La asimetría societal

Cullingford and Husemann’s (1995) edited collection of essays on various aspects of the Anglo-German relationship includes Cumberbatch and Wood (1995) on

representations of Germans in the British press in two distinct samples of 1991 and 1990- 1994. The authors’ methodology consists mainly of key word searches and little statistical analysis, and their conclusion is, somewhat vaguely, that “Germans do not get a fair coverage in the media” (p. 118).

A bilingual collection of essays edited by Tenberg (1999b) includes contributions on the representation of Germany in the media and in language teaching in the 1990s, the latter from an angle of Landeskunde (intercultural knowledge). In this volume, both Krӧnig

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and Tenberg (1999a) reported on anti-German sentiments expressed in the British press, which they put down to British concerns about the arguably more powerful, newly-unified Germany, reinforced by perceived challenges to Britain’s own identity. Theobald (1999) took this point further by arguing that anti-European discourses in the British media draw on historical and easily-accessible negative German stereotypes in order to support an anti- European agenda.

Wittlinger (2004) (see also 3.5. above) picked up on Krӧnig and Tenberg by highlighting how the relatively good post-war Anglo-German relations, as represented in the media, started to deteriorate in the late 1980s. Wittlinger attributed this development to a variety of factors, including WWII and the Holocaust (p. 464). Importantly for this study, Wittlinger also identified a connection with and therefore an opportunity for German language teaching at school level, and suggests changes to the ‘Hitlerised’ history curriculum as well as the inclusion of more cultural content in the German language textbooks used in the UK.

Grix and Lacroix’s (2006) paper, which includes a Germany-EU case study,

positions itself as “one of the few empirical studies” to investigate (over time) stereotypical reporting on other countries, and in this instance, Germany, by the press. The authors organise their findings under eight ‘core stereotypes’, and distinguish between newspapers, target readership, tone, and frequency. The paper takes a cultural approach on the effects of the media: long-term exposure to national stereotypes can lead to their ’embeddedness’ (p. 376). It is important to note that although the paper was published in 2006, articles were sampled from the year 2001. Samples were taken from the British national newspapers The

Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and The Guardian. Eight stereotypes were

identified: 1) war prone, 2) engine or leader of the EU, 3) German-British football rivalry, 4) highly intellectual, educated or creative, 5), German cars and engineering, 6) German companies hindering or taking over British ones, 7) controlled, restricted or highly

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legislated economy or society, 8) organised, punctual or boring. Somewhat surprisingly,

The Sun as the only tabloid in the study was found to be adopting the least stereotypical

stance towards the Germans and Germany, contrary to The Guardian (considered a left- leaning broadsheet; Duffy & Rowden, 2005), which displayed the most stereotypical reporting (p. 381). Almost half (485) of stereotypes were categorised as negative, 32% as neutral, and 20% as positive, and whilst German stereotypes were widely distributed through all types of articles, categories of stereotypes were found to be different from paper to paper. Overall, German-related coverage was negative in tone. Grix and Lacroix’s article is useful for the current study both for its successful use of relevant methodology and for comparative purposes.

Tritz (2007) analysed Germany-related articles from The Guardian, The Times, The

Sunday Times, and The Sun between November 2004 and August 2006 with regard to the

change of government from the left-leaning SPD to the more conservative CDU headed by Angela Merkel, in November 2005. For her investigation of the representation of Germany and the Germans, Tritz employed the methodologies of evaluation and frame analysis. Frame analysis is a theoretical approach which involves the investigation of how a

communication source defines and constructs a political issue for an audience (e.g. Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson, 1997). This approach aligns with discourse analysis, which similarly explores the relative positions of speaker and reader in the construction of discursive events (e.g. Fairclough, 2003). Although Tritz found an improvement of the representation of Germany with the appointment of Angela Merkel as Chancellor, averaged out over for the whole time span of the study she reported an overall slightly negative representation. Interestingly, Tritz’s study also considered snapshot empirical public opinion data in the form of a questionnaire completed by 100 British Londoners, which confirmed the findings of the newspaper analysis. Tritz read that as confirmation that the media influence public opinion. Unfortunately the questionnaire is not included, and the study did not consider

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any possible effect of the World Cup 2006, which has been linked to a change in public attitudes towards Germany (e.g. Harding, 2006).

