3.1 Stylometric Analysis

Based on a list of the 800 most frequent words from the overall corpus,² the stylistic similarity between the different DAV-sections was calculated in R. The results are visualized in Figure 2 in the form of a dendrogram. Sections with a high similarity share a long arm, whereas an early divergence marks bigger differences in word usage. For the most part, clusters of either sections from the East or the West of Germany can be observed. The sections SBB, Dresden, and Chemnitz on the one hand, and those from Gera and Dessau on the other, form clusters that only contain sections in Eastern Germany. Similarly, Rosenheim and Konstanz as well as Hameln, Aschaffenburg, and Hersbruck are all Western sections, which show the highest similarity with other sections from the Western part of the country. The section from Amberg and the ‘Akademische Sektion Dresden’ mark the only outliers, which show the highest proximity for a Western section to one from the East and vice versa. Exploring the reasons for these outliers goes beyond the scope of this paper but marks a potentially instructive desideratum for future works.

Figure 2: Results of the stylometric analysis.

While the word-based similarity of the texts from Eastern and Western sections does not mark a clear-cut separation, a significant tendency for Eastern and Western clusters to form can be observed. This supports the hypothesis that there are still substantial differences concerning language use in the formerly separated parts of Germany. This broad finding suggests that a continued contrastive analysis based upon an Eastern and a Western corpus is sensible.

3.2 Diachronic Sentiment Analysis

After establishing that there seem to be significant differences between the language used in journals from Eastern and Western DAV sections, respectively, the following sections will focus on a further examination of these differences by considering the level of positivity in the two subcorpora. Furthermore, we will look into the development of the level of positivity in each of the two subcorpora over time.

The sentiment analysis presented here is based on the sentiment dictionary SentiWS (Remus et al., 2010). Each entry in SentiWS contains a value between 0 and 1, which quantifies how strongly that particular word is associated with a positive or negative valence. For each subcorpus, the frequencies of the words in the SentiWS-dictionary were multiplied by the respective weight. Subsequently, the total sum of positive scores was divided by the sum of negative scores to determine a relative score which can be compared with the other subcorpora. As SentiWS is not a mountaineering-specific resource, a high sentiment score is indicative of a high frequency of words perceived as positive in general language use rather than words with a climbing-specific positive connotation.

Figure 3 visualizes the development of the relative positivity in the analyzed texts over time. The scores mark a relative value where a higher score is associated with more positive use of language, whereas a lower score marks a more negative word choice. The blue line represents the subcorpora from the West; the corpora from the East are represented in red. The two dotted lines mark an aggregated overall tendency over time based on the observed values.

Figure 3: Results of the sentiment analysis.

A consistently more positive sentiment score for the subcorpus from the West can be observed, with 2014 being the only exception. The dotted lines illustrate a general trend towards more positive vocabulary in both subcorpora over time. The blue line for the Western subcorpus marks a steeper slope which means that this tendency is stronger than the development of sentiment in the East. However, the tendency is the same in both subcorpora. Notably, there are significant drops of the sentiment scores in 2020 (West corpus) and 2021 (East corpus) respectively. This increase of negativity in the texts is likely linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences for society and spare-time activities. Why this development appears a year earlier in the data from the West compared to the East remains an open question that might prove insightful to examine further in future research.

The observed difference in sentiment seems to mark one of the systematic differences in language use between the journals from Eastern and Western sections. All in all, the language in the journals from the West can be described as more positive than the one in the journals from the East. However, there are some notable limitations to these findings. For the first few years represented in Figure 3, data from several of the DAV sections in focus is missing. Only from 2009 onwards, the journals from all twelve sections were available online. Also, in this timeframe, there is not a journal issue from every section for each year, as some of them were only published biannually. The findings for individual years thus may be influenced by the differing data. The overall pattern that can be observed is clear, however: It shows a systematic difference in valence between the two subcorpora and increasing positivity in both of them. The following section will be used to examine in more detail how the word choice differs between the subcorpora by conducting a keyword analysis followed by a qualitative examination of the results. Nonetheless, it is necessary to keep in mind that the former inner-German division is just one of many factors which contribute to the stylistic variation between the different DAV sections as the two outlier sections mentioned above illustrate. As our goal is not to artificially create a clear-cut division when, in fact, reality is more nuanced, we will keep the data of these outliers in the corpus for the following analysis even though they do not match the hypothesis of a separation between East and West.

