Siamo con voi? – Eine korpuslinguistische Diskursanalyse über das Italien- und Deutschlandbild in deutschen und italienischen Zeitungsartikeln zu Beginn der Coronavirus-Pandemie.

During the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the discussion about so-called coronabonds seemed to have led to a rather critical portrayal of Italy in German media and vice versa. The aim of this paper is to examine the two countries’ images in each other's media at the time and to analyse whether EU policy had an influence on them. For the analysis, a corpus linguistic case study was conducted. About 4,500 articles were downloaded from the online portals of three Italian and three German newspapers. The articles originated from March and April 2020 and contained the search terms "Italien", "Italiener" or "italienisch" and "Germania" or "tedesco". Subsequently, six time periods were defined based on important political events. From each period, 50 sentences containing the search terms were randomly selected per newspaper. They were divided into different topics and analysed to determine how positively or negatively Germany and Italy were portrayed in the different periods.The results of this study showed that although no completely new images of Germany or Italy were created in the analysed news coverage, existing opinions or prejudices might have been strengthened by it. The negative reporting about Italy’s economy and government might have evoked old stereotypes of the Italians being spendthrifts and untrustworthy in politics. In Italian reporting, the strong focus on Germany's generally good economic performance was a factor that may have evoked anger at the "rich" Germans. This might have been further promoted by the negative assessments of Germany being a country lacking solidarity, especially during the discussions about EU aids, and the creation of the topos of a paziente zero tedesco, who allegedly was responsible for the spread of the virus in Italy.Future studies could investigate which country images were drawn in other media (such as the tabloid press or television) or how the respective country images changed during the pandemic.