On an interdisciplinary analysis of the 1953 Bundestag elections

Abstract

The second Bundestag elections were held in a tense and controversial political environment, as the population was still facing great challenges almost ten years after the end of World War II. The government coalition and the opposition tried to gain more support from voters: the first by presenting their successes, the second by criticizing the government's work. The ruling team needed to secure victory to maintain the political course set in the previous legislative period.

In the report, we will discuss several types of texts (commercial for cinema, weekly news, analytical video on a historical topic) from an interdisciplinary perspective. The first text is a campaign advertisement for the German social democratic party, intended for cinema screenings. It consists of 18 sentences and lasts 1 minute and 18 seconds. Excerpts from the second text discuss the election process and last 2 minutes and 14 seconds. It consists of 14 sentences. The third text is distinguished by its largest volume (5 minutes and 20 seconds). As a result of multimodal politico-linguistic analysis, the functional role of various linguistic and non-linguistic components was revealed. The report also presents a political context that clearly shows which factors determined the outcome of the historic election.

The Social Democratic Party’s commercial attempts to criticize the government’s work and emotionally influence the recipients’ voting behavior through various means (e.g., exclamatory sentence, rhymes, superlatives, past tense recall, universality marker, making allusions with invented words, asyndeton, animation, music). This goal is served by contrasting stable and unstable economic conditions. The negative portrayal of the market economy and the horror-genre scenario contribute to the construction of the concept of illness. Its own positions are reinforced with irony, regional and colloquial words, rhymes, music, and slogans. It is noteworthy that the combination of rhymes and intertextual connections brings the commercial closer to a lyrical text. The implicit and explicit interaction of linguistic, visual, and acoustic aspects encourages voters to make the right decision. It should be noted that the climax of the commercial is limited only to the expressiveness of the slogan.

The excerpt from the weekly chronicle describes the election day in a businesslike, sober tone and positively assesses the process. In the video recordings, leading politicians from the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party act according to the government-opposition role model. Unlike Konrad Adenauer, Erich Ollenbacher formulates his opinions only in complex sentences.

The analytical video presents all the actors and a cause-and-effect overview of the political context. The analysis of two election posters turned out to be particularly insightful. The first contributes to the deepening of polarization, while the second brings the idea of ​​unity to the forefront.

The report emphasizes the importance of using authentic video material in teaching a foreign language. Accordingly, the report provides methodological and didactic approaches for working with texts in university-level German language courses.