4.1 Characteristics of the General Corpus

Following the analyses described above, we used the keyword analysis feature of SketchEngine to extract the statistically overrepresented lemmas from the whole corpus and from the East and West subcorpora. In corpus linguistics, ‘keywords’ are tokens characteristic of a certain text by appearing with higher frequency when compared to a reference corpus (Stefanowitsch, 2020: 354). As mentioned above, we worked with the German Web corpus 2020 as reference corpus, a contemporary 17.5-billion-word corpus made up of texts from the internet and covering a multiplicity of topics. In this case, the Simple Maths approach was used to calculate keywords (Kilgariff, 2009). This calculation method includes the option of focussing on words with a higher or lower overall frequency and can readily be used in SketchEngine. We specified a weight of 1,000, which equals a strong focus on more common lemmas. We conducted the analysis with a focus on common words to preclude finding only specific names and locations.

Firstly, we extracted the keyword lists from the complete corpus to gain an understanding of differences between general language use for written text and the DAV journals. Subsequently, we compared the East and West subcorpora with each other to obtain a list of lemmas that are quantitatively characteristic of each respective corpus. As laid out in the introduction, our aim was to combine a corpus-linguistic distant reading with a qualitative close reading in order to obtain findings on a micro as well as a macro level. Based on illustrative text passages from the corpus, we clustered the top 200 keywords from each list manually. The process was guided by the semantics of the lemmas. In order to enhance the comparability, the resulting clusters were grouped into eight broader categories derived from general content similarities between the subcorpora’s keyword clusters which have different subcategories that align with these diverging clusters. These broader categories and respective clusters are visualized in Figure 4. While the categories ‘Club Organisation’, ‘Activities’, ‘Names’, ‘Spatial Expressions’, and ‘Nature/Geography’ are directly linked to the activity of climbing and the practices of the DAV sections, the category ‘Social Aspects’ maps the sociocultural relevance of these practices and structures, the category ‘Sentiment/Values’ includes the evaluation of these practices in terms of positivity or negativity and general values, and the category ‘Written Communication’ references explicit mentions of language use and communicative purposes. In the following, the semantic fields and their respective clusters within the corpora will be presented. We begin with the findings from the whole corpus and subsequently contrast the results of the analysis of the East and West subcorpora.

Figure 4: Keyword clusters from the general corpus with the German web corpus as reference.

The clusters of the whole corpus reveal that the majority of keywords can be grouped in the categories ‘Club Organisation’, which consists of the lexemes denoting organisational aspects like positions within the sections, organisational structures, and event organisation, and ‘Activities’, i.e., activity-specific vocabulary like climbing-specific terms, outdoor activities, and material. Further relevant categories are expressions related to persons as well as places—the common words focus that was intended to reduce these could not evade some frequent lemmas—words about geographical aspects of the activity as well as spatial descriptions mainly linked to the description of tours and climbing processes. These aspects mark the language use of the DAV as functionally linked to the description of mountaineering events. The explicit mentioning of communicative and language-use-related practices places emphasis not only on the events as such but also on the active reporting and communicating about these, especially in the specific form of a club journal. Since, in addition to the abovementioned categories, lemmas from the categories ‘Sentiment/Values’ and ‘Social Aspects’ feature prominently, the language use observed in the corpus reveals the importance of evaluation and the distribution of information about the club-related activities by specific members for the members and their interpersonal connections. These findings align with Posch’s (2022: 85) notion of climbing as sport without an audience, where communication functions as constitutive practice that enables mountaineering events to be described and shared among the members of a climbing section.

