Nekrolog w służbie propagandy
The obituary in the service of propaganda

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of the material excerpted from two daily newspapers: Trybuna Ludu and Neues Deutschland, the author of this paper shows that obituaries can be also considered as texts in the service of PRL (Polish People’s Republic) and GDR (East Germany). Obituaries performed – like all other press genres – the ritual function and thus, albeit in a less direct way than typical propaganda texts, served the socialist state and its ideology. The following means of rituality confirm and consolidate the adopted values: structure of the obituary, fixed formulas, keywords, references to the past and the present, adjectives, and full titles of the deceased. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted.

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