Visual Representations of Refugees in German Media 2010 - 2020

Also released during the highpoint of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis, this image captioned broadly "Flüchtlinge am Bahnhof von Salzburg" (Refugees at Salzburg train station) accompanied the article "Kleines Land, was nun?" (Small country, what now?) published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on October 1, 2015. 

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The article profiles politician Heinz-Christian Strache of the conservative Austrian party FPÖ and details his extreme stance against refugees and desire to "close" Austria's borders, stating that the majority of refugees entering are young men seeking refugee status for economic reasons. The top half of the photo shows an overcrowded group of refugees being corralled by a group of the Austrian police. The police serve to break up the photo's physical space positioned almost directly on the horizontal middle line and additionally act as the embodiment of the profiled politician's proposed policy to turn refugees away from the small country of Austria by protecting the "border" figuratively and literally that they are keeping the refugees from entering the escalators.

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In the photo, Strache's point of predominantly male refugee populations is proven as there is only one female visible in the top left corner nearly out of frame. Excluding the woman, all the subjects in the photo are lighter-skinned, Arab-looking men, although as noted in other photos in this study this is not a problem unique to Austria or photographs taken in Austria. By including the police in this photo and amplifying the situation at the Salzburg train station, which may just be the everyday arrival of refugees – the caption is too vague to give us an idea of why the refugees are being held off in the location they are in – and bolstering Strache's comments that mostly males are coming to Austria as refugees through the imagery of the photo, the pairing of this article with this photograph further the right-wing bias towards accepting refugees.