Furthermore, the keywords emphasize the personal and local focus of the activities and, with respect to the names mentioned, imply that men are more prevalent than women within the clubs. Nonetheless, the lemmas ‘Familiengruppe’ [family group] and ‘Jugend’ [youth] reveal that more diversity and inclusivity with regard to age groups and gender find their way into the climbing scene. The array of different activities found in the category ‘Activities’ underlines this, since a diverse field of potential activities ranging from indoor to outdoor climbing and hiking as low impact sport aims at different participant groups. Even though climbing is seen as a dangerous sport, the evaluation among the members of the community is positive, which shows that the activity is seen in a community-specific way deviating from more general assumptions.

Summarizing the findings from the keywords of the general corpus, we conclude that the topics of climbing and mountaineering, the internal structures and practices of the community, and evaluations as well as social aspects of the activity are foregrounded and thus emphasize the communicative, community-constitutive, and, thus, social function of writing in the climbing community.

4.2 Comparison of East and West

From this starting point, we delve into the keywords of the respective subcorpora. Figures 5 and 6 show the most prominent keywords for the two subcorpora East and West. In each case, the respective other subcorpus was used as reference. For comparability reasons, the keywords were grouped into the same clusters laid out above.

Figure 5: Clustered keywords for the East subcorpus.

Figure 6: Clustered keywords for the West subcorpus.

The least surprising finding was that the expressions related to persons and places differ. Despite all DAV sections being situated in Germany, they are linked to different places and people. The first names encompass popular names in the FRG and GDR respectively during partition time with their frequency as a result of older members being mentioned in texts about historical event as well as their involvement in organisational structures and relevance as authors. A similarity in the names found is—congruent with the findings from the general corpus—that masculine names appear more frequently than feminine names, even though, in contrast to the general corpus, some women’s names appear as keywords.

The keywords give insight into demographic features of persons in the community and their networks and social relationships concerning the climbing sections. In both subcorpora, the category of ‘Social Aspects’ emphasizes the importance of elder generations—terms like ‘Geburtstag’ [birthday] in the East subcorpus and ‘Jahrgang’ [cohort], ‘verstorben’ [deceased], or ‘Senior’ [senior] in the West subcorpus—as well as inclusivity with regard to gender—e.g., ‘Familie’ [family] in the East subcorpus and ‘Familiengruppe’ [family group] and the gendered affix ‘*innen’ in the West subcorpus. Even though different people thus participate in climbing in either part of Germany, the keywords of the West subcorpus imply a higher focus on inclusivity than those of the Eastern sections. Further keywords in this category in the East subcorpus cluster around the paradigmatic notion of ‘Sektionsleben’ [section life], where friendships, comradeship, and social gatherings play a big role. The following quote from the Mitteilungen DAV Chemnitz emphasizes the values associated with the term:

Aber trotz steigender Mitgliederzahl wird die Anzahl derjenigen, die sich auch aktiv in das Sektionsleben einbringen, immer geringer. Daher auch an dieser Stelle nochmals den herzlichsten Dank an all jene, die uneigennützig ihre Freizeit, ihr Wissen und ihre Erfahrungen in die Sektion einbringen, ohne die es unser reichhaltiges Sektionsleben nicht gäbe (Oehme, 2018: 1).

But despite the increasing number of members, the number of those who are actively involved in the life of the section is getting smaller and smaller. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank all those who unselfishly contribute their free time, knowledge and experience to the section, without whom our rich section life would not exist (our translation).

The West subcorpus features no such keywords. Instead, there is a variety of functional roles within the sections in the keyword cluster ‘Club Organisation’, e.g., ‘Teilnehmer’ [participant], ‘Jugend’ [youth], ‘Leitung’ [Leader], ‘Mitglied’ [member], ‘Fachübungsleiter’ [specialized coach], or ‘Tourenleiter’ [tour leader] and ‘Trainer’ [coach]. Connecting these to the lemmas ‘team’ [team] or ‘Fahrgemeinschaft’ [carpooling] from the ‘Social Aspects’ category, the focus is more on the sportive aims and the organisation thereof than on a community life with social relationships. The following excerpt from one of the journals underlines this attitude:

Seit Anfang des Jahres hat Georg Fleischmann das Kletterwerk als Betriebsleiter übernommen. Seitdem werden auch alle Hallenkurse von unseren eigenen Trainern durchgeführt (Wilke, 2015: 4).

