Osijeker deutschsprachige Werbeanzeigen aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert als soziokulturelle Marker einer Zeit
German-Language Advertisements from 19th- and 20th-century Osijek as Sociocultural Markers of an Era

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the sociocultural function of German-language advertisements in the Osijek newspapers Slavonische Presse and Die Drau from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since German at the time functioned both as a “prestige language” among the upper social classes and as a means of everyday communication — serving as a link between various ethnic groups in Osijek —German-language advertisements can be considered reliable and relevant markers of social life in Osijek during that period. They offer valuable insights into the sociocultural characteristics of the time: advertisements reveal information about the purchasing and travel habits of Osijek’s citizens, the gastronomic life of the city and its surroundings, as well as Sunday and holiday offerings. As some advertisements were bilingual — published in both German and Croatian — the extracted corpus is examined through a combination of quantitative and qualitative semiotic and text analysis, and is linguistically analyzed using a comparative method. The collected corpus comes from the online portal essekiana.eindigo.net, which is the result of a collaboration between the German Studies departments of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities in Osijek, and is freely accessible.

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