ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to present conspiracy theories about Germany in the Greek press during the economic crisis starting in 2009. Based on theoretical approaches from corpus linguistics, the study used data from a corpus of four million words, which comprises approximately 8,000 articles taken from four Greek newspapers with big circulation in the period 2010–2013. All articles contained in their title the lexeme γερμαν* (= german*) and thus it is expected that their main point is Germany.
The findings showed that after 2010 Germany is represented in the Greek press negatively. Many articles feature conspiracy theories about the German hegemony and the Germans as Nazis that want to conquer Europe by means of the financial discipline because they failed to do so in the Second World War. The study also focuses on the linguistic strategies in the discourse about Germany that promote this conspiracy theory, such as the recurrent stereotyped phrases ‘German Europe’ and ‘Fourth Reich’, as well as metaphors that simplify complex concepts and describe Germany’s politics as a standard recipe or act of an empire.
