Instrumentalisierung juristischer Fachsprache in reichsbürgerlichen Texten

Abstract

This article examines how Reich Citizens use legal terminology in their texts and instrumentalize it for their ideological purposes. For this purpose, two corpora with a total of 109 texts from the Reich Citizens scene are analyzed in more detail with regard to legal terminology. On the one hand, the texts represent letters from Reich Citizens to authorities; on the other hand, they are sample letters and forms that Reich Citizens present as templates on the Internet. They contain an extremely wide range of specific legal terminology, which is documented here as an example. In addition, however, there is also a great number of pseudo-legal lexis. Another specific feature is the widespread use of archaic legal terminology, through which Reich Citizens obviously want to give their texts a historical foundation. A few selected examples can then be used to show in detail that legal lexis is deliberately reinterpreted in the texts and placed in extraneous contexts according to expediency in order to delegitimize the Federal Republic of Germany and its representatives on the one hand and to support the Reich Citizens worldview on the other.

Keywords

• legal terminology
• reich citizens
• political linguistics
• text analysis