Perception and Evaluation of the Balkans as a Powder Keg in the German-language Press Discourse

Abstract

Media reports have employed the metaphor Pulverfass “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” in the past century to describe the Balkans in general, and the former Yugoslavia in particular, as an area in which unrest has repeatedly occurred and might continue to occur. In everyday and mass media discourse, the use of metaphors has an evaluation function, whereas in the representation of politically relevant processes a persuasive function through which the attitudes and evaluations of the text producer are conveyed to the readers. In this article we will use the example of the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” to show how it has become a rating pattern for German-speaking Balkan perceptions since the First World War. The focus of this paper is the analysis of this metaphor in the German-language media reports from the beginning of the First World War to the present - a century later – with the aim of finding out which functions they serve as a pattern of interpretation in the German-language media discourse on the security situation in the Balkans, more specifically in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the metaphor used in this article draws on both conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory. Schwarz-Friesel (2015) examines the metaphorical utterance of the Balkan powder keg in the context of critical cognitive linguistics (CCL). The corpus for this paper consists of archives and articles available online (such as comments, reports, and interviews). The potential significance of the metaphorical expression of the Balkan powder keg is examined on the basis of the selected corpus.