Visual Representations of Refugees in German Media 2010 - 2020
By: Cassidy Chreene Whittle, M.S. GMC - German
Advisors: Dr. Britta Kallin, Associate Professor of German, and
Dr. Richard Utz, Chair and Professor, Literature, Media, and Communication
Refugees on the Serbian-Hungarian border
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / September 20, 2015 / photo by AP
Published in the Economics section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the article "Drücken die Flüchtlinge unsere Löhne?" (Are the refugees threatening our wages?) opens with the sentence, "What happens when hundreds of thousands of new workers suddenly push into an existing labor market, for example through mass immigration?" The article's accompanying photo shows that exact fear realized and is captioned "Flüchtlinge an der serbisch-ungarischen Grenze" (Refugees on the Serbian-Hungarian border) with credit to AP. The article was published in September of 2015, at the height of the European Refugee Crisis as Germany was on their way to accepting close to 1 million refugees.
The jagged barbed wire fence-line encompassing the lower right half of the photo generates a sense of instability and serves to separate the refugees both physically in the space as well as metaphorically by the photographer in their use of framing. Additionally, the position of the photographer behind the group of refugees bolsters the feeling of facelessness already present from the large size of the crowd. Both of these factors together with the economic debate mentioned in the subheading "are refugees threatening our wages"? support the idea of a threat to the German economy through mass immigration.
Although it is difficult to discern since only the back of the subjects' heads are visible and the line of sight extends far enough that the subjects are blurred, it appears to be primarily male refugees, with one child clearly visible on the shoulders of a man, who are journeying from between Serbia and Hungry. Assuming traditional gender roles, people would expect the men to emigrate first to find work and establish themselves in a new country as the "breadwinner," so this depiction of only males traveling furthers once again the threat the male refugees are supposedly creating against the German workers' wages.