Die Entmachtung der Metapher

Zur Dekonstruktion sprachlich vermittelter Feindbilder im europäischen Flüchtlingsdiskurs

Abstract

In view of the increased immigration to European countries, which is often perceived as menacing, we daily fuel the notion of immigrants being a danger by means of metaphors: talk of the refugee as a natural disaster, parasite or pathogen has now become established. And this is often not even held to be problematic. However, such discriminating metaphors, which are often exploited by right-wing populists, have over the last few years increasingly been questioned and systematically deconstructed. Based on the cognitive metaphor theory the present contribution aims to show which different communicative strategies are used for this purpose. It compiles German, Italian and French primary texts from the Web, including blogs, blog comments, tweets, Facebook pages and online journalistic articles.