frame-semantic and discourse-analytic perspectives in a bid to investigate usage of Drang nach Osten in German and Polish media since 1990. While it emerges that Drang nach Osten is just as sensitive to shifts in foreign relations after 1990 as before, the main objective of the paper is programmatic, pointing out issues for cooperation between the methodologies as well as trends in the data that future research may find worth investigating.

ISBN:9783631646083

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