Mass-Mediated Discourse on Emotion, and the Feeling Rules It Conveys: The Case of the Sarrazin Debate

Abstract

This article argues that mass-mediated public discourse produces a discourse on emotion and disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people by studying one of the most heated debates on immigrant integration in Germany during the past decade—that surrounding Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In. Adapting and further developing Arlie Hochschild’s notion of ‘feeling rules’ as a ‘sensitizing concept’ within a grounded-theory approach, it analyses 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions, which were drawn from a corpus of 961 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and other items. The article shows that the debate’s discourse on emotion assigned different sets of emotions to two different groups of ordinary Germans: ‘Autochthonous Germans’ were predominantly described as having Angst (German for anxiety), while ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ were partly described as being offended or hurt. It also conveyed different sets of feeling rules for each of them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’ were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings. The article interprets this pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and discusses how future research may benefit from the approach presented in this article.

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Please quote this article as follows:
Piwoni, E. (2018). Mass-mediated discourse on emotion, and the feeling rules it conveys:
The case of the Sarrazin debate. Current Sociology.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392117751574
Mass-Mediated Discourse on Emotion, and the Feeling Rules It Conveys: The Case of
the Sarrazin Debate
Abstract
This article argues that mass-mediated public discourse produces a discourse on emotion
and disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people by studying one of the
most heated debates on immigrant integration in Germany during the past decade—that
surrounding Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In. Adapting and further
developing Arlie Hochschild’s notion of ‘feeling rules’ as a ‘sensitizing concept’ within a
grounded-theory approach, it analyses 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions,
which were drawn from a corpus of 961 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and other

items. The article shows that the debate’s discourse on emotion assigned different sets of
emotions to two different groups of ordinary Germans: ‘Autochthonous Germans’ were
predominantly described as having Angst (German for anxiety), while ‘immigrants from
Muslim-majority countries’ were partly described as being offended or hurt. It also
conveyed different sets of feeling rules for each of them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’
were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘immigrants
from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings. The article interprets this
pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and discusses how future research may
benefit from the approach presented in this article.
Keywords
emotion discourse, feeling rules, public discourse, mass media, Germany, immigrant
integration
Autor’s name and affiliation
Eunike Piwoni
Department of Sociology, University of Goettingen, Germany

Author’s details
Dr. Eunike Piwoni
Institut für Soziologie, Abteilung Kultursoziologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen,
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.
Email: eunike.piwoni@sowi.uni-goettingen.de
Introduction
In 2010, one of the most significant debates about the integration of immigrants in
Germany during recent decades took place: the so-called ‘Sarrazin debate’ (Piwoni, 2015;
Diehl and Steinmann, 2012). Thilo Sarrazin, then a member of the board of the Bundesbank
and of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), published a book titled Germany Does Itself In:
How We Are Gambling with Our Country, in which he claimed to be concerned about
Germany’s future as a nation. In his book, he laments that immigrants of the ‘wrong’ kind,
from Muslim and Arab countries, are ‘dumbing down’ German society. Germany’s elites
perceived Germany Does Itself In as a scandal and as a violation of the idea of Germany
being a pluralistic nation. Nonetheless, Sarrazin’s book became one of the best-selling non-
fiction books in Germany since its foundation as a federal republic, and the debate
surrounding it stirred intense emotions in the German population. Soon after its release,

various elite speakers engaged in making sense of the German population’s reactions to the
debate, and not least of their emotions.
My study zooms in on this discussion of emotions that may seem innocent at first sight. As
both anthropologists and sociologists have pointed out, there are also cultural and social
aspects of emotion (Kusenbach and Loseke, 2013; Hochschild, 1979, 1983; Lutz and Abu-
Lughod, 1990). Individual experience is shaped by social and cultural frameworks and
contexts; likewise, expressions of emotions need to be understood and made sense of in
social encounters. More than that, the process of reading and interpreting emotions tends to
be intertwined with notions of which emotions are appropriate for whom. Naming and
talking about emotions is thus a social action that is by no means ‘innocent’. On the
contrary, discourses about emotions tend to be laden with distinctive emotional imperatives
attributed to specific groups of people. Two concepts are particularly useful for
understanding these processes, those of ‘discourse on emotion’ (Katriel, 2015: 57) and
‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979: 563). ‘Discourse on emotion’ is a concept that highlights
how emotions and emotional states are discursively represented and talked about; it is
associated with ‘the capacity to note and interpret the emotional displays of others’ (Katriel,
2015: 57). ‘Feeling rules’, on the other hand, are defined as ‘social guidelines that direct
how we want to try to feel’ (Hochschild, 1979: 563). Feeling rules thus specify what (and

how) we should feel in a specific situation. More than that, they are ‘guidelines for the
assessment of fits and misfits between feeling and situations’ (Hochschild, 1979: 566).
These rules are socially constructed, and they may ‘vary from group to group’ (Hochschild,
1983: 57). Feeling rules come thus to the fore when specific emotions are assessed, with
reference to specific groups of people and specific situations, as fitting and appropriate and
or as misfitting and inappropriate.
In this paper, I explore the case of the Sarrazin debate by using the concepts of discourse on
emotion and feeling rules. I thus pose the following research questions: 1) How were the
German population’s emotions talked about and interpreted (the discourse on emotion)? 2)
What were the feeling rules conveyed by these interpretations?
To answer these questions, the debate’s discourse on emotion has been reconstructed on the
basis of 961 newspaper articles, editorials, interviews, letters to the editor and other pieces
that appeared surrounding the issue of Sarrazin and his book in Germany’s opinion-leading
newspapers and magazines. Specifically, 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions
have been analysed by using a grounded theory approach.
On a broader level, this study seeks to bring forward the argument that mass-mediated
public discourse produces a discourse on emotion and disseminates feeling rules for
specific groups of people. While the concept of feeling rules has inspired research in

