The Discoursive Construction of National Stereotypes: Collective Imagination and Racist Concepts in Germany before World War I

Abstract

The mechanism and power of nationalist and racist ideas and movements raise a series of questions regarding both theory and methods. Traditional boundaries of scientific and academic disciplines are confounded not merely by the profusion of research subjects but even more significantly by the immediate explosive political context. These issues frame the following reflections in which I examine, from a perspective of discourse, literary, and cultural theory, the production of nationalist and racist concepts and their social function in Germany before World War I. In this chapter, I emphasize discoursive schemes of collective identity and the part they play in the self-description and basic knowledge of modern societies. Any analysis of processes involving culture, politics, and the history of mentalities in the broadest sense must necessarily take an interdisciplinary approach. It is precisely in this regard that the discourse theory of Michel Foucault opens up new and productive lines of inquiry. To explore the concept of national identity it is important, first of all, not to view phenomena such as national character as more or less naturally occurring but instead to investigate them for their specific discoursive and historic composition. The emphasis on discourse is by no means intended to cast doubt on the relative validity of nondiscoursive practices,such as material reproduction cycles, but rather to take into account the functional and constitutive linkage of the two moments in historical processes. Thus, bodies of texts, statements, and knowledge are viewed not as reflections or articulations of existing subjective perceptions, but as functional aspects of the formation of individual and collective subjectivity.