Three people were killed in the arson attack in Mölln in November 1992. The DISS had previously analyzed the racist discourses that preceded this as “incendiary sentences”.
Photo: dpa/Rolf Rick
“Before we can advance to anti-racist strategies,” write Margarete and Siegfried Jäger in a special issue on anti-racism in the magazine “The Argument” from October 1992, “it seems necessary to us to find out how it presents itself in everyday consciousness and what it is fed by “What function(s) it has for today’s societies”. For this purpose, they conducted qualitative interviews in 1991 and 1992, which they evaluated using discourse analysis. The results are detailed in their study “BrandSätze. Racism in Everyday Life”, which was first published in May 1992. In it they expressly state that “racism is not a problem of any fringe groups” but “is at the center of our everyday lives”.
Siegfried and Margarete Jäger played a crucial role in ensuring that such insights seem self-evident in anti-racist discussions today. At the same time as research projects at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main (IfS) and the theoretical publications of Argument-Verlag, the two of them carried out the first empirical studies on (everyday) racism in Germany.
Plight of critical science
In 1987, Margarete Jäger and her husband Siegfried, who died in 2020 at the age of 83, founded the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research (DISS). To this day – 37 years later – independent research is carried out here on the extreme right and ethnic nationalism, racism, antigypsyism, antifeminism and anti-Semitism and, of course, discourse theory.
“Our research has always been precarious, but it has never been like this before.”
Margarete JägerLinguist
Margarete Jäger, chairwoman of the DISS, explains: “Our research has always been precarious, but it has never been like this before.” The DISS is in financial distress because a larger project was “unexpectedly not approved.” This also has to do with the structural conditions of the scientific landscape in Germany. Due to the increasingly poor basic funding of universities and large research institutions, the DISS now has to compete with them in the acquisition of research funds.
“That’s why this time we decided to draw public attention to our financial situation and send out an emergency call,” explains Jäger. In it, the institute asks for donations in the form of supporting memberships “so that we can cover the infrastructure costs, i.e. the rent and the archive.” Most employees work at DISS on a voluntary basis, but in order to pay staff they have to rely on third-party funding.
The DISS sees itself as a place for scientific debate and is located in Duisburg’s old town, not far from the inner harbor. In the Wilhelminian style house, the DISS maintains an archive of the publications of the extreme right, a library that extends over all three floors, the basement, the mezzanine and the first floor, offices and a seminar room. “We regularly have interns who come from all over Germany,” says Jäger. For them, the DISS is a “place of communication” where there is always something going on.
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The work mainly takes place in the working groups. For example, the legal working group has existed since the beginning. “We also have a discourse workshop where new discourse analysis approaches and publications are discussed once a month, as well as current discourse developments,” she explains. There are further working groups on migration, anti-Semitism and antigypsyism.
In addition, there is now a series of publications comprising over 50 books, the “Edition DISS”, which is published by Unrast-Verlag. “We used to publish books ourselves, but we actually wanted to research, not publish,” she says and laughs. The only thing that the DISS still publishes itself is the “DISS-Journal”, the institute’s magazine, which appears about twice a year. “Sometimes we do this together with the magazine ‘kultuRRevolution’, which is edited by Jürgen Link, who represents an important reference point for our research method.”
Inspired by Foucault
Margarete and Siegfried Jäger came across Michel Foucault through Jürgen Link and his magazine “kultuRRevolution,” which was founded in 1982, and were “very strongly inspired.” “On the basis of this, we then developed a methodological concept on how to structure the multitude of discourses, make them manageable and arrive at qualitatively assured statements,” she explains. Unlike orthodox Marxism, where language was understood as a reflection, discourses “lead an independent life”; They therefore have their own materiality, which sets the framework for what can be said and thought. The research method that they have developed at DISS over the last few decades is important: critical discourse analysis (KDA).
The associated introduction, which is now in its seventh edition, was developed by Siegfried Jäger. The KDA sees itself as an open “toolbox”, whose method does not use any social scientific or linguistic methods, as Siegfried Jäger writes, but rather “it is closely tied to a theory: Foucauldian discourse theory”. Discourse analysis is only marginally interested in language; its focus is on the “contents and relationships that it criticizes.” Discourses could point out dangers that are not yet current and thus serve as “early warning systems”.
It is not for nothing that the May 1992 publication was called “BrandSätze,” as Margarete Jäger emphasizes. That was before the arson attacks in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln and Solingen, and “the spelling, the ambiguity, has a reason.” In the analyses, they found that people “are potentially ready to take the stick in their hands and beat the ‘foreigners,’ as it was called back then, out of their front yard.” In some cases it was expressed, in others it was latent. “That actually turned out to be the case.”
In this sense, the KDA is also political because, as Siegfried Jäger wrote in the introduction, it should give “courage to resist” and look for ways to intervene in discourses.
A revised edition of the introduction to the KDA will be published in the next few months. Together with Benno Nothardt and Regina Wamper, Margarete Jäger re-wrote passages and entire chapters, deleting and adding parts. »We actually wanted to work on this new edition together with Siegfried. Unfortunately, that was no longer possible.” Siegfried Jäger is still named as a co-author, “because he is basically the father of the KDA.” They have expanded the KDA’s previous “toolbox” to include new chapters for analyzing images, online discourses, TV, special discourses and literature. There are also practical instructions and examples for making your own analyses. “A lot of work,” is how she sums up the project.
Potentials of contradictions
The discourse analyzes by Margarete and Siegfried Jäger from the beginning of the 1990s are highly topical. For example, they refer to the “racist argument in which the lack of equality for women among immigrant citizens serves as a pretext for rejecting them.” The fact that such forms of argument often turn out to be contradictory means that they also recognize the potential – for example in the intertwining of patriarchy and racism – “not only to expand women’s perspectives for action, but also to destroy racist constructions.”
Social conditions have changed in one crucial point, as Jäger expressly emphasizes: “Racism is still there, no question about it. There are militant right-wing extremists, everything has become much more dense. What has changed is that there is also resistance to it.” There was no such thing in society as a whole back then. “After Rostock-Lichtenhagen, after Mölln and Solingen, there was an outcry, but that was it.” Because of this, anti-racist groups were only formed at that time. This is a potential that should not be underestimated.
Today there is also established racism research. “I think I can even say that the DISS has been a good pioneer with its work,” adds Margarete Jäger. But in order for the DISS to remain a reference point for critical science and left-wing politics, it depends on support. “We remain confident,” says Jäger in farewell.
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