different arenas and spheres, as on, for instance, ‘racialized feeling rules’ in professional
workplaces (Wingfield, 2010), gender roles (Hochschild and Machung, 1989) and protest
movements (Bröer and Duyvendak, 2009), the question of how mass-mediated public
discourse disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people has not been
addressed to date.
Likewise, the media’s emotional bias and its role in amplifying emotions are well-studied
(see Altheide, 2002; Bail, 2015; Cohen, 1972; Burns and Crawford, 1999). Researchers
have theorised about the media’s role in contributing to ‘moral panics’ by focusing on
sensationalised stories in reaction to the public’s concerns (Cohen, 1972; Burns and
Crawford, 1999; see also Critcher, 2008) and they have shown how fringe organisations
may come to dominate media discourse through displays of fear and anger because of the
media’s emotional bias (Bail, 2015). The literature has thus taken account of the media
being susceptible to displays of emotion, but we do not know much about the processes by
which ordinary people’s emotions are actually ‘read’ and interpreted in mass-mediated
discourse—such processes being, by definition, contingent and, as I argue below, enmeshed
with feeling rules for specific groups of people.
As I show in this paper, attending to these processes is important because they produce
inequality by distributing recognition unequally: Whereas some groups of people are

allowed emotions, others are required to be rational and abstain from expressing their
feelings. Not everybody’s emotions are viewed as equally legitimate.
In what follows, I first give a short overview of the Sarrazin debate before explaining my
methods of data collection and analysis. Specifically, I show how I have adapted the
concept of ‘feeling rules’ to make it suitable for analysing mass-mediated discourse on
emotion. After that, I present and discuss my findings. In conclusion, I point out pathways
for future research.
The Case of the Sarrazin Debate
The debate surrounding Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In: How We Are Gambling
with Our Country started one week before the book’s official release on 30 August 2010,
when, on 23 August, the influential weekly magazine Der Spiegel published extracts from
Chapter 7 on ‘immigration and integration’. In this chapter, Sarrazin argues that Germany’s
cultural identity has been endangered by two developments. First, ‘autochthonous
Germans’ have a very low fertility rate, which means that their population will substantially
decrease over the next three or four generations. Second, ‘immigrants from Muslim
majority countries’, having a much higher fertility rate, will outnumber ‘autochthonous
Germans’ by 2100.

In the first phase of the debate, lasting until early September, Germany’s political elite,
including Chancellor Angela Merkel, and commentators from all of the country’s quality
newspapers and magazines (covering a spectrum from the leftist taz to the rightist Die Welt)
were fiercely critical and appeared clearly worried about the divisive effects of Sarrazin’s
statements (Kamann, Die Welt, 26 August 2010). In particular, journalists and intellectuals
pointed out that Sarrazin was arguing that intelligence was hereditary and that ethnic and
genetic dispositions partly explained why the integration of ‘immigrants from Muslim-
majority countries’ was less successful than that of other groups of immigrants—a stance
they found, particularly in light of Germany’s history, unacceptable (Geyer, FAZ, 26
August 2010; Schirrmacher, FAS, 29 August 2010; Ulrich and Topcu, Die Zeit, 26 August
2010; see also Author, 2013). On 29 August 2010, Sarrazin was asked in an interview
whether he believed in ‘ethnically-determined identity’. In reaction to his answer that ‘all
Jews share a specific gene, Basques have specific genes which differentiate them from
others’, the debate reached its climax, with political and societal elites clearly judging
Sarrazin even more harshly than before (Seibel, Schumacher and Fahrun, Welt am Sonntag,
29 August 2010). On 2 September 2010, the Bundesbank’s executive board decided to
request Sarrazin’s revocation from his position as president of the Federal Republic of
Germany, as he had not sufficiently demonstrated moderation while in office (Greive, Die

Welt, 3 September 2010). A few days later, newspapers reported that Sarrazin and the
Bundesbank had decided to end their collaboration in mutual agreement (FAZ, 10
September 2010). After Sarrazin’s resignation, the debate’s focus shifted. Whereas the first
phase of the debate, until Sarrazin’s resignation from his Bundesbank position, was
characterised by fierce repudiation of Sarrazin’s ideas, the second phase led to a broad
discussion of questions of immigrant integration. This was when journalists, politicians and
members of other elite groups asserted their consensus that particularly those immigrants
who had contributed to the welfare of Germany should be seen as belonging to German
society, no matter where they were from (see Author, 2015: 89-96).
These affirmations notwithstanding, it was also in this second phase of the debate that
speakers started to take into account the reaction of ordinary Germans to Sarrazin’s views.
Not only did the speakers realise that there was a ‘surge of support from the wide
population’ (Kohler, FAZ, 3 September 2010) and appear to be impressed by the ‘breadth
and vehemence’ of approval for Sarrazin’s arguments among the population (Poschardt,
Die Welt, 2 September 2010), but they also started making sense of the magnitude of the
emotions stirred by the debate.

