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
Spiegel Title Split
Der Spiegel / July 25, 2015/ Johannes Arlt for Der Spiegel
2015 marked the beginning of the European refugee crisis with Germany alone receiving an “unprecedented 442,000 individual first-time asylum applications” according to the Pew Research Center (“Record 1.3 Million Sought Asylum in Europe in 2015”). For their publication during the week of July 25, 2015, Der Spiegel created a Titelsplit (title split) cover page with six portraits of refugees in Germany with accompanying wordplays on stereotypical assumptions against refugees and counterarguments showcasing the truth behind refugees.
From left to right the main cover lines read as follows: (top row) “Threatening? Threatened” / “Dangerous? Tortured” / “Uneducated? Oppressed” (bottom row) “Criminal? Persecuted” / “Greedy? Poor” / “Greedy? Hungry.” Each of the portraits follows the same basic photographic structure: a full face, frontal shot of the subject in front of a plain white, textured backdrop, which we might assume to be a wall. Five of the six subjects have an emotionless expression, with the woman in the top right corner of the compilation breaking the trend with a slight smile. During this point in the refugee crisis, the majority of the photos being published by news organizations were large group shots, depicting refugees on boats, at camps, or at intake facilities. By shifting the focus from photos of herds of people, especially young men, seemingly invading the continent to the actual individuals and their true motives for needing to migrate to a safer country than their own home, editors at Der Spiegel humanize the faceless crowds of refugees pouring into Germany.
Additionally, the decision not to limit themselves to only one “poster child” demonstrates the diversity among the refugees and breaks down multiple stereotypes in a single week’s issues. Developing this project into a series spread across multiple weeks would have strengthened its impact on the refugees’ plight and further fought to educate the German public, but that is likely an unreasonable request for a magazine whose focus is mostly news about politics, economics, and culture, not specifically immigration issues. Perhaps able to have established this as a long-term series of portraits and individual stories would have been Diakonie Deutschland, a Protestant social work agency, or Pro-Asyl, a non-government organization dedicated to the protection and rights of asylum seekers in Germany and Europe, through their respective publications or social media channels.