German Media and National Identity By Sanna Inthorn

Yet, highlighting how media discourse offers particular subject positions is not enough to explore the political nature of the popular. Media and cultural studies locate media content within its social and political contexts and show how discursively constructed identities in the media relate to wider social relations of power. While I do not wish to argue for a model of straightforward media “effects”, I do argue that the media are a key source of information that help us make sense of the social and political world around us, as well as our own place within it. We may incorporate media discourse in modes of behaviour and forms of identification. From the premise of this argument, the following questions arise: What range of different ways of being in the world does media discourse have to offer? Does it challenge or sustain the current distribution of power in society? All four case studies in this book find evidence that media discourse constructs not only a civic concept of the nation but also an inward-looking, ethnocentric concept. In order to show how this discourse relates to a wider social and political context in which an ethnic concept of the nation underpins exclusionary practices against ethnic minorities, in the introduction, as well as chapters 1 and 2, I sketch out some key processes and events in German politics and society. I highlight key characteristics of German government approaches to European integration, as well as central elements of Germany’s reform of citizenship legislation and immigration policy. I then relate the findings of my media analysis back to these contexts, in order to show how media discourse offers similar concepts of identity to those that are propagated by political discourse and enshrined in legislation. Readers in the fields of politics and history might be disgruntled with what I think they might see as my “skimming over” political events and complex governmental processes. I mainly have relied on what I believe is a useful range of secondary literature to make my argument, but I concede that a primary analysis of political discourse would be a valuable addition to my research. I encourage future researchers to pick up where I did not go further.