The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity - page 5
Keywords: German; Austrian; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; discourse; identity; analysis
By sth202 on 25/09/2008
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 5 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
have likely originated from the society she has grown up in and what she has learnt throughout her life, that is to say her education as well as experience. She compares herself to the elite; “ich glaub’ dass, das schon noch so etwas wie eine gewisse elitäre Kulturform ist, die auch von einem bestimmten teile Bevölkerung in Anspruch genommen wird...” I.e. the State Opera and the Burgtheater are more for the elite – a social group to which she doesn’t belong.
Woodward (1997: 18) maintains that “it is not possible to know all those who share our national identity, so we must have a shared idea of what it constitutes.” Lemke (1995: 24-25, cited in Cameron 2001: 156) adds that “we speak with the voices of our communities, and to the extent that we have individual voices, we fashion them out of the social voices already available to us, appropriating the words of others to speak a word of our own.” Although it seemed that Nadine was speaking for herself, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. She articulates that she “weiß nicht wie jemand, der in Veranberg [zum Beispiel] aufgewachsen ist, welche Gefühle dort das Burgtheater hervorruft.” Perhaps she doesn’t know how someone from a different town would feel about the Burgtheater in Vienna, but reading this one would also assume that the feelings she has expressed regarding the institution are true for all Viennese. She also occasionally drew on the use of the pronoun ‘man’, which implies that she was not only speaking for herself and therefore was representing the views and feelings of everyone else.
Wodak et al remark that nowadays it is not possible for there to be a public ‘national memory’, particularly for Austria and Germany, without “confronting the darkest aspects of the national past” (1999: 85). This is certainly a concept of which Nadine was acutely aware. When talking about such institutions as the State Opera house and the Burgtheater, for example, she recurrently reflected on what those buildings would have been used for during the war, that is to say how the Third Reich utilised them. She also worried that the tourist industry is painting an idyllic picture of Austria and that in doing so there is ‘immer sehr sehr viel versteckt oder dass... viele unter dem Teppich gekehrt wird.’ The implication of these comments is such, that in Nadine’s eyes Austria is given
Last 5 comments…
There have been no comments posted for this article, but you need to register if you want to be the first!