Employing an interdisciplinary approach which included stereotype research and critical discourse analysis, in her doctoral thesis Demleitner (2008) analysed themed British and German stereotypes in both the British and the German press, and the linguistic devices expressing those stereotypes. Similar to Grix and Lacroix’s study, one needs to be aware that although the thesis was submitted in 2008, the newspaper articles for the specialised corpus were collected between May and July 1998. Demleitner gives a chronological overview of the representation of Germany in the UK, beginning with the Victorian era. Taking up the argument that the 1980s are supposedly the ‘golden era’ of Anglo-German relations, she explored the fragility and superficiality of positive broadsheet representations versus public opinion surveys. Reunification is seen as a turning point for any tendencies towards positive images and attitudes, with some media moving seamlessly from the portrayal of Germany as a war enemy, to Germany as a European Union enemy, intent on subjugation of the UK (p. 45). The ambivalent stereotyping of Germany and the Germans by the British press, which has been dichotomised into the “war-story-German” and the “Vorsprung durch-Technik-German”, (a sentiment echoed by Matussek (2005)), leading to a ‘two-Germany-theory’, are examined and put into context (p. 47). In keeping with previous results of the studies she reviews, Demleitner found on the whole negative representations of Germany in the British press: “Germans are portrayed as uninteresting, unappealing, arrogant, boring, hypercorrect, humourless, submissive to authority, dominant and too predictable. They occupy sun loungers and inform on each other” (p. 389, my translation). Figure 3.1. below is a typical graphic tabloid representation of such a view:

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Figure 3.1. Vell, Englander, answer ze kvestion! Vy do you no like us? (Charles Griffin, Daily Mirror, 17th July 1990, reprinted in Ramsden, 2006, p. 403).

One single event which has been highlighted as a turning point in the negative representation of Germany in the British press was the 2006 FIFA (Football) World Cup. Beck (2003) had noted the absence of the theme of football in the study of Anglo-German relations. This is surprising, as a number of studies refer to the anti-German reporting of the 1996 European Football Championships (Euro 96) by the British press, which was found to be characterised by a notable revival of war imagery. For example, Maguire, Poulton, and Possamai (1999) quote the French magazine L’Equipe, which commented that British reporting of the England – Germany match made one feel “as if Germany had never made peace with the Allies. It was almost as if they once again bombed London with their V1s” (quoted in Michail, 2001). The authors compared German and English print media regarding their reportage of Euro 96, considering stereotypes, national habitus codes, identity issues, Europeanisation processes and politics, and explored how the thus formed respective national identity discourses relate to a particular agenda regarding European integration. In separate chapters, Head and Brooker also discuss Euro 96 and the related representations of the Germans and Germany in the UK in Emig’s (2000) edited volume.

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In their analysis of press reports of the football match between Germany and

England during the following round of the same Championship four years later, Euro 2000, Bishop and Jaworski (2003) argue that the formulation of nationalism and the homogeneity and unity of the nation in the British press in relation to the England - Germany football match takes the form of three main identified strategies: a separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, conflict as expressed through war imagery, and typification, i.e., stereotypes. The authors show how these strategies are used by the press to support and uphold a hegemonic world order of sovereign nation states.

Harding (2006) conducted a case study of the 2006 Football World Cup media coverage by the UK press. The author describes the 2006 World Cup as “a defining

moment in Germany’s post-war journey towards normalization. It changed popular British perceptions of the Germans” (p. 23). Harding traces how the attitudes of the British media changed from “unable to write about Germany without touching on the Third Reich” (p. 8, citing Kielinger, 2006) to tabloid headlines such as “Love is in the Herr. England-fans love Germany” (p. 14, citing Perryman, 2006). The author sees the cause for the shift in

attitudes in the fact that a large number of football fans and journalists travelled to Germany and experienced it first-hand. Tellingly, writing in 2006, Harding poses the question “whether the more positive image of Germany will endure or whether tabloid newspapers will revert to the old clichés of Hitler and the Second World War“ (p. 23), which will be explored as part of this study’s investigation relating to research question 3.