Abstract

Since the summer of 2015, when the arrivals of persons fleeing their home countries increased sharply in Germany, questions of refugee immigration and its impact on the German society have been met by intense debates in the public and political sphere. At the same time, popularity of right-wing populist groups increased massively, many of which claim that the purity of the nation is endangered by the influx of people from fundamentally different cultural backgrounds. Drawing on poststructuralist theories, we apply a corpus linguistic approach to analyse how political identities are constituted in German mainstream media in relation to culture. We show that despite widespread condemnation of right-wing groups, essentialist understandings of culture and culture-based discursive constructions of “us” and “other” are widespread within the analysed data.