Culture in Communication

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Section II

Case Studies of Intercultural Encounters

Three Ways of Analysing Communication

between East and West Germans as

Intercultural Communication

Peter Auer and Friederike Kern

University of Freiburg, University of Dortmund

1. Introduction

This paper investigates the possibilities of applying the concepts of intercul-

turality and intercultural communication to the situation in Germany after

unification. In particular, we will consider three different notions of intercul-

turality and investigate their usability in/for the analysis of one particular

communicative genre, namely the job interview, focusing on those inter-

views in which East German applicants and West German interviewers are

involved.

Our discussion is set against the following theoretical background. Dur-

ing the past decade, we have witnessed “intercultural communication analy-

sis” flourish in social psychology, communication studies, and linguistics.

The way intercultural communication is viewed in many of its dominant

theoretical conceptualizations and practical applications is based on the fol-

lowing assumptions (some explicit, others implicit): (a) intercultural commu-

nication occurs whenever two or more persons ‘belonging to at least two

different cultures’ interact; (b) ‘culture’ means a list of prescriptions of what is

or is not to be done in a given society, prescriptions which hold and which may

be identified in a decontextualized way; (c) members of different cultures,

when interacting, expect each other to behave in the same way as they do

themselves; at the same time, they are unable to adjust their own behaviour to

that of the other-culture co-participant; as a consequence of (b) and (c),

intercultural communication is bound to fail; (d) however, successful intercul-

90 PETER AUER AND FRIEDERIKE KERN

tural communication may be trained by teaching what is part of the other

culture, and will be successful as soon as this knowledge is put into practice.

These assumptions have been criticised by several anthropologists and

linguists (cf., e.g., Gumperz 1990; Gumperz and Roberts 1991; Hinnenkamp

1987, 1989; Roberts and Sarangi 1993; Günthner 1993; Streeck 1985;

Blommaert 1991; Sarangi 1994; Sharrock and Anderson 1980) who argue (a)

that the notion of intercultural communication outlined above builds on a

monolithic instead of a “multi-voiced” conception of ‘their’ and ‘our’ culture

in which commonalities are understressed and differences are overstressed;

(b) that it conceptualises culture independent of the action and interaction

taking place within intercultural and intracultural communication, locating

culture outside practice; (c) that it wrongly presupposes that mutual under-

standing is indeed the primary aim of communication (and not, for instance,

the wish to maintain group identity); (d) that it is based upon a lay usage of the

term culture as an ideological concept employed to account for interactional

failure, rather than as a resource made use of in the interaction itself, in which

such a failure may occur; (e) that, contrary to this notion of intercultural

communication, interactants of different backgrounds do not expect each

other to adjust perfectly to their own culturally based norms or expectations,

and that adjusting in such a way would not make the encounter unproblematic

(but, on the contrary, even create misunderstandings of its own); (f) that it is in

itself culturally prejudiced and eurocentric, since it takes for granted that

training may prepare the western, but not the non-western, participant to

adjust and thereby perform successfully in intercultural communication, pre-

supposing the superiority of this culture in terms of flexibility and dynamics

(while the other, e.g. Asian, is taken to be passive and non-adaptive).

With this critique of a ‘naive’ approach to intercultural communication

(which we share) in mind, we now turn to East/West German job interviews.

2. Cultural categorisation in discourse

Our first way of approaching our materials as intercultural follows a construc-

tivist approach to context (cf., for example, Auer and Di Luzio eds. 1992). As

implied by the critique of intercultural communication outlined in the preced-

ing section, an external definition of a situation as intercultural needs to be

replaced by an analytic reconstruction of the ways in which participants

HREE WAYS OF ANALYSING INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

construe a situation as intercultural: intercultural communication is not what

happens when two people of different cultural-biographical backgrounds

meet, but rather, it is a brought-about (Hinnenkamp 1987: 144, following

Giddens) feature of an encounter. While a similar argument has been made

with reference to participants from widely diverging biographical back-

grounds by Meeuwis (1994), we want to approach it here by focusing on

encounters in which participants rely on a comparatively similar background

of knowledge and experiences, accumulated through life histories in East

Germany (interviewees) and West Germany (personnel managers). Neverthe-

less, participants may choose to categorise one another as members of two

different cultures, thus “talking each other into” cultural differences (cf.

Zimmermann and Boden 1991).

Accordingly, we will first explore the relevance of ‘East’ and ‘West’ as

cultural concepts in job interviews by investigating some of the speakers’

activities through which they establish the relevance of these social catego-

ries.

The study is based on authentic job interviews with West German

interviewers and East- and West German applicants (cf. for details Kern 2000,

Birkner 2001).