As a consequence, the Sarrazin debate featured various statements in which elite speakers
noted, interpreted, took account of and evaluated ordinary Germans’ emotions, and it is
thus an excellent case for studying a discourse on emotion and the feeling rules it conveys.
Methods of Data Collection and Analysis
My analysis of the Sarrazin debate’s discourse on emotion and feeling rules is based on a
set of 427 statements. These statements were drawn from a corpus of 961 articles,
interviews, essays, commentaries, letters to the editor and other items that appeared in
Germany’s quality print media in the period between 1 August 2010 and 31 December
2010 and between 1 July 2011 and 31 July 2011 on the subject of Sarrazin’s book and the
reactions it had provoked. Specifically, I included the following outlets in my search: the
weeklies Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), which are liberal
and left-leaning, and the leftist die tageszeitung (taz). Morover, I included the dailies Die
Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and their Sunday editions Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) and Welt am Sonntag, which are conservative and right-
leaning (for details on data collection and methods, see online supplementary file). To
identify statements for analysis, I read all the articles and highlighted all statements in
which Germans’ emotions were referred to. It is important to note that I identified and

selected these statements by paying attention to discursive situations in which actors
explicitly named emotions or emotional behaviour or used emotion metaphors (Edwards,
1997: 170-201). I did not, however, code states or displays of anger or fear by ‘reading
between the lines’ or interpreting particular syntax as emotionally driven (or not). In doing
so, I arrived at 427 statements. To afford a quantitative analysis of the frequencies with
which specific emotions were ascribed to specific groups of people, I then coded for each
statement the a) author of the statement, b) the emotion and c) the subject experiencing or
being characterised by the emotion. In so doing, I arrived at a detailed picture of how the
German population’s emotions were talked about and interpreted (Research Question 1).
In a subsequent step, I applied a grounded theory approach to arrive at a theory of the
pattern of feeling rules at work in the debate’s discourse on emotion (see Glaser, 1965). In
doing so, I compared statements on emotions from different speakers across all selected
newspapers to determine the grounded pattern of feeling rules in the debate’s discourse on
emotion (Research Question 2). As a point of departure, I adapted the notion of feeling
rules as developed by Hochschild (1979, 1983) and used it as a ‘sensitizing concept’
(Blumer, 1954: 7) to provide guidelines for analysis (see Charmaz, 2003; Glaser, 1978).
Hochschild (1979: 563) has shown that feeling rules may be expressed quite explicitly—‘as
if rights and duties applied directly to them’. This happens, for instance, when we judge

ourselves for having a specific feeling, when we demand from ourselves a specific emotion
(self-assessment) or when other people judge our feelings by declaring their own opinion
‘as to the fit of feeling to situation’ (assessment of others). However, feeling rules are not
always talked about explicitly; sometimes, they come to the fore when another person
‘chide[s], tease[s], cajole[s], scold[s], shun[s]—in a word, sanction[s] us for “misfeeling”.
Such sanctions are a clue to the rules they are meant to enforce’ (ibid.: 564). We may,
however, also sanction ourselves. Feeling rules are thus affirmed when speakers explicitly
demand to control emotions, when they describe their attempts to control their feelings or
when they say how they are trying to feel. However, feeling rules also come to the fore in
statements sanctioning specific emotions. To get a hold of these sanctions, it was important
to pay attention to how emotions were talked about in the broader context. Were they
understood as an appropriate reaction, or were they mocked, criticised or scolded?
When analysing my data, I understood that applying these two understandings of the
concept of feeling rules could not do justice to all the cases in which feeling rules were
conveyed. First, some emotions are illegitimate per definition, such as xenophobia or
resentment, while other emotions, such as anger, can be seen as either appropriate or not
(depending on the situation). When accusing someone of being xenophobic, we
automatically point out ‘misfeeling’. It is thus important to consider the meaning of a

specific emotion in its broader (here: German) cultural context. Second, some emotions
may be regarded as simply incontrollable to the person experiencing it. In such cases, even
if the emotion is seen as undesirable, the person still has—and here I quote Hochschild on
the impact of ‘feeling rules’—‘permission to be free of worry, guilt or shame with regard to
the situated feeling’ (Hochschild, 1979: 565). Asking questions such as ‘Who should
become active to alleviate the negative emotional state? The person herself or someone
else?’ and ‘Who is responsible for its genesis?’ proved helpful for reconstructing this
specific expression of feeling rules (for anchor examples, see online supplementary file).
The Sarrazin Debate’s Discourse on Emotion
I counted 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions in 213 different articles, letters
to the editor and other items (see Table 2, online supplementary file). Two hundred
seventy-five of these statements (64 per cent) were made in reference to ‘autochthonous
Germans,’ while one hundred six (25 per cent) were made in reference to ‘immigrants
from Muslim-majority countries’ (‘IMC’).1 These two categories of people had been
introduced by Sarrazin himself (Sarrazin, Der Spiegel, 23 August 2010) and informed the
debate’s discourse on emotion (see online supplementary file).

In what follows, I first present the different types of ideas brought forward to describe
‘IMC’s’ emotions and the feeling rules entrenched in these descriptions, before turning to
the dominant interpretations used to make sense of what ‘autochthonous Germans’ were
feeling. I thus address my two research questions for each of the two groups separately.
Making Sense of ‘IMC’s’ Emotions
I counted 106 statements on ‘IMC’s’ emotions that had been published in 61 different
articles. In 38 statements, ‘IMC’ were described as feeling hurt, aggrieved, defamed or
attacked. In a related reading of their emotions, they were described as feeling offended (24
statements). Another nine statements stressed that they were being unemotional regarding
the Sarrazin debate (see Table 10, online supplementary file).
Throughout the debate, there were basically two ways in which speakers constructed
feeling rules for ‘IMC’. On the one hand, there was the notion that ‘IMC’ were feeling
rightfully hurt, aggrieved or offended. On the other hand, there were speakers who claimed
that this was an inappropriate or unnecessary reaction. Moreover, those speakers demanded
that ‘IMC’ control their feelings.
Among the first group of speakers was, most prominently, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who
remarked, ‘These [Sarrazin’s] are statements that cannot but hurt a lot of people in our

