Masaryk University Faculty of Social Studies Department of Political Science
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS IN THE BERLINER REPUBLIC MASTER’S THESIS BC. HELENA TRUCHLA SUPERVISOR: PROF. PHDR. JAN HOLZER, PH.D UČO 414846 POLITICAL SCIENCE IMMATRICULATION YEAR: 2015 BRNO, 2018 2 Declaration I declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. Quotations, illustrations, and citations have been duly referenced. Brno, May 29, 2018 ............................................. 3 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank to my thesis supervisor Prof Jan Holzer of the Department of Political Science at Masaryk University. This thesis would not have been possible without the help of Prof. Dr. Dieter Ohr of the Otto– Suhr–Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, who kindly agreed to supervise my Erasmus study stay. I am grateful to Mgr. et Mgr. Kateřina Kirkosová of the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Masaryk University, who steered me in a new (analytical) direction. Finally, I wish to express most heartfelt thanks to my parents, my partner, and my dearest friend V. You keep me going. 5 6 CONTENT INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 10 1. THEORETICAL PART ....................................................................................................... 12 1.2 Arguments in Politics ...................................................................................................... 12 1.3 Theories of Memory and Remembering ......................................................................... 14 1.3.1 History and Memory ................................................................................................ 15 1.3.2 Content Centred Approach....................................................................................... 17 1.3.3 Process Oriented Approach ...................................................................................... 21 1.3.4 The Culture of Remembrance as a Discourse .......................................................... 22 1.3.5 Politics Of/With History .......................................................................................... 23 1.3.6 Historical Arguments ............................................................................................... 24 1.4 Excursion To The Second History Of Nazism ................................................................ 27 1.4.1 The Old Bundesrepublik Deutschland ..................................................................... 28 1.4.2 The German Democratic Republic .......................................................................... 31 1.4.3 Reunified Germany .................................................................................................. 33 1.4.4 Weimar, (Berlin), Bonn, Berlin ............................................................................... 34 1.5 Conclusion of the Theoretical Part .................................................................................. 38 2 METHODS .......................................................................................................................... 39 2.1 Paradigmatic Anchoring.................................................................................................. 39 2.2 Aims and Research Questions ......................................................................................... 39 2.3 Research Plan .................................................................................................................. 40 2.3.1 Time Span ................................................................................................................ 41 2.3.2 Data Sources and Collection .................................................................................... 41 2.3.3 Sampling .................................................................................................................. 41 2.4 Analytical Approaches .................................................................................................... 42 2.4.1 Corpus Lexicometry ................................................................................................. 43 2.4.2 Discourse Analysis ................................................................................................... 46 7 2.5 Quality and Limits of Analysis ....................................................................................... 48 2.6 Conclusion of the Chapter on Methods .......................................................................... 49 3 MAPPING THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE ..................................................................... 50 3.1 Interpretation 1: Discourse in Numbers.......................................................................... 50 3.2 Plenary Minutes Sampling: Peaks in Debates ................................................................ 56 3.2.1 Legislative Period 14 ............................................................................................... 58 3.2.2 Legislative Period 15 ............................................................................................... 59 3.2.3 Legislative Period 16 ............................................................................................... 59 3.2.4 Legislative Period 17 ............................................................................................... 60 3.2.5 Legislative Period 18 ............................................................................................... 61 3.3 Interpretation 2: Topics, Strategies, Speakers ................................................................ 62 3.3.1 Foreign and defence policy ..................................................................................... 63 3.3.2 Democracy ............................................................................................................... 74 3.3.3 Citizenship and National Identity ............................................................................ 75 3.3.4 Medicine and Research............................................................................................ 78 3.4 Typology of Strategies.................................................................................................... 78 3.5 Culture of Remembrance of the Berliner Republic ........................................................ 80 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 84 LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. 87 LIST OF ATTACHMENTS .................................................................................................... 88 ATTACHMENTS .................................................................................................................... 89 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 112 ANNOTATION AND KEYWORDS .................................................................................... 124 8 WORDCOUNT: 183.131 9 INTRODUCTION “Our past shapes our present and our culture. We are heirs of our German history … we have the common collective memory of places and events. The Brandenburg Gate and the 9th of November are parts of that memory. Or a victory in a World Cup,” wrote German minister of the interior Thomas de Maiziére for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper (2017). History is indeed more than just a sum of past events. Since there is always a “number of allowed, legitimate, ‘objective’ and more or less appropriate arguments about one historical object” (Kocka, 1977: 470), history can very well be utilized to to provide “orientation in the present” (Leuschner, 1980: 13; emphasis added). In politics, providing orientation usually means to justify decisions, frame actors and processes, shape identity of a given collective, or guide choices between the moral and the unacceptable. In this thesis, we are interested in discovering and describing the way, in which history and memories of National Socialism enter political discourse, in the form of argumentation used by the members of the German federal parliament – the Bundestag. We will focus on the period of Berliner Republic (1998 – 2017), which began with moving the federal parliament and government back from Bonn to Berlin, and which provided an opportunity to redefine Germany’s collective memories and its national identity. Specifically, we will be interested in discovering the way, in which historical arguments penetrate discussions in general policy areas - not in commemorative and symbolical politics. Such an approach has been identified in literature review as a gap in existing research. Since the principal aim of this thesis is to map political discourse, we will begin with a large data set comprising all Bundestag plenary meeting transcripts from the given period. By combining quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches, we will reduce the corpus to the specific instances of historical argumentation within general policy topics. These will be analysed qualitatively. Underlying logic of such research plan is to link individual analytical steps with one another, making use of the advantages of both. We will attempt to approach the interpretation in an analogous manner: combining visual representations of quantitative results with qualitative, on 10 broader context focused