[Crisis in the Public Sphere]

In our contribution, we first make fundamental considerations on the medial constitution of the Covid 19 crisis as well as on the concept of crisis itself. Subsequently, an extensive corpus of notices and other communiqués from four European countries - France, Germany, Austria and Sweden - is analysed under the aspect of their materiality, mediality and locality as well as the respective discursive functions. From a temporal perspective, three phases of the use of communicates in the pandemic are assumed. From a fundamental perspective, we then look at the property of areality, which is characteristic of public communicates of the type studied. Areality is understood as the range or scope of the communicates with their specific conditions of reception and compliance. The hypothesis we are pursuing is that a typology of the communicates can be established under the aspect of their areality, thus enabling deeper insights into their social and communicative functions.