country’ (SZ, 26 August 2010). A few days later, she added that ‘whole groups in our
society feel hurt’ (Fritzen et al., FAS, 5 September 2010). Although she was not explicit
about who these ‘people’ or ‘groups’ were, she was understood, for instance, by Naika
Foroutan, a well-known public intellectual, to have been speaking of Muslims (Mönch,
FAZ.net, 3 September 2010). Most importantly, this interpretation came in conjunction with
the implicit notion that these feelings were a natural, appropriate and legitimate reaction to
Sarrazin’s statements (they ‘cannot but hurt’). Given Angela Merkel’s outstanding role in
German public life, it is not very surprising that her statement and variants thereof were
quoted many times and across all newspapers. Actually, her statement and variants thereof
made for 13 of the 38 statements ascribing feelings of hurt to ‘IMC’. However, the notions
of ‘feeling hurt’, ‘feeling aggrieved’ or ‘feeling offended’ were applied not only by Merkel,
but also, however occasionally, by other speakers. Dieter Graumann, vice president of the
General Council of Jews in Germany, accused Sarrazin of ‘hurting and disparaging’ people
(taz, 30 August 2010), and the government's integration policy representative, Maria
Böhmer, criticised Sarrazin’s statements ‘against Muslims’ as ‘defaming and hurting’ (Die
Welt, 25 August 2010). Additionally, many journalists (in 13 statements in total), writing
for both left-wing and right-wing newspapers, seemed to take it for granted that ‘IMC’ felt

hurt or offended by Sarrazin’s book (see Misik, taz, 1 September 2010; Zoder, FAS, 12
September 2010).
These voices were occasionally joined by elite ‘IMC’, who stated that they felt hurt, as in
the case of an open letter addressed to Sarrazin and written by a group of young students,
most of them ‘IMC’ and representing a foundation called ‘Start’, which supports students
with immigrant backgrounds. They stated: ‘Your words make many of us feel alien and as
if we are no longer welcome in Germany’. Moreover, these young people asserted, ‘Your
assumptions hurt us deeply’ (Haupt, FAZ, 27 September 2010; see also Die Welt, 22
September 2010; Ates, Welt am Sonntag, September 5, 2010). In these statements, feelings
of hurt are expressed in a self-confident manner and are depicted as an inevitable reaction,
given the nature of Sarrazin’s theses. The rule conveyed by these statements is thus that
feeling hurt is an appropriate and legitimate reaction to Sarrazin’s theses.
This feeling rule, however, was contested and opposed by an alternative feeling rule that
asked ‘IMC’ to fight and control their feelings. This rule was articulated in both statements
in which ‘IMC’ assessed their own emotions and statements in which ‘IMC’s’ emotions
were assessed by other speakers. The following quotes illustrate two different ways in
which this feeling rule was expressed by ‘IMC’:

That migrants do not create work places is not true. I know many migrants who
have jobs; good ones, too. I have to admit that it makes me angry [wütend] when
people have prejudices of this kind. But I have learnt to control my anger [meine
Wut zu beherrschen]: I simply do not listen to these things. That is what I used to
do. (Aust, taz, 20 October 2010)
Me, personally, I do not feel addressed by his offensive theses. (Akyün, Welt am
Sonntag, 5 September 2010; see also El Masrar, Welt am Sonntag, 5 September
2010; Frank, SZ, 4 September 2010)
The first speaker, an intern working at a Turkish dentist’s office in Berlin, admitted to
being emotionally affected by prejudices such as those highlighted by Sarrazin, but
reported at the same time that he had found a strategy to control his feelings. He explicitly
described how he was ‘not listen[ing] to these things’. The second quote is from Hatice
Akyün, a journalist and novelist. While making the point that Sarrazin’s statements are
undoubtedly offensive, she stressed her impassiveness towards the Sarrazin issue, thereby
claiming that it is indeed possible to emotionally rise above such offences. In sum, both
quotes imply the notion that hurt feelings are neither appropriate nor necessary, and that

‘IMC’ should control their feelings and approach the debate with an attitude of self-
composure. Other speakers verbalised this rule even more explicitly. Ezhar Cazairli, for
instance, a member of the Council on Integration for the regional government of Hesse,
published an appeal to his ‘fellow countrymen’ from Turkey and to all immigrants not to
take on ‘victim status’ or to be ‘offended’, but to ‘consider whether there is some truth in
the criticisms’ (Cezairli, FAZ, 14 September 2010). Cezairli thus demanded that immigrants
control their emotions, thereby indicating that immigrants themselves were entirely
responsible if they felt offended.
Another interesting case was that of Özlem Topcu’s remark about how the Turkish
community reacted to a visit by Thilo Sarrazin to Kreuzberg, a Berlin neighbourhood with
many residents of Turkish and Arab origins. Topcu, a journalist working for Die Zeit,
commented as follows on demands by a small group of people of Turkish origin that
Sarrazin leave ‘their’ neighbourhood: ‘The Turks served up to Thilo Sarrazin exactly what
he criticises them for: the tendency to be offended’ (Topcu, Die Zeit, 21 July 2011).
Moreover, Topcu wrote that it would have been much better if the Turkish community in
Kreuzberg had used the occasion to actually talk to Sarrazin and describe their everyday
lives. Topcu lamented, ‘Instead of that, there was a big fuss. And, because of some
hotheads overreacting, the picture of the migrant getting upset again prevails’ (Topcu, Die

