Cover not available
Part of
Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 111–134

Chapter 5
“Organically German”?

Changing ideologies of national belonging

ORCID logo | University of Groningen
This chapter examines variation in the situated meanings of the term Biodeutsche(r), a term which has emerged relatively recently as a way to refer to people who are German by descent (i.e., not of migration background). This analysis shows that use of this term reflects competing discourses about the role of ethnicity in national belonging in Germany. While the origin and many uses of the term challenge the validity of ethnicity as a basis for legitimacy in German society, some of the data suggest that it has also been adopted as a supposedly neutral term to describe a segment of the German population, which supports an ethnonational ideology.
Keywords: media discourse, German, national identity, biodeutsch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.German ethnicity, citizenship and belonging: Concepts and policies
    • 2.1Ethnicity
    • 2.2Immigration and citizenship
  • 3.Discourses of belonging
    • 3.1Discourses of ethnonational ideology
    • 3.2Integration and belonging: Discourses of exclusion and inclusion
    • 3.3Post-national discourse
  • 4.The term Biodeutsche(r)
  • 5.Methodology: Media data
  • 6.Overview of term and its meanings
    • 6.1Biodeutsche(r): Challenging ethnonational ideology
    • 6.2Missing the joke: Reclaiming Biodeutsche(r)
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • 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: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.05ful
References (55)
References
Antonsich, M. 2010. Searching for belonging-an analytical framework. Geography Compass, 4(6), 644–659.Google Scholar
Antonsich, Marco. 2012. Exploring the demands of assimilation among white ethnic majorities in Western Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38. 59–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore. 2008. A primer for the linguistics of humor. The Primer of Humor Research 8. 101–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aktürk, Şener. 2012. Regimes of ethnicity and nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Blommaert, J., & Varis, P. 2015. Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 139, 1–72.Google Scholar
Bonikowski, Bart. 2017. Nationhood as cultural repertoire: Collective identities and political attitudes in France and Germany. In Skey, M., & Antonsich, M. (eds.), Everyday nationhood: Theorising culture, identity and belonging after banal nationalism, 147–174. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Ethnicity, race, and nationalism. Annual Review of Sociology 35. 21–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ceuppens, B., & Geschiere, P. 2005. Autochthony: local or global? New modes in the struggle over citizenship and belonging in Africa and Europe. Annu. Rev. Anthropol., 34, 385–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dijk, Teun van. 2018. Discourse and migration. In Ricard Zapata-Barrero & Evren Yalaz (eds.), Qualitative research in European migration studies, 227–245. Cham: Springer Open. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ditlmann, Ruth K., Valerie Purdie-Vaughns & Richard P. Eibach. 2011. Heritage- and ideology-based national identities and their implications for immigrant citizen relations in the United States and in Germany. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35. 395–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Driessen, H. G. G. M. 2015. Humor, Anthropology of. In J. D. Wright (ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, 416–419. 2nd edn. New York: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duyvendak, Jan. 2011. The politics of home: Belonging and nostalgia in Europe and the United States. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ersanilli, Evelyn & Ruud Koopmans. 2010. Rewarding integration? Citizenship regulations and the socio-cultural integration of immigrants in the Netherlands, France and Germany. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36. 773–791. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ezell, E. D., Seeleib-Kaiser, M., & Tiryakian, E. A. 2003. National identity issues in the new German elites: A study of German university students. International journal of comparative sociology, 44(4), 280–308.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2009. A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research. In Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis, 162–86. 2nd edn. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Feustel, Robert, Nancy Grochol & Tobias Pruwer. 2019. Worterbuch des besorgten Burgers. Mainz: Ventil Verlag.Google Scholar
Foroutan, Naika, Coskun Canan, Sina Arnold, Benjamin Schwarze, Steffen Beigang & Dorina Kalkum. 2014. Deutschland postmigrantisch I: Gesellschaft, Religion, Identität. [URL]
Fuller, Janet M. 2018a. Immigration, integration and Leitkultur in German newspapers: Competing discourses about national belonging. Studii de Lingvistica 8(2). 175–190.Google Scholar
2018b. Discourses of national belonging in Germany: Twitter data and the 2018 World Cup. Paper presented at the Language and Belonging Workshop, 5 October 2018, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
2019. Discourses of immigration and integration in German newspaper comments. In Andreas Musolff and Lorella Viola (eds.), Migration and media: Discourses about identities in crisis, 317–338. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, Joanne R. 2004. Performing marginality: Humor, gender, and cultural critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Gannon, Megan. 2016. Race is a social construct, scientists argue. Scientific American 5. [URL]
