Geared to Intercultural understanding: The technique of perspectivizing in biographical interviews about the East German TRABI

The novelty of the presented approach of perspectivizing for intercultural understanding is to break away from the general presumption of 'intercultural blockage' or 'intercultural obstacles or barriers', often leading to misunderstandings. Instead, the proposed study focuses on the verbal communication in intercultural contacts 'beyond misunderstanding' and sets out to explore realistic mechanisms of reflective activities of interlocutors and their communicative efforts that lead to interpersonal and mutual understanding. These efforts are regarded as functional pragmatic action knowledge embedded in receptive intercultural interaction. The paper examines a three-step strategy for achieving intercultural understanding that reproduces the process of considering communicative expectations in intercultural discourse: by generalizing, an interactant considers his speech action to be a cultural standard solution; by perspectivizing, he locates his speech action in the actual speech situation taking into account the cultural standards of the other. By contrasting cultures, the speaker enables the hearer to compare the speaker's cultural standards with his own and thus attain an adequate interpretation of the discourse. Four case studies are analyzed in which the three-step model is related to cultural differences, age difference, expert knowledge, and L1-L2 constellations. These differences can be accounted for within the three-step model. The data originate from a study on biographical stories about the East German car, the Trabant, commonly known as the Trabi.