Zeit, 21 July 2011). Topcu was thus criticising over-emotionality, as expressed by people
getting upset or offended, and demanding an attitude of composure and readiness to engage
in rational debate (see also Topcu, Die Zeit, 9 September 2010).
Most remarkably, and maybe ironically, these voices were joined by some (German)
speakers—as well as Sarrazin himself. When asked in an interview with Welt am Sonntag
whether he could understand that people with Muslim backgrounds were feeling hurt and
defamed by his statements, Sarrazin responded, ‘No, I do not, because my book makes
quite a clear differentiation. When I say that a lot of Turkish immigrants do not finish
school and that only a few obtain the Abitur [university entrance diploma], I am not
discriminating against anyone. Speaking purely about facts can never be hurtful’ (Seibel et
al., Welt am Sonntag, 25 August 2010).2 Whereas Sarrazin refrained from taking a
polemical tone, others, like writer Cora Stephan, cast doubt and mockery on the feelings
referred to. Stephan used the disrespectful term ‘role-model Muslim’ (Vorzeigemuslima),
by which she apparently meant well-integrated and educated female Muslims who speak up
in public, stating that ‘even if they claim to feel offended, there is no need for misguided
over-consideration of such a forceful opponent’ (Stephan, Welt am Sonntag, 5 September
2010; see also Seibel, Welt am Sonntag, 27 September 2010). By pointing out that these
educated women only ‘claim’ to be offended, Stephan has indicated that they did not really

feel offended, but that they were following a specific strategy when publicly displaying
emotions. Stephan was thus convinced that these women were in full control of their
emotions. More than that, Stephan’s and Sarrazin’s statements indicate that Muslims should
abstain from feeling hurt (Sarrazin) and expressing feelings of being hurt in public
(Stephan).
To sum up, ‘IMC’s’ emotions were interpreted in basically two opposing ways. Although
some speakers, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, argued for acknowledging and
honouring the hurt feelings of ‘IMC’, these interpretations were countered by other
participants in the debate who either doubted the authenticity of such emotions or
denounced IMC’s’ ‘emotional behaviour’. Calling for calm, they suggested how
immigrants and people from immigrant backgrounds should feel: self-possessed,
unemotional and ready to engage in public debate.
Talking about ‘Autochthonous Germans’’ Emotions
I counted 276 statements on ‘autochthonous Germans’’ emotions that had been published in
148 different articles. In 95 statements, they were described as having Angst, that is, being
anxious. In 25 statements, ‘autochthonous Germans’ were said to have resentments, while
28 statements attested to ‘autochthonous Germans’’ hatred against immigrants, or

xenophobia (see Table 9, online supplementary file). It is important to note that almost half
of all the statements assigning resentment towards and hatred against immigrants or
xenophobia to ‘autochthonous Germans’ only appeared in the left-wing newspaper die
tageszeitung, while the notion of Angst was the emotion ascribed most frequently across all
newspapers.
How, then, was Angst ascribed to ‘autochthonous Germans’, and what was the feeling rule
conveyed thereby? In what follows, I show that Angst was either seen as an appropriate
reaction or depicted as incontrollable to those experiencing it. ‘Autochthonous Germans’
were thus permitted to dwell in Angst and not commanded to control their Angst3.
Angst was not only the notion used most frequently, but also that used by both speakers
attempting to find a neutral or even positive stance with regard to Sarrazin’s intervention
and the subsequent debate, and by those who were clearly against Sarrazin. A quotation
from Claudius Seidl, a commentator for FAZ, illustrates quite vividly how ‘autochthonous
Germans’’ Angst was referred to by the former group:
Anyone alarmed by these circumstances [wem diese Verhältnisse Angst einjagen],
who thinks that birth rates like these are the fundamental catastrophe of the present
German reality, is not a Deutschtümler [someone who importunately and excessively
adheres to Germanness], and is not a racist, and this has nothing at all to do with

perceiving immigrants or the underclass as genetically deficient. On the contrary, the
alarm is triggered by worries about the children […] (Seidl, FAZ, 5 September 2010;
see also Cezairli, FAZ, 14 September 2010; Löhn, Welt am Sonntag, 30 August 2010;
Ates, Welt am Sonntag, 5 September 2010)
Here, Seidl argues that those adhering to Sarrazin’s views are neither racists nor
nationalists, but that they are simply experiencing Angst. Moreover, he describes this Angst
as well-grounded, legitimate and understandable. In a letter to the editor, the opinion was
expressed that, ‘in the long run, the worries and anxieties of many people in this country
cannot be swept under the carpet’ (Beck, SZ, 2 September 2010; see also Winkelmann, Die
Welt, 8 September 2010). Angst is thus a genuine and persistent emotion. Unsurprisingly,
Sarrazin himself referred to ‘autochthonous Germans’’ Angst to explain why his
contribution was timely and necessary, stating that ‘a majority of citizens feels that their
anxieties and worries are misunderstood’ (Seibel, Welt am Sonntag, 25 August 2010).
While these commentators were clearly trying to generate (some) understanding of those
supporting Sarrazin by pointing to their legitimate and well-grounded Angst, those speakers
who were clearly against Sarrazin tended to offer more critical interpretations, but showed
themselves to be nonetheless convinced that it was Angst that people were experiencing.

They spoke of ‘an abstract anxiety’ (Ulrich, Die Zeit, 2 September 2010) and referred to
Sarrazin as the ‘ghostwriter of an anxious society [verängstigten Gesellschaft]’
(Schirrmacher, FAS, 29 August 2010). Likewise, Matthias Drobinski, a writer for
Süddeutsche Zeitung, speculated that the reason why Sarrazin’s book found so much
approval was that people in prosperous societies have a ‘latent fear’ of ‘decay’ (Drobinski,
SZ, 30 August 2010), whereas his colleague Andrian Kreye spoke of anxieties that are
‘diffuse’ and ‘hidden’ (Kreye, SZ, 3 September 2010; see also Steinfeld, SZ, 31 August
2010).
Speakers describing ‘autochthonous Germans’ as having Angst were thus divided into two
camps: While one group spoke of Angst in an exculpatory way, other participants in the
debate, especially those criticising Sarrazin, expressed a more critical view of Angst.
Surprisingly enough, however, this criticism did not mean that ‘autochthonous Germans’
were asked to actively manage their Angst, as the following quotes illustrate:
Plebeian tribunes have been successful throughout Europe, in the Netherlands,
France, Great Britain… Essentially, we witness here the manifestation of a deep-
rooted fear [eine tiefsitzende Angst] of modernity, of societal change, of identity
loss. All this manifests itself in the enthusiasm for Sarrazin. (Käppner, SZ, 6
September 2010)