Georg Fleischmann took over as manager of the Kletterwerk at the beginning of the year. Since then, all indoor courses have also been run by our own trainers (our translation).

This distinction between a community-based and a functional focus among the members of the sections can be linked to the different histories of the sport in the former GDR and FRG. While in both areas climbing and mountaineering were present as sportive endeavours since the end of the 19th century, their development after WW2 differed. Being dependent on the availability of natural resources, in the Western sections climbing focussed on alpine mountain ranges and some rock areas, which resulted in more diverse possibilities for activities. At the same time, access to international climbing areas, resources from the steadily developing industry developing new gear, and competitions, were less restricted than in the GDR. There, the resources were limited and access to international markets was restricted while at the same time the state aimed at utilising sportive endeavours and clubs as means of propagating socialist ideology and thus forbade the existing clubs in 1948. Climbing focussed heavily on the sandstone areas of Saxon Switzerland, which resulted in many climbers simultaneously identifying with the special traditions and the ethics of Saxon mountaineering, including seeing ‘mountaineering as a way of life, characterized by freedom, friendship and adventure’ (Reinhart, 2020: 149).

The conflict between the traditional and socialist understanding of climbing resulted in a split between state-organized climbing clubs and numerous unofficial clubs that were oftentimes critical of the state and functioned as escape from state ideology for the climbers (Reinhart, 2020: 146–148). This entanglement of climbing as sport, space for individuality, and subculture determined a strong focus on the social life and interpersonal connections within the sections, which can still be seen within the keywords for the Eastern sections’ texts. A further keyword found in the Eastern subcorpus, ‘Geschichte’ [story or history], implies that the historical developments and heritage of GDR times remains relevant and, moreover, the narrated experiences are conceptualized as facets within this community-based discourse. The Western subcorpus features no keywords that allow for conclusions into that direction and thus can be seen as focussed on the activity as such and less on its relevance for interpersonal relations. In sum, the keywords reveal that the social ties within the climbing sections are different in the Eastern and Western sections with a more community-based focus in the former and a functional emphasis in the latter, which can be connected to the respective historical backgrounds.

The categories ‘Activity’, ‘Nature/Geography’, and ‘Spatial Expressions’ show a comparable distinction between pragmatism and activity-centredness in the West subcorpus and more experience-related descriptions in the Eastern subcorpus that can be tied to the abovementioned historical developments. The activities mentioned in the Eastern subcorpus, in congruence with the local possibilities of the area, are primarily rock climbing and hiking. The term ’boofen’ [bivvy] represents a local expression that exists only in the tradition of Saxon climbing and once more emphasizes the relevance of this area for the community. Many of the terms in the category ‘Activity’ are general terms that describe the actions while pursuing the abovementioned activities in nature, and specialized mountaineering terms are scarce. Compared to the Western subcorpus, the categories ‘Nature/Geography’ and ‘Spatial Expressions’ are extensive, which indicates that, instead of merely pursuing the sport, the local environment and the movement therein are described in great detail. Perception words like ‘sehen’ [see] and expressions used for describing the area of a particular trip like ‘nah’ [near] or ‘erreichen’ [reach] underline this tendency. The relevance of nature and the holistic experience of climbing confirm the previously described historically grown ethical stance towards the sport and community. Furthermore, the area being a ‘Nationalpark’ [national park] features among the keywords and thus nature is not only seen as a resource for climbing but as a generally important and protected area included in the ethics.

