Text(sorten)stabilität und pragmatischer Wandel der deutschen politischen Karikatur (1871-1990)

Political caricature represents a long-established textual genre in which satirical strategies are employed to comment on and evaluate political actors, institutions, and events. This contribution examines the extent to which the constitutive features of political caricature (the text-image relationship and the representation of satirical content) have undergone change between 1871 and 1990. Based on a corpus of 107 German political caricatures, the analysis identifies a set of prototypical genre features that remain structurally stable across the investigated period. At the same time, observable variations can be attributed to contextual, ideological, and author-specific factors, pointing to functional and pragmatic-discursive variation rather than to a fundamental genre change. The findings contribute to the discussion of the genre evolution by highlighting stability as a central characteristic of political caricature and by outlining its potential for fostering not only linguistic but also critical reflection in university-level DaF (GFL) teaching.