Prognostic Practices and Normalism in Pandemic Discourse in Britain and Germany – A case study on Covid-19

At times of crisis, normality becomes an object of desire and a contested political object. This article uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to examine how ‘normality’-discourses unfolded during the first year (2020) of the coronavirus crisis in selected print news media from Britain and Germany. Referring to ‘normalism’ (Link, 2004) we assume that notions of the normal have become a powerful narrative to prioritise the status quo at times of crisis. Our data show a strong discourse on normalism indicated by an overall more frequent use of expressions of normality. Normality is a frequent topic of discussion, much more so in British than in German news coverage. The concept of normality is used in prognostic practices in all relevant fields of knowledge, with the economy standing out in the UK, while in Germany the education system was more widely discussed. Nevertheless, in both countries the discourses of normalcy remained vague, thereby allowing the unequal reality of ‘the normal‘ to remain unaddressed. We found three typical patterns: ‘carry on as normal’, ‘back to normal’ and the ‘new normal’ with varying occurrences. ‘Carry on as normal’ dominated the early days when there was a tendency to emphasise the need not to panic and hopes for a quick ‘return to normal’ were raised in particular in conservative discourse. The acceptance of a ‘new normal’ of living with COVID-19 was followed in the later months by the growing insight that COVID-19 does not only change the present but the future as well. However, the prospect of a ’new normal‘, and thus the idea of seeing the state of emergency as an opportunity for social change, remains a very rare and elitist concept.