Metaphern und Identität in biographischen Interviews mit deutsch-jüdischen Migranten in Israel

Abstract

On the basis of narratives from the corpus put together by Anne Betten and collaborators between 1989 and 2007, which consists of narrative interviews with Jewish immigrants who went to Palestine/Israel from German-speaking areas mainly in the 1930s, I carry out a qualitative analysis of metaphorical expressions used by the speakers when they deal with questions regarding their identity construction. While the metaphors employed mostly highlight the profound break in their lives caused by migration, expressions contributing to present their life story as a coherent and harmonic whole are also used. A fine-grained linguistic investigation of these formulations and their underlying conceptualisations, also including the role of agency and positioning, will prove fruitful in revealing aspects of the speakers’ identity construction that are not explicitly presented in the course of the interviews. A further outcome of the analysis is that metaphorical expressions can be an important factor in producing text coherence, as they often span across several sentences or a whole interview.