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It examines not only discourses circulated in relation to political and legal issues and aimed clearly at an educated and even elite readership—as Gaye Tuchman (1978) suggests, one can easily get the impression here of “eavesdropping” (p. x) on a conversation between different sections of that elite—but, by including football reporting (particularly its televisual variety), it also enters the realm of popular culture and working-class audiences. It then complements these analyses by paying close and overdue attention to that fountainhead of petit-bourgeois “distinction” (to use Bourdieu’s [1984] term), the restaurant review with its studiedly pompous language, its self-referential interest in the “exotic”, and its confident claims to be able to sniff out the enduringly authentic in contrast to the commercially and superficially fake.
As the author points out, the panorama is not complete; and, indeed, never can be covered exhaustively in a single volume. National identity, as a site of ideological struggle rather than in any sense a “thing”, is overdetermined in complex and not always overlapping ways. Any German who is uninterested in the various domains covered here—politics, citizenship law, football, culinary reviews—will find yet other narratives of national identity circulating in yet other fields: music, advertising, fashion, comic strips, soap operas, leisure activities, and so on. The discursive matrix is dense and multistranded—and as readers, viewers, and listeners, while we are not destined to occupy any particular part of it, we cannot move outside it.
Among the many strengths of this book are both an acknowledgment of the specificities of each domain it covers and the identification of a metadiscourse, which behind the variety of styles and languages present can be seen as present in all of them. On one hand, while the language of political and legal debate (covered in both chapters 1 and 2, respectively) can be adversarial—even hostile—and characterised at times by the deployment of a quasi-technical, domain-specific vocabulary, and while the terminology of restaurant reviews (chapter 4) is exquisitely self-important and occasionally verges on the baroque, on the other hand, the relationship between sports journalists and their readers/viewers (chapter 3) is—as the author quite correctly points out—often built around the use of humour and even forms of banter. She gives a wonderful example of such a rapport (see chapter 3) when she quotes German comedian Dieter Nuhr as saying the following of neighbouring Holland in the run-up to a German-Holland match during the 2004 European Championship: