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 after their rescue from the Mediterranean
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / January 24, 2016 / photo by dpa
Captioned once again with the similarly vague description seen in many photos thus far, "Flüchtlinge nach ihrer Rettung aus dem Mittelmeer" (Refugees after their rescue from the Mediterranean) this photo accompanied the guest commentary article titled "We're ist Flüchtling?" (Who is a refugee?). The commentary is written by Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean-German philosopher and cultural theorist who came to Germany at age 22 as a refugee.
The essay-style article opens with an introduction citing the same Hannah Arendt essay "We Refugees" used in the creative project spotlighted in Der Spiegel, and goes on to detail Han's personal experiences as a refugee and the feelings of loneliness and uncertainty one feels in a foreign country. He details the questions of identity and home he had to address as a young refugee. Although there is no direct mention of the current state of affairs in German at the time the article was published, the timing of publication in January 2017 might seem to indicate a desire for understanding of the newly arrived refugees' potential social dilemmas. Further supporting this theory is the image selection used as the article's cover photo. Instead of using a headshot of Han or a photo he might have had from his early years in Germany, the editors at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung made the explicit decision to select a photo supplied by the dpa showing a group of young, dark-skinned refugees after being rescued from the Mediterranean.
Due to the photo's angle from directly above the refugees, only the tops of the heads of the subjects and parts of their faces are visible, but not enough to determine with certainty their gender or approximate age. They all appear to be wearing the same blue, scrub-style outfits likely provided by the rescue committee after being pulled from the water. On the hands of the middle subject and the far-right subject, identification numbers can be seen written in black marker on their left hand. Despite the fact it may have been the intention of the journalist to connect Han's philosophical essay to contemporary refugee issues, using this photo as the article's main photo instead seems exploitative to use their image and likeness to promote the intellectual work of an already well-known academic.