Perception and Evaluation of the Balkans as a Powder Keg in the German-language Press Discourse
Vjosa Hamiti, Milote SadikuMedia reports have employed the metaphor Pulverfass “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” in the past century to describe the Balkans in general, and the former Yugoslavia in particular, as an area in which unrest has repeatedly occurred and might continue to occur. In everyday and mass media discourse, the use of metaphors has an evaluation function, whereas in the representation of politically relevant processes a persuasive function through which the attitudes and evaluations of the text producer are conveyed to the readers. In this article we will use the example of the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” to show how it has become a rating pattern for German-speaking Balkan perceptions since the First World War. The focus of this paper is the analysis of this metaphor in the German-language media reports from the beginning of the First World War to the present - a century later – with the aim of finding out which functions they serve as a pattern of interpretation in the German-language media discourse on the security situation in the Balkans, more specifically in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the metaphor used in this article draws on both conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory. Schwarz-Friesel (2015) examines the metaphorical utterance of the Balkan powder keg in the context of critical cognitive linguistics (CCL). The corpus for this paper consists of archives and articles available online (such as comments, reports, and interviews). The potential significance of the metaphorical expression of the Balkan powder keg is examined on the basis of the selected corpus.
Wahrnehmung und Evaluierung des Balkan als Pulverfass im deutschsprachigen Pressediskurs
Vjosa Hamiti, Milote SadikuIm vergangenen Jahrhundert wird der Balkan im Allgemeinen und insbesondere ExJugoslawien in Medienberichten mit der Metapher „Balkan Pulverfass“ beschrieben, als eine Gegend, in der es immer wieder zu Unruhen kam und weiterhin kommen könnte. Im alltäglichen und massenmedialen Diskurs hat die Verwendung von Metaphern eine Evaluierungsfunktion und bei der Darstellung von politisch relevanten Vorgängen eine persuasive Funktion, durch die Einstellungen und Bewertungen des Textproduzenten den Lesern vermittelt werden. In diesem Beitrag werden wir am Beispiel der Metapher „Pulverfass Balkan“ aufzeigen, wie die Metapher seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg zum Bewertungsmuster der deutschsprachigen Balkanwahrnehmung geworden ist. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrages steht die Analyse der Metapher in den deutschsprachigen Berichterstattungen aus Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, die den Zeitraum vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zu Gegenwart umfassen. Ziel des Beitrages ist es zu zeigen, welche Funktionen die Metapher als Deutungsmuster im deutschsprachigen Mediendiskurs zur Sicherheitslage auf dem Balkan, genauer in ExJugoslawien übernommen hat. In diesem Beitrag wird zunächst der Begriff Metapher nach dem Ansatz der konzeptuellen Metapherntheorie und der Blending Theorie erläutert. Anschließend wird mit Schwarz-Friesel (2015) die metaphorische Äußerung „Pulverfass Balkan“ im Rahmen der kritischen Kognitionslinguistik (KKL) untersucht. Die Datengrundlage der Analyse bildet das Korpus aus online verfügbaren Archiven und Beiträgen gesammelten Kommentaren, Reportagen, Berichterstattungen und Interviews. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zeigen, dass die metaphorische Äußerung Pulverfass Balkan ein viel breiteres Bedeutungspotential hat.
In this article, the analysis of the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” shows how this metaphor has become an evaluation pattern vis-à-vis the Balkans amongst German-speakers since the First World War. The focus of the article is the investigation of the usage of this metaphor in German-language news accounts covering the Balkans from the beginning of the First World War to the present, more than a century later. The aim of the investigation is to find out which functions this metaphor has taken on as a pattern of evaluation/interpretation in German-language media discourse on the security situation in the Balkans, more specifically in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, the intensity of use of this metaphor in times of acute crises shall be examined in comparison to times of low intensity conflict. This study also aims to show how the perception of the Balkans has developed in German-speaking countries. Routinely resorting to this metaphor, media reports have described the Balkans in general, and the former Yugoslavia in particular, as an area in which unrest has repeatedly occurred and might continue to occur. Using the metaphors of powder keg, fuse and spark, the recipient is fed with violence, threat and even fear scenarios that can trigger emotional concepts such as anxiety and fear. This article assumes that the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” describes a territory in which there is a high voltage that could lead to an explosion at any time. The causes of events that lead to the explosion of the powder keg are established discursively by the semantics of the lexical units “throw/be a spark” and “put a fuse”, as in the idioms “den Funken ins Pulverfass werfen/schleudern (‘throw a spark into the powder keg’); der Funke im Pulverfass sei (‘the spark in the powder keg’) and die Lunte ans Pulverfass legen (‘put the fuse on the powder keg’)”.On the basis of evidence from a press coverage corpus (109 documents), this paper examines how the metaphorical expression “powder keg” has become the evaluation/ interpretation pattern of the Balkans and to what extent this interpretation pattern can lead to an intensification of the threat potential. The corpus consists of media coverage in times of acute crises (World War I and post-Yugoslav wars) and in times of lack of them. In this way we want to determine whether the metaphorical expression “powder keg” in German-language media discourse has the same vitality and the same potential in wartime as in times of low conflict. The outbreak of WWI is considered a discursive event, expressed widely by the “powder keg” metaphor. The classic understanding of the metaphor is of a linguistic phenomenon that serves to embellish speech in a poetic and rhetorical way. Since ancient times, it has been the subject of investigation not only in linguistic but in many other scholarly fields. Metaphors are no longer regarded as mere ornaments of language in the scholarship on the metaphor. Especially since the groundbreaking publication Metaphors we live by (1980) by Lakoff and Johnson, which has been around for almost 40 years, the discussion of metaphors has been booming in many specialist disciplines. As the main representative of conceptual metaphor theory, which originated in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, Lakoff and Johnson (2008 [1997]) relate the concept of metaphor to the conceptual level. This approach is based on the assumption that metaphors structure our everyday life and have a great impact on the way we think and act, i.e. language and thinking are subject to the same cognitive principles. In cognitive metaphor theory, complex and abstract phenomena can be summarized in familiar and elementary understandable concepts: conceptual metaphors actively participate in the processing of experiences. Press documents from ANNO - Historical Austrian Newspaper and Magazine Archives - serve as the material basis for the investigation for the period of the First World War. The reports from 1945 to the present consist of documents from the online archives of Der Spiegel, Tages-Anzeiger, St. Galler Tagblatt, Die Zeit, Die Presse and Euronews. The analysis shows that the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” inferred the following conceptual features: “instability”, “primitiveness”, “unreliability”, “ethnic and religious mixture”, “violence”, “corruption”, “lack of democracy” and “fundamentalist Islamism”. The use of the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” in media discourse has the function to convey attitudes and evaluations of the West as well as to convey opinions about the situation in the Balkans in general.In summary, it can be said that the Balkans have been referred to as a “powder keg” for more than a century due to political and historical events. In the documents examined, the metaphorical expression “powder keg” has always been used for the whole Balkans, the instability of which threatens the whole of Europe.