He [Sarrazin] is, as claimed by Frank Schirrmacher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung, the ‘ghostwriter of an anxious society’. This expression is right,
even if this anxiety [diese Angst] is rather hypothetical for all those who do not live
in the neighbourhood of the very few militant Muslim communities. (Steinfeld, SZ,
31 August 2010)
Although these speakers have an undeniably critical view of Angst, they all appear to
suggest that Angst is an authentic feeling. Angst may not be desirable, but it is described as
an undeniable fact, as a feeling that is simply there and lies at the bottom of everything.
Angst is spoken of as if it were the ultimate truth. It has, if any, quite abstract causes, such
as modernity or potentially dangerous Muslim communities. Most importantly, it is
depicted as incontrollable to those experiencing it. Across all the statements, not a single
speaker asked ‘autochthonous Germans’ to hold back their feelings of anxiety or to fight
those feelings. This stands in stark contrast to how ‘IMC’ were asked to control their hurt
feelings, as shown in the previous section. The fact that ordinary ‘autochthonous Germans’
were not held accountable for their Angst is additionally stressed by quotes identifying
others as responsible either for having produced this Angst or for having to address it.

Specifically Sarrazin was accused of appealing to these anxieties and for ‘stoking fears’
(Ängste schüren)—by, for instance, Andrea Nahles, general secretary of the Social
Democratic Party (Lachmann, Die Welt, 4 September 2010; see also Fahrun, Die Welt, 2
September 2010; Pflaumer, SZ, 2 September 2010; SZ, 11 September 2010). In this
expression in particular, ‘autochthonous Germans’ were regarded as overcome with Angst
and as objects of their feelings. Blame for the fact that Angst was growing was placed on
Sarrazin. It was Sarrazin who ‘activated’ and ‘stoked’ these feelings, and he was thus
responsible for their becoming so mighty. But who then was asked to cope with these
feelings, or to stop them from growing further? Again: not ‘autochthonous Germans’
themselves. The above-quoted Andrea Nahles, for instance, asked her party, the SPD, to
address such fears by initiating a ‘critical debate’ on the ‘problems’ and ‘deficits’ of
integration (Lachmann, Die Welt, 4 September 2010; see also Doemens and Fras, FR, 9
September 2010). Moreover, Sarrazin himself made clear his hope ‘that the existing
democratic parties could absorb the fears [Befürchtungen], concerns [Bedenken] and
worries [Sorgen] of large parts of the population’ (Seibel et al., Welt am Sonntag, 25
August 2010). This very idea—that it was basically politicians’ duty to address
‘autochthonous Germans’’ Angst—and thereby alleviate it—was a frequently expressed
idea in the debate (see, for instance, Löhn, Welt am Sonntag, 30 August 2010; Ates, Welt

am Sonntag, 5 September 2010; Beck, SZ, 2 September 2010; Geis and Hildebrandt, Die
Zeit, 9 September 2010), and some even pointed out that, if politicians missed the
opportunity to address these anxieties and worries (Ängste und Sorgen), they might
encourage the foundation of new (right-wing) political parties (see Kohler, FAZ, 3
September 2010; Seibel, Die Welt, 2 September 2010).
To conclude, Angst was either described as appropriate or depicted as incontrollable to
those experiencing it. In contrast to ‘IMC’, ‘autochthonous Germans’ were thus given
‘permission to be free of worry, guilt or shame with regard to the situated feeling’
(Hochschild, 1979: 565)—because others were responsible for alleviating it.
While Angst was the notion most frequently chosen to interpret ‘autochthonous Germans’’
emotions, the left-wing newspaper die tageszeitung presented an alternative to Angst:
resentment. Here, writers described ‘autochthonous Germans’ as harbouring ‘resentment’
(Ressentiments) (see Lang-Lendorff, taz, 24 August 2010; Linden, taz, 2 September 2010;
Bax, taz, 1 October 2010; Schneider et al., taz, 16 October 2010), and they frequently
associated ‘resentment’ with racism (Leggewie and Sommer, taz, 11 September 2010) or
xenophobia (Lang-Lendorff, taz, 24 August 2010). In German, ‘Ressentiments’ is a loan-
word from French and belongs to the distinctive vocabulary of the educated class. Thus, the
word itself expresses the adoption of a specific distance, and having resentment or being

xenophobic is not legitimate by definition—it is ‘misfeeling’. Most importantly, this notion
was, in contrast to Angst, not consensual, but promulgated mainly by the leftist taz.
Discussion
As my analysis has shown, mass-mediated discourse on emotion in the Sarrazin debate
engaged in attributing different emotions to ‘immigrants from Muslim majority countries’
on the one hand and ‘autochthonous Germans’ on the other: Whereas ‘IMC’ were partly
described as being offended or hurt, ‘autochthonous Germans’ were predominantly
described as having Angst. The discourse also conveyed different sets of feeling rules for
them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’ were not asked to control their Angst, there was a
tendency to ask ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings.
They were thus allowed only limited room for hurt feelings. How can we interpret these
findings?
First, we may regard the Sarrazin debate’s discourse on emotion as a case in which media
discourse legitimated ordinary people’s support of racism. By predominantly interpreting
‘autochthonous Germans’ as having Angst (and not ‘resentment’ or ‘xenophobia’, which
are ‘misfeelings’ by definition in the German context) to make sense of them supporting
Sarrazin, speakers glossed over the fact that ‘autochthonous Germans’ were affirmative of

