Cold War discourses in separated Germany’s Literature. A synthesizing perspective on german-german literary history as a relationship history and communication context 1949-1989.

During the Security Conference 2016 in Munich Russian prime minister Medwedew argues the global situation is more than fragile: ‘Wir sind in die Zeiten eines neuen Kalten Krieges abgerutscht’. He illustrates his statement with corresponding rhetoric: ‘heiße[r] Krieg‘, ‘Stellvertreterkrieg‘ and ‘Gefahr eines dritten Weltkrieges‘, ‘mit verstärkter Aufrüstung und atomarer Abschreckung auf beiden Seiten‘ as well as the unambiguous headline ‘Heißes Thema, kalter Krieg‘ (TAZ, 15th February 2016) . Tuning in to present political coverage, one will detect that Cold War undergoes its controversial actualisation after its (pretended) end, first as a discourse formation, second as a rhetorical means.
Now, my PhD-project aims to trace those apparently still viral Cold War discourses with a literary historical impetus – namely in 90 DDR and BRD prose texts, which originated between 1949 and 1989. To be able to mark individual subject areas out of this voluminous material and to develop a suitable analytical approach, my dissertational project functionalises the terminus ‘Cold War’, originally deriving from historical science, in terms of a ‘discourse bundle’ and, in turn, interprets the five diverging conflict dimensions of this globally settled dispute as individual ‘discourse threads’ . Specific terms, statements or passages in texts of my textcorpus, which correlate with particular discourse threads, are named ‘discourse fragments’.
In this regard, Cold War discourses, which are literalised in my corpus, are comprehended as a concept of intertextual relationships and discursive equivalences between those prose texts – and therefore can be exposed as analysable transnational communicative correlations.
With the help of atlas.ti, a complex computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, discourse fragments literalised in those digitized texts are carved out and annotated manually for the time being, in order to be able to ‘compute’ them. This tagging process is always geared to the ‘catalogue of discourse fragments’, which is already finalised in advance. By means of this transformation of text-raw data into smart data it is finally possible to subject my digitised corpus to quantitative breakdowns (e.g. creation of information visualisations concerning the (non-)existence of specific discourse fragments per quinquennium; enumeration of particular significant terms) – a (qualitative) discourse analysis thus becomes the point of origin for a quantitative analysis of my digitised textcorpus according to the method of a knowledge discovery in databases. In turn, its results will constitute the fundament for my revision of established literary historical theses.
By means of those results gathered first step, my PhD-project develops the first synthesizing perspective towards german-german literary history, which comprehends itself as a history of ties among DDR- and BRD-literature between 1949-1989 and besides interprets the discourse bundle Cold War as its structuring reference point. To concretise this synthesising perspective my textcorpus will be systemised an the basis of three substantial parameters: (a) date of origin, (b) (non-)realized discourse fragments as well as country-specific (emergence-) context.
From a theoretical viewpoint my PhD-project interlinks text- and archive-theoretical approaches (Baßler) with conceptions of a semiotic model of culture (Posner) as well as theories of literary-discursive fields (Bourdieu), but enhances familiar literary methods of discourse analysis (Siefkes; Foucault) and adds a distant or rather scalable reading procedure.
All in all, my PhD-project is to be located in the domain of Digital Humanities as it brings together philological qualitative textanalyses and quantitative approaches, to ultimately approximate the vision of a „mutual cooperation between human and computational reading[s]“ .

Field of study: German Philology
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Moritz Baßler