Thilo Sarrazin sparked a heated discourse on German immigration and integration policies with his controversial but bestselling book published in 2010. As part of a larger research project, which investigates the interplay between on- and offline discourses about the multicultural society in Germany, this article provides an insight into the complex network around Sarrazin and his critics, shaping the current integration discourse. Using a template analysis (manual qualitative data analysis) on preselected textual data, themes and actors within the integration policy debate are identified. Based on the social identity theory, in-group versus out-group categorizations and attributions are evaluated, concluding that Sarrazin stereotypes Muslims, dependent on their economic value and their sociocultural compatibility to Western civilization.