someone who promulgated racist arguments. Naming other people’s or one’s own emotions
or emotional behaviour, or using emotion metaphors to describe emotional states, is never
without alternative—on the contrary, naming and interpreting emotions is a process that is,
by definition, contingent, and different speakers may make use of this freedom in different
ways. In the Sarrazin debate, speakers predominantly interpreted ‘autochthonous
Germans’’ emotions as Angst. However, the case of the leftist taz using notions such as
‘resentment’ or ‘xenophobia’ vividly illustrates that alternative notions were available,
although only marginally used. Most importantly, describing ‘autochthonous Germans’ as
having Angst was well-suited to excusing them from the responsibility of controlling their
emotions and to ‘whitewashing’ their motives for supporting Sarrazin (see also Piwoni,
2015: 94-95). Discourse on emotion is thus not only contingent, but also momentous.
Simply by noting and naming emotions, an act that we could be inclined to regard as
‘normal’ or ‘innocent’, discourse on emotion may either ascribe the responsibility to
control an illegitimate emotion (such as xenophobia) or shift the responsibility to alleviate
an unpleasant state (such as Angst) to someone else.
More than that, the debate’s discourse on emotion distributed recognition unequally. First
of all, it focused much more on ‘autochthonous Germans’’ emotions than on ‘IMC’s’
emotions: While 64 per cent of all statements on ordinary Germans’ emotions were made in

reference to ‘autochthonous Germans,’ only 25 per cent were made in reference to ‘IMC’.
Their emotions were thus not given the same attention as ‘autochthonous Germans’’
emotions. More than that, the debate’s discourse on emotion applied double standards by
attributing different feeling rules to ‘immigrants from Muslim majority countries’ on the
one hand and ‘autochthonous Germans’ on the other, and: Whereas ‘autochthonous
Germans’ were allowed to have Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘IMC’ to be rational and
they were allowed only limited room for hurt feelings. Thus, the significance of discourse
on emotion must be seen in terms of its subtle operation at the level of legitimacy and
dignity—a dimension that has been ‘discovered’ in the study of social inequality only
recently (see Lamont et al., 2014). While I do not assume that culture determines how
individuals actually feel, the literature argues that feeling rules structure the resources we
use when expressing our own emotions (Tudor, 2003; Hochschild, 1979). The point is thus
that discourse on emotion can become a mechanism for social control by means of teaching
‘correct’ kinds of emotions or emotional behaviour to different groups of people. And the
individuals ‘being taught’ by this discourse may react to these feeling rules by observing
themselves and engaging in feeling management and self-labelling processes (see Thoits,
1985), or, in the words of Arlie Hochschild (1979: 561), ‘emotion work’ as an ‘act of trying
to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’. I suggest regarding the mass-

mediated dissemination of feeling rules as highly relevant with regard to this mechanism
because of the mass media’s key role in distributing elements of culture—or meanings—
that are available for use in a given society (Schudson, 1989).
By drawing our attention to how mass-mediated discourse on emotion disseminates feeling
rules, this study also complements research that has focused on feeling rules in a variety of
fields (Wingfield, 2010; Hochschild, Bröer and Duyvendak, 2009; Hochschild and
Machung, 1989), but has neither studied feeling rules in mass-mediated discourse nor
systematically considered mass-mediated discourse as an emotion-managing and emotion-
sanctioning authority in the society at large (but see Ahmed, 2004).This seems quite
surprising, given that Hochschild herself sees feeling rules as coming into play not only in
professional workspaces and within specific groups, but also at the level of societal culture;
she has written that it is ‘our culture’ that ‘invites women, more than men, to focus on
feeling’ (1983: 57; see also Hochschild, 1990). Studying this culture by focusing on mass-
mediated discourse on emotion seems highly suitable if we want to get a hold of whom in
our society is invited to feel and in what particular way. To stay in the picture, we may, for
instance, study the feeling rules women see themselves as obliged to follow, not only by
means of interviews or observation (see Hochschild and Machung, 1989), but also through
an analysis of mass-mediated discourse on women’s emotions in different societal spheres

and the feeling rules conveyed by this discourse. Additionally, we may examine how this
discourse has evolved over time.
To facilitate an analysis of feeling rules in mass-mediated discourse on emotion, I have
suggested conceiving of feeling rules as expressed in at least four different ways: explicitly,
implicitly, by describing an emotion as incontrollable to the person experiencing it and by
ascribing an emotion that is illegitimate by definition. In so doing, I have drawn on and
further elaborated on Hochschild’s concept and have tried to sharpen our understanding of
how feeling rules can be recognised.
While the concrete power and effectiveness of mass-mediated discourse on emotion and its
feeling rules remain, of course, an empirical question, the approach presented in this paper
is thus capable of improving our understanding of the kinds of feeling rules that individuals
and groups in a certain society have at their disposal to engage with. Examining, in a next
step, how these mass-mediated feeling rules actually resonate with different groups in
society (see Schudson, 1989) would push the literature on feeling rules even further.
Aside from contributing to the literature on feeling rules, this study also refines our
knowledge on the media’s susceptibility to emotions (see Altheide, 2002; Bail, 2015;
Cohen, 1972; Burns and Crawford, 1999). In this strand of literature, the processes by
which ordinary people’s emotions are (variously) interpreted in media discourse have not

been focused on to date. The reason for this may be that emotions are very often ‘granted
ultimate facticity’, as pointed out by Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz (1990: 1). Thus,
discourse on emotion remains implicit in everyday life and, as Abu-Lughod and Lutz have
claimed, is the ‘least amenable to sociocultural analysis’ (ibid.).
In this study of the Sarrazin debate, I offer an approach that is well-suited to closing this
gap. This approach brings together the concepts of ‘discourse on emotion’ and ‘feeling
rules’ and pays tribute to the fact that, in social interaction, emotions need to be interpreted
and that these interpretations tend to be intertwined with notions of what emotions are
appropriate for whom. Future research may profit from this approach in various ways.
When, for instance, exploring the media’s role in the context of emotionally laden events
such as school shootings, terror attacks or elections, it may help us to study the variety of
interpretations of the population’s emotions and the feeling rules conveyed by these
interpretations. Focusing on these processes would also help us to further elaborate theories
of how the media contributes to ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1972; Burns and Crawford, 1999;
see also Critcher, 2008). In light of my study, we could, for instance, argue that the media’s
role in this process is not limited to the media’s promulgation of sensationalised stories.
‘Moral panics’ may also be fuelled by the media disseminating feeling rules that interpret
specific emotions, such as anger or anxiety, as legitimate. Likewise, a ‘moral panic’ may be

alleviated by a discourse that consensually calls for calm. A research design comparing two
cases in which media discourse conveys different sets of feeling rules would be well-suited
to carving out how different feeling rules play out with regard to ‘moral panics’.
Limitations and Pathways for Future Research
As with any study, this study has limitations, some of which, however, point towards
fascinating avenues for future research. First, when analysing how ordinary people’s
emotions have been interpreted in media discourse, I focused on patterns, in that I tried to
carve out shared understandings. Consequently, I did not discuss in depth the content of the
various statements on emotions in relation to different types of speakers. However, it surely
would be interesting to elaborate more, especially on the fact that feeling rules for ‘IMC’
were communicated not only by German speakers, but also and quite emphatically by
(elite) ‘IMC’. Interpreting this, we could draw on Hochschild’s (1983: 19) term ‘emotional
labor’, which she uses to make sense of the emotional activities performed in an
employment setting for a wage—activities that are ‘sold as labor’. In analogy, we may
interpret ‘IMC’s’ public demands to hold back feelings as asking ‘IMC’ to perform
‘integration labour’ in order to avoid alienation from the broader German society and to
prove that they are worthy members of the German national community. Moreover, when

asserting how they have learnt to control their emotions, elite ‘IMC’ publicly demonstrate
how they themselves succeed in performing that labour. Future research could specifically
focus on what kind of speakers are disseminating what kind of feeling rules and then try to
explain their statements by drawing on not only Hochschild’s theory, but also other useful
perspectives, such as, for instance, on Erving Goffman’s insights into impression
management (Goffman, 1959).
Another aspect worth elaborating upon is the way in which speakers have reflected ethnic
schemas containing stereotypes of emotionality when talking about the German
population’s emotions. As remarked by Rogers Brubaker (2004: 44), classifications and
interpretations of people’s emotions are very often tied to ethnic schemas that are ‘hyper-
accessible and in effect crowd out other interpretative schemas’. This insight may explain
why media discourse frequently interpreted ‘autochthonous Germans’ as having Angst.
Notably, speakers did not even attempt to justify or further explain their interpretation, for
instance, by presenting cases of particularly anxious Germans or by asking what this Angst
looked like in practice and in the everyday lives of those experiencing it. Likewise, the
causes of Angst were described in a very unspecific way. In short, speakers seemed to
simply reflect and reify the ‘hyper-accessible’ and culturally well-established schema of the
German dwelling in Angst (see Wierzbicka, 1999: 123-167).

Schemas also played an important role in the debate’s discourse on ‘IMC’s’ emotions.
Statements such as that by Özlem Topcu, for instance, who claimed that, because of
Turkish immigrants’ emotional reactions, ‘the picture of the migrant getting upset again
prevails’ (Topcu, Die Zeit, 21 July 2011), refer to the schema of the easily offended
immigrant (Hüllse, 2006). Topcu seems to be aware of how easily this schema is available
to those interpreting Turkish immigrants’ actions and emotions. However, her ‘solution’ to
this problem is not to ask ‘autochthonous Germans’ to deconstruct their schemas of ‘IMC’,
but to ask ‘IMC’ to control their emotions. Likewise, we may interpret Topcu’s demand to
act rationally as an affirmative reference to the schema of the ‘rational’ German. As this
short discussion indicates, the perspective advanced in this paper could be further
developed by focusing on how discourse on emotion draws on different schemas and how
feeling rules are used in relation to these schemas: Are feeling rules applied in order to
deconstruct or, as in Topcu’s example, to ‘bypass’ these schemas, or do they reify them?
Studying discourse on emotion and the feeling rules it conveys could thus be a useful tool
for scholars interested in how ethnic schemas containing stereotypes of emotionality are
referred to and coped with—and, not least, whether the articulation of feeling rules has an
impact on whether the content of schemas changes over time.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Florian Töpfl, Matthias Koenig and Julian Hamann for their comments and
their support. I am also grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the editors in charge for
their valuable and constructive suggestions which helped to improve the article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public,
commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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1 To highlight the fact that these categories are discursive constructions, I use quotation marks
throughout the text.
2 According to official statistics, 16,5 per cent of Muslims of Turkish background do not have a
school-leaving certificate (among all groups of Muslim immigrants this is the second highest rate)
based on data of 2008 (see ‘Muslim Life in Germany,’ 2009: 215). In contrast, only 3,8 per cent of
the German population without an immigrant background aged 18 to under 25 did not have such a
certificate in 2008 (see Statistisches Bundesamt, 2017).
3 In German, Angst is a very common word. It can also be used without having to specify the
reasons for that Angst, as in ‘Ich habe Angst’ (I have Angst). Comparative linguist Anna Wierzbicka
(1999: 125) pointed out that Angst is a ‘state’, like depression. Angst always focuses on the
subjective state of the experiencer and is not necessarily linked with any conscious thoughts about
particular targets. And even if Angst is presented as linked with a particular thought, it can still be
thought of as a particular emotional state—a kind of state that is linked with uncertainty and with a
sense of vulnerability (see Wierzbicka, 1999: 136).