The article is devoted to theoretical and practical aspects of a discourse analysis of the relevant German political key words. The authors consider the issues of identifying and classifying key words; special attention is paid to their discursive and pragmatic characteristics. The paper provides a discourse analysis of the new key word “postfaktisch” at intra-textual, trans-textual levels and at the level of actors; examines the peculiarities of codified and discursive semantics in the political media-discourse and analyzes discursive derivatives and collocations of the lexeme.