Gehring, Jacqueline. 2016. Race, ethnicity and German identity: A media analysis of the 2010 world cup men’s national soccer team. Ethnic and Racial Studies 39. 1962–1980. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldmann, Fabian. 2017. Ist biodeutsch nur ein anderes Wort für Arier? Was hinter dem neuen Wort steckt. Spiegel Panorama, 6 June 2017. [URL]
Hatoss, Anikó. 2012. Where are you from? Identity construction and experiences of ‘othering’ in the narratives of Sudanese refugee-background Australians. Discourse & Society 23. 47–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holtz, Peter, Janine Dahinden & Wolfgang Wagner. 2013. German Muslims and the ‘integration debate’: Negotiating identities in the face of discrimination. Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 47. 231–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michal. 2010. The discursive construction of European identities: A multi-level approach to discourse and identity in the transforming European Union (Sprache im Kontext 35). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kuipers, Giselinde. 2008. The sociology of humor. In V. Raskin (ed.), The primer of humor research, 361–398. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, Angel & Ryuko Kubota. 2013. Discourse and race. In K. Hyland & B. Paltridge (eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to discourse analysis, 277–290. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Lutter, Andreas. 2016. Jenseits von Assimilation und Multikultur? Herausforderungen migrationspolitischer Bildung in Deutschland. Linguistik Online 79. 127–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manz, Stefan. 2004. Constructing a normative national identity: The Leitkultur debate in Germany, 2000/2001. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25. 481–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2002. Queering semantics: Definitional struggles. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (ed.), Language and sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice, 137–60. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Metzger, Stefan & Özgür Özvatan. 2020. Games of belonging: Football, boundaries and politics between Germany and Turkey. Nationalities Papers 48(4). 737–751. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moffitt, U., Juang, L. P., & Syed, M. 2018. Being both German and Other: Narratives of contested national identity among white and Turkish German young adults. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57(4), 878–896.Google Scholar
Özvatan, Özgür. (2020). The Great Secession: Ethno-national rebirth and the politics of Turkish–German belonging. Social Inclusion 8(1). 285–299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The history of white people. New York: WW Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Pautz, Hartwig. 2005. The politics of identity in Germany: The Leitkultur debate. Race & Class 46. 39–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Procházka, Ondřej. 2019. Chronotopic representations as an effect of individuation: The case of the European migrant crisis. Language in Society 48. 1–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rand, Erin J. 2014. Reclaiming queer: Activist and academic rhetorics of resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Römhild, Regina. 1999. Home-made cleavages: Ethnonational discourse, diasporization, and the politics of Germanness. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 8(1). 99–120.Google Scholar
Scarvaglieri, Claudio & Claudia Zech. 2013. “Ganz normale Jugendliche, allerdings meist mit Migrationshintergrund“: Eine funktional-semantische Analyse von Migrationshintergrund. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 58. 201–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Statistisches Bundesamt. 2019. Bevölkerung: Migration und Integration. [URL]
Stevenson, Patrick & Livia Schanze. 2009. Language, migration and citizenship in Germany: Discourses on integration and belonging. In Guus Extra, Massimiliano Spotti & Piet Van Avermaet (eds.), Language testing, migration and citizenship: Cross-national perspectives on integration regimes, 87–106. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
United Nations. 2019. International migrant stock 2019. [URL]
Titarenko, Maiia. 2019. Verbalized social statuses of a person in the linguocultural space “crime” of modern Germany. Journal of Applied Linguistic and Intercultural Studies 2. 26–36.Google Scholar
Williams, Daniel. 2013. Germanness or rights? Second generation young adults and citizenship in contemporary Germany. German Politics and Society 31. 30–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Helen. 2014. Changing the national narrative: Evolution in citizenship and integration in Germany, 2000–10. Journal of Contemporary History 49. 54–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilpert, Czarina. 2013. Identity issues in the history of the postwar migration from Turkey to Germany. German Politics and Society 31. 108–113. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, Ruth Rodger & Karin Liebhart (eds.). 2009. The discursive construction of national identity. In The discursive construction of national identity, 7–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2011. Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren (eds.), Discursive pragmatics, 50–69. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. Discourses about nationalism. In John Flowerdew & John E. Richardson (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis, 403–420. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zelinsky, Wilbur. 2001. The enigma of ethnicity: Another American dilemma. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar