Abstract/Summary

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have demonstrated that apart from indexing cultural stereotypes, public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of references to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new research by investigating transpositions of the historical Germanism Kulturkampf in Polish and in English. Originally coined in the context of Bismarckian political attempts to reduce the power of the Catholic Church in Prussia, over time this term had been ‘borrowed’ to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. By adopting a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this paper examines the use of Kulturkampf in a large collection of newspaper data in English and Polish. Results demonstrate the ways in which the meaning of Kulturkampf has been discursively extended to perform ideological work in contemporary public discourse in the two different cultural contexts