PUBLIC DISCOURSES of crisis are always intertwined with aspects of causal investigation, critique of responsible actors and moral accusations. At their core lies the fundamental question: who is responsible for a crisis? Which subjects (for example, people, groups, elites) or structures (for example, markets, economy, society, culture) are to blame? Hegemonic struggles for answers begin.

If we look towards Europe and the so-called eurozone crisis that emerged after 2008, we can identify several divergent interpretations of the crisis and as many proposals to resolve it in the public discourses of various actors (for example, media, governments, politicians, experts, civil society and social movements). These discourses have triggered a debate about debt, guilt and responsibility in many societies. Particularly in two very different EU states, Germany and Greece, multiple polarised debates have occurred over responsibility for the debt crisis. Both were severely affected by the crisis: Greece was facing national bankruptcy, the German economy experienced the largest contraction of its GDP in the post-war period in 2009, the eurozone threatened to collapse, and German banks made claims on Greek debt, thus triggering the German government's crisis policy. In both countries, governments and above all the media very quickly established the discursive framework of a collective guilt of all Greeks from 2010 onwards. This strategy was used to justify austerity measures, ‘a process of creating and sustaining shame and guilt and thus legitimising punishment (in the form of radical impoverishment, sky-rocketing unemployment, liquidation of labour and other social rights)’. Thereupon, reflections and diagnoses on debates of crisis and guilt were offered by some German and many more Greek public intellectuals, ranging from internal and external subject constructions, guilt accusations, self-blame and culturalist constructions to a broad critique of finance capitalism, the eurozone and its power elites. After reviewing a wider range of these intellectual analyses, two discourses appear to stand out: the culturalist-identitarian and the politico-economic ones. The first accuses entire national collectives of causing the crisis by pathologising their cultural characteristics and their ‘way of life’– in our case, ‘the Greeks’; the second sees the causes of crisis in the political and economic structures of the eurozone and in the decisions of the EU's political elites.