Keywords from the Western sections are more extensive than those from the Eastern ones regarding the range of activities, but in both the categories of ‘Nature/Geography’ and ‘Spatial Expressions’, fewer keywords were found. The range of activities is, on one hand, tied to the possibilities deriving from the alpine area many Western sections are based in or traditionally always had access to, and, on the other hand, the broader range has to do with less fixed ethics and focus within the community. Words like ‘Angebot’ [offer/possibility] and ‘Sport’[sports] emphasize functional and sports-oriented attitudes. With regard to the latter, terminology like ‘Fahrtechnik’ [driving or skiing technique], ‘Kurs’ [course], or ‘Kondition’ [endurance] shift the focus of the texts from experiential to physical aspects and skills. ‘Helm’ [helmet] or ‘Ausrüstung’ [equipment] imply that gear and the requirements to pursue a certain activity play a rather big role. The lack of environment descriptions as well as spatial terms emphasizes this focus on the sport rather than a holistic experience similar to the descriptions in the other subcorpus. With regard to the activities pursued and the localization of especially the Bavarian sections, it is surprising that there are not more words linked to mountain ranges and alpine conditions or glaciers, which were present in the keywords extracted from the whole corpus. Apparently, they appear relatively frequently in both subcorpora as a result of travels in the Eastern sections.

Both subcorpora feature keywords that point to the medium and writing as well as words that imply conventions with regard to the texts. In the Eastern sections, those consist of references to texts or elements thereof, like ‘Foto’ [photograph], ‘Beitrag’ [contribution], and ‘Geschichte’ [story/history], and of markers of subordinate sentences and elaborate sentence structures, like ‘welche’ [which], ‘dass’ [subordinating conjunction], ‘als’ [as], or ‘diese’ [this/these]. These point towards a stronger focus on narrative text forms and the integration of pictures in the East.

In the Western sections, references to the medium are fewer and can be distinguished into genres like ‘Bericht’ [report] or ‘Tourenbericht’ [tour report] and references to sources or further information, like ‘Telefon’ [telephone], ‘online’, or ‘Auskunft’ [information]. Consequently, the genre of reports, which is also prominent in the Eastern sections as the verb ‘berichten’ [to report], is important in both subcorpora but the Eastern narrative seems more narration-based while information in the Western journals includes practical as well as organisational aspects to a higher extent. The Eastern keyword ‘Geschichte’ [story/history] again suggests a stronger focus on the traditions within the community.

The category ‘Sentiment/Values’ in the Western subcorpus contains many positive words, like ‘gerne’ [gladly], ‘freuen’ [enjoy], or ‘Spaß’ [fun]. The following excerpt from the corpus conveys this attitude:

Angefangen hat es mit einem Klettertreff alle 2 Wochen, der später um einen sogenannten Gruppentreff erweitert wurde, sprich erst Klettern und dann Ratschen, Touren planen, Spaß haben, Pizza und Radler genießen! (Waurich and Wendlinger, 2022: 92–93).

It started with a climbing meeting every 2 weeks, which was later expanded to include a so-called group meeting, i.e., first climbing and then chatting, planning tours, having fun, enjoying pizza and shandy! (our translation).

The Eastern subcorpus contains words hinting at different values, such as ‘schön’ [beautiful], ‘kaum’ [hardly], or ‘nicht’[not]. This emphasizes the findings from the sentiment analysis, where the Western subcorpus had consistently higher values for positivity. Once more, this can also be traced back to historical development, since the approach to sports in the East is traditionally marked by ethics, morals, and seriousness rather than personal enjoyment and hedonism. The following quotation from one of the journals underlines this perspective:

Das Bergsteigen ist unser Herzblut und wir wissen, dass unsere Kletterleidenschaft nur dann auf Dauer möglich ist, wenn die Natur mit Respekt behandelt wird (Jacob, 2008: 1).

Mountaineering is our lifeblood and we know that our passion for climbing is only possible in the long term if nature is treated with respect (our translation).

In sum, the keywords show that, despite roughly similar topics as possible clusters, the Eastern and Western sections focus on different aspects within those themes. While the Eastern subcorpus indicates a holistic, community-related, and experience-centred way of writing with detailed descriptions of nature, the Western subcorpus implies a functionally oriented stance, forwards mostly sportive aims, and focusses on practical aspects. The evaluation of practices within the community are generally more positive in the Western sections. The findings from the sentiment analysis as well as consideration of the historical background align with these arguments.