The political language of defensibility in Germany 1871 - 1990

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Wolfram Pyta; Professor Dr. Martin Wengeler
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553312684

The project aims to investigate the political agency of language using a particularly powerful example: the discourse on defensiveness in Germany between 1871 and 1990. It proceeds from the epistemological thesis that this politically powerful discourse played a decisive role in fundamental decisions. This results in a research design that interlinks historiographical and polito- or discourse-linguistic approaches. The research interest of historians focuses on the extent to which in three political systems - the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany - the course was set (military laws, fleet program; revision of the Treaty of Versailles; rearmament; double-track decision) by means of discourse sovereignty over the dynamic discourse field of "Wehrhaftigkeit". The focus is on decision-makers in government as well as in parliaments and political parties. In this way, the project aims to uncover linguistic factors that were introduced into the decision-making processes in the field of military, security, and foreign policy in such a way that the decisions taken turned out the way they did. In this respect, it aims to make an important contribution to the research field of the cultural history of decision-making. The language of "Wehrhaftigkeit" is composed towards a political usage, which is scrutinized by the historiographical part with regard to the decision-making relevance of this discourse. This requires a sensitivity to linguistic construction processes, the results of which help determine the implementation of language as a decision-making factor. This is where the polito/discourse linguistic part of the project comes in. It shows how the political language of "Wehrhaftigkeit" was composed so that it could find its way into decision-making processes. The discourse field "Wehrhaftigkeit" is likely to be characterized above all by a specific vocabulary as well as by specific patterns of argumentation. With the help of discourse linguistic methods, it will therefore be shown how "Wehrhaftigkeit" is heterogeneously constructed by different discourse actors with different interests and which perspectives on the respective decisions in question were hegemonic and prevailed in the process. Both parts of the project are interwoven in such a way that a monograph jointly written by the project researchers and the applicants will record the results of this interdisciplinary project. In this way, the project is pioneering work, because there is no precedent for a politico-discourse-linguistically underpinned cultural history of political decisions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants