Learning how to play the game: An investigation of role-played job interviews in East Germany
The political and economic changes which have taken place as part of the transformation of the German Democratic Republic into the 'New States' (Neue Bundeslander) of the Federal Republic of Germany have also had important repercussions on the communicative genres used in official and semiofficial situations in the East of Germany. The present paper investigates one of the genres, i.e., the job interview. On the basis of role-played data which were recorded in East and West Germany in 1993 it is argued that East and West German participants employ very different stylistic resources. The differences are analyzed on various levels, focussing on the more formal means used by East Germans, their borrowings from the state-and-party style, and the stylistic incongruities and breaks that were found to be characteristic of their performances. These differences are interpreted in terms of a process of acquisition of a communicative genre hitherto largely unknown or dealt with under very different conditions