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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 317–338

Chapter 13
Discourses of immigration and integration in German newspaper comments

This chapter employs a critical, constructivist theoretical perspective to address how online commenters on articles in the liberal newspaper Die Zeit characterize immigrants, integration, and German identity. While the formerly dominant ethnonational ideology about German identity is now in the minority, there is nonetheless a strong tendency to categorize and characterize immigrant background residents according to ethnonational and religious criteria. A hierarchy of immigrants has emerged, with a discourse that positions Muslims in general, and Turks in particular, as the unintegrated Other. Because Germanness is defined in opposition to Muslim practices, integration for such residents is impossible. However, the presence of competing discourses is significant; through voices that point out discrimination and view integration as a two-way process, social change may be enacted.

Keywords: immigration, integration, ethnonational ideologies, German identity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: German immigration, citizenship policy, and integration
    • 2.1Terms: A rose by any other name
  • 3.Theoretical background
  • 4.Data and methodology
  • 5.Integration in Germany: Themes
    • 5.1Dissatisfaction with the state of integration in Germany
    • 5.2Whose responsibility?
    • 5.3What is integration?
    • 5.4Good immigrants and bad
    • 5.5Refugees
    • 5.6What does it mean to be German, anyway?
  • 6.Discussion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.14ful
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