2.1 East/West translations

In our materials, we observed on the part of both interviewer and applicant

conversational strategies which seem to aim at compensating for anticipated

deficits of culturally bound knowledge of the Eastern and Western life-worlds

before the Wende. However, a closer inspection reveals that their primary

pragmatic function is not so much related to referential ambiguities or misun-

derstandings as to an underlining of the (former) existence of two separate social

and cultural worlds. One of the most explicit activities by which participants

display their orientation towards the categories East and West are therefore

translations of East German into West German terms, as in extracts (1)–(3).

Example 1

[I = Interviewer, B = Applicant]

I:okEE. SCHULbildung; aber sie HAM (-) abitur.=ne?

B:ja

I:= eh oh ES. [ne? ]

B:[mhm; ]

I:mhm,

B:ja=GUT.

DAmals eh nannte sich [das erWEIterte oberschule;

I:[ oder

92 PETER AUER AND FRIEDERIKE KERN

B: und=und hier eh (-) [mittler ] weile heisst das gymNAsium.

I:[<acc>e=oh=ES; ne?]

I: okay. education; but you got your abitur, didnt you

B: yes

e: o: es, wasnt it?

B: mh

I: mh

B: well=right.

then it was called erweiterte oberschule ((extended secondary

school)) and and here eh (-) in the meantime it is called gymnasium.

The interviewer mentions the GDR-specific term EOS in connection with

the candidate’s educational career. By using the term, he displays some

knowledge of the East German school system. (The EOS was a type of

secondary school; like the West German Gymnasium, it led to the Abitur.)

Nevertheless, the applicant translates the term EOS into its West German

equivalent Gymnasium in his next turn. Since the interviewer has already shown

his understanding of the EOS, the reason for the candidate’s translation cannot

be to compensate for knowledge deficits on the part of the interviewer. Rather,

through their respective activities, both participants display their orientation

towards the categories ‘East’ and ‘West’. Notice also how the candidate creates

two distinct social reference systems (East and West Germany) using the

temporal and local adverbs damals (‘then’) — referring to the former GDR —

and hier (‘here’). As the interview took place in East Germany, here cannot

relate to the situation at hand. Rather, the speaker metaphorically locates the

current interview within the new — Western — reference system. We found this

to be a common strategy: speakers use spatio-temporal deictics to actively

construe two distinct life-worlds (cf. Liebscher 1997 for similar results).

In extract (2), an East German applicant again translates a GDR-specific

term into its Western equivalent:

Example 2

B:e: h (.) mei=MANN is dann zur arMEE jegang, also (-)

hier heißt (das

[ja wohl]) BUND?

I3:[mhm ]

B: eh (.) my husband then joined the army,

well i think it is called the services here?

Once more, the speaker’s intent is not so much to clarify the GDR-specific

term Armee (‘army’) by translating it into its Western counterpart; after all,

Armee is understood perfectly by West Germans as well. Rather, by using the

HREE WAYS OF ANALYSING INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

colloquial expression Bund, she proves her knowledge of the West but equally

signals her distance from the West German speech community by hedging her

translation (cf. the use of the particle wohl).

Finally, in extract (3), the interviewee is telling an autobiographical story

which is set in the former GDR. Again, the East German applicant uses the

indexical temporal expression früher (‘then’) in order to locate the word

Kaderabteilung (‘personnel office’) within the reference system of GDR

society:

Example 3

B:und ich komm da in=ne KAderabteilung <<rall>hieß das da früher un:d (.) sie

sagte zu mir (.) eh (-) die war=ne> SCHULfreundin meine ehemalje

<<acc>SCHULfreu=mit der ich inne SCHUle jegang=bin> .h sie SASS da

DRIN; ja, und und [hatt] ich GLÜCK daß [ich ]

I1:[mhm,]

[

KAder,]

(-) heißt persoNALabteilung; ne,

ja, jetzt persoNALabteilung; ja:, un:d e:h (.) ich hab

wirklich den l’ (.) letzten ARbeitsplatz bekomm.

B: and I walk into the

cadre department it was called then and she said to me eh

(-) she was a school friend my former school friend who i went to school with (-)

she sat

in there, and and

[i was] lucky that [i ]

I: [hm ]

[cadre] (-) means personnel department, doesnt it

B: yes,

now personnel department; yes and eh (.) i really did get the last job.

When she uses the East German word Kaderabteilung, the interviewee adds a

comment about the cultural boundedness of the term (‘as it was called then’).

She thus constructs it as an outdated term. The interviewer nevertheless

interrupts with a clarification request bringing the semantic equivalence of

Kaderabteilung and Personalabteilung into play. This is done not only to

display competence in the East German reference system but also to instruct

the Eastern interviewee about the “legitimate” (cf. Bourdieu 1982) expres-

sion. Notice the absence of indexical features in his turn: the utterance is not

located in time or place (through deictic expressions such as here and now) but

appears universally valid:

the Western expression is contextualized as the

doxical (standard) form.

Thus, what at first sight seems to prove participants’ orientation towards