ABSTRACT

This article scrutinizes shifts in media coverage of soccer player Mesut Özil during the 2018 World Cup and his subsequent resignation from the German national team. Our analysis highlights the dominance of a multicultural integration discourse that connotes a particularly German understanding of multicultural diversity as only valuable when it is subordinate to an individual’s integration into German culture. Multicultural integration implicitly constructs Germanness as white through dubious claims of the “civilizational superiority” of Western/Christian secularism and a rejection of non-Western/Islamic religiosity as fundamentally “inferior” or “un-democratic.” The shifting treatment of Özil from an exemplar of multicultural integration to a symbol of its failure illustrates the underlying racialized-religious foundation of the discourse and Germany’s remaining attachments to whiteness vis-à-vis Christianity.

摘要

本文详细审视了 2018 年世界杯期间足球运动员梅苏特·厄齐尔 (Mesut Özil) 及其随后从德国国家队辞职的媒体报道变化。我们的分析强调了多元文化融合话语的主导地位，这种话语意味着德国人对多元文化多样性的理解只有当它从属于个人融入德国文化时才有价值。多元文化融合通过对西方/基督教世俗主义的“文明优越性”的可疑主张以及对非西方/伊斯兰宗教信仰的拒绝，隐含地将德国人构建为白人。