Berlin between the Western showcase and the Soviet bloc: phraseology as a critique of the Cold War in Gabriel García Márquez’s Berlín es un disparate

Abstract

This article examines the phraseology of the absurd in Gabriel García Márquez’s chronicle Berlín es un disparate and shows how lexical items and phraseological units underpin a critical stance toward the propagandistic staging of the Cold War. The study adopts a combined quantitative and qualitative approach. In the first stage, Voyant Tools is used to describe lexical frequencies and segmental distribution and to identify three semantic clusters: urban space; geopolitics and ideology; and economics and propaganda. In the second stage, a twelve-item inventory of phraseological units (PUs) is manually compiled and classified; their contextual paraphrases are formulated, their experiential domains are delineated, and their evaluative orientations are established. The findings reveal an asymmetrical distribution of attention, with a clear emphasis on the Western bloc, and group the PUs into four lexico-phraseological fields: chaos and disorder; spectacle and propagandistic façade; border and silent violence; and overcrowding and everyday malaise. The article concludes that phraseology transforms the material contradictions of the divided city into a form of critique accessible to a Spanish American readership and brings linguistic analysis into dialogue with literary interpretations of the Cold War.