Zum Finnland-Bild in der deutschen Presse. Eine qualitative Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Stereotype

Abstract

The roots of Finnish-German relations in politics, trade, science and culture go far back to the past. Even today, Germany's importance as Finland's most important export and import partner provides the basis for regular news coverage of the German political and economic occurrences in the Finnish media. From the German point of view, however, the situation is different. Despite the common past with Germany, Finland still carries the image of being a rather unknown and distant northern country. The purpose of my research was to find out what different stereotypes of Finland are communicated to readers in the German press today and what kind of image of Finland results from that. These stereotypes about Finland and the Finns and their role as possible modifiers of the country image, were an essential part of my study. The corpus consisted of 142 meticulously sorted newspaper articles published between 2010-2017 in the six most widely distributed national German quality newspapers. My dissertation consists of seven chapters. After the introduction (Ch. 1), I discuss stereotype research in general and its different disciplines in the theory section (Ch. 2). In Chapter 3, “Finland’s presence in Germany,” I review the common history of Finland and Germany. In addition to that I introduce, by way of example, various sources of Finland information in German society. I describe the Grounded Theory research method and my own methodological approach in Chapter 4, after which, in Chapel 5, I present the research criteria and specific characteristics of the corpus. As a result of the analysis section of my research (Ch. 6), I identify a total of 29 topic clusters based on my data. In addition to the variety of these topic clusters, also the positive writing about Finland in the German media should be pointed out as a result of my study. Indeed, my research has shown that Finland’s image in Germany is more diverse and positive today than ever before. Keywords: Finland’s image, country image, Finland-Germany, stereotypes, press, Grounded Theory