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Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies
ISSN: 1556-2948 (Print) 1556-2956 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wimm20
The Volatility of the Discourse on Refugees in
Germany
Bastian Vollmer & Serhat Karakayali
To cite this article: Bastian Vollmer & Serhat Karakayali (2017): The Volatility of the
Discourse on Refugees in Germany, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, DOI:
10.1080/15562948.2017.1288284
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The Volatility of the Discourse on Refugees in Germany
Bastian Vollmera,b
and Serhat Karakayalic
a
University of Oxford, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Oxford, United Kingdom; b
SFB 923
Threatened Orders, University of T€ubingen, T€ubingen, Germany; c
Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin
Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Berlin, Germany
ABSTRACT
The anti-immigration continuum of public attitude-mediapolitics
has undergone changes in the course of the “refugee
crisis” in Germany. By examining migrant representations and
discursive events taking place in 2015 and early 2016, we will
show the volatility of the recent discourse on refugees. A
historical/critical discourse analysis will show how new topoi
arose and old topoi of the security/power paradigm have lastly
reconquered the discourse. Using newspaper coverage, we
discuss discursive events in three main sections: borders, arrival,
and presence. Discursive shifts have taken place that have had
an impact on the configuration of migration categories such as
migrants or refugees.
KEYWORDS
Migration; discourse; politics;
European Union; Germany;
policy
In the course of 2015, over one million refugees arrived in the European Union.
Thousands of them died on their way to seeking protection in the member-states
of the European Union. The problematique of this situation is not new. What is
new is how migrants have acted and how discourses in political/public arenas have
corresponded with these developments, particularly in Germany.
Looking back, the fear of uncontrolled movement was very common in Western
Germany, first in government discourses throughout the 1960s (Karakayali, 2008,
Sch€onw€alder, 2001) and increasingly in public debates in the context of the end of
the guest workers recruitment system in 1973: “At the end of the decade […]
millions of Turkish people are threatening to get moving in the direction of the
Federal Republic” (M€unchner Merkur, September 9, 1973).
The term million has seemingly a particular power of drawing attention because,
not only is it a large number, it also seems to be a significant threshold. Der Spiegel
used the term in the early 1970s on its cover page,1
simply stating: “One million
Turks.” The image depicts a family in what seems to be an overcrowded apartment,
because Turkish immigrants have many children. Similar connotations between
numbers and the implicit threat by such masses of people have not disappeared
CONTACT Bastian Vollmer B.A.Vollmer.04@cantab.net University of Oxford, Centre on Migration, Policy and
Society, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6QS, United Kingdom.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES
2017, VOL. 0, NO. 0, 1–22
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1288284
from the media discourse, as a quote from a newspaper in 2015 reminds us:
“One million refugees? The atmosphere is threatened to change” (Augsburger
Allgemeine, September 14, 2015).
It would be misleading however to take these similarities as evidence for a seamless
continuity in the way issues around migration, refugees, and diversity are being
framed. In the German context, one of the main reasons for this change is the
transformation of migration policy discourse over the last decades—that is, from
recruitment policies to an increasingly demanding integration policy agenda
(Baringhorst, Hunger, & Sch€onw€alder, 2006; Matouschek, Wodak, & T€an€uschek,
1995). More-recent developments such as digitization and the emergence of new
social media have also influenced the nature of discourses, both in terms of the
very composition of the elements of a discourse and the regimes of their distribution
(sharing, liking, re-tweeting and the mostly nontransparent algorithms with
which the platforms govern the visibility of content). We will not provide a full
account of the role of these new media and their relevance for discourse analysis,
however it is a research field that becomes increasingly necessary to explore.2
The newspaper landscape in Germany, as in other European countries, still
exerts substantial influence on public discourse, despite studies that suggest that
public visibility in terms of circulation has fallen (Conboy, 2010). And thus, for
our data we have selected the newspapers and news magazines with the highest
sales figures in order to substantiate the claim of impact on public discourses. In
our analysis, we will focus on a set of German newspapers and weekly magazines
that can be seen as relevant in the sense of “Leitmedien” (leading sources of media;
trend-setters for other media). Social agents, particularly the political elite, regard
this media as “agenda-setters.” For our data set we have included the outlets Der
Focus, Der Spiegel, Der Tagesspiegel, Bild, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, and S€uddeutsche Zeitung.
Having systematically screened this media (print and online) from March 2015
until March 2016, we have built a text corpus,3
analyzed it, and distilled our findings
for this article. We have used computational screening employing the interface
Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff, Rychly, Smrz, & Tugwell, 2004) and on the basis of this
data set and applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) (see e.g., Wodak & Krzyzanowski,
2008; Wodak & Meyer, 2016), we were able to draw conclusions about the
general development of the discourse from March 2015 until March 2016. Prior
studies have used Sketch Engine to derive word sketches of lemmas such as Muslim
(Baker et al. 2013; KhosraviNik, 2010) or in more general analysis woman or man
(Pearce, 2008). Specific kinds of verbs surrounded these groups of people, who carried
certain prosody. However, considering the growing significance of images and
visuals in ways of communication and the media (Haas & Wischermann, 2015),
we find it important not to limit our analysis to content, expressed in textual form
but to include the visual dimension (see e.g., Chouliaraki, 2006; Mitchell, 1987).
This is only meaningful when one argues that visual representations of metaphors
such as “the boat” or “the child” do not simply express the same thing as their
2 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
narrative counterparts or if it can be said that visual representations—both moving
images and photographs—express different meanings. We used a sample of visualizations,
which had an impact on the public discourse. As we will show in the
exemplary case of the image of the dead body of Aylan Kurdi, images have the
capacity to shift the focus in discourses and possibly lead to a shift of framing.
These two layers of analysis (text and visualization) and, additionally, a series of
expert interviews with politicians, journalists, and volunteers are tested against our
hypothesis about the main factors of the public discourse toward migration, particularly
refugee migration: The acceptance of refugees depends on their representation
as “deserving.” Deservingness, as we will argue, negatively correlates with
agency and choice on the side of the refugees. A survey among volunteers in Germany
suggests that volunteers regard the quite generic expression “being forced”
to migrate as the most legitimate reason (Karakayali & Kleist, 2015). Children and
families, we argue, serve as narrative and visual markers for this condition, as
opposed to men, who often represent the figure of the rational choice individual
who (sometimes depicted with the term “asylum shopper”) tends to be seen as illegitimate—an
economic migrant, who does not deserve protection. Coming back to
our inclusion of visual analysis, it puts forward another point of justification: In
textual content, journalists often generically write about refugees or asylum
seekers, while photographs necessarily show concrete individuals or groups. The
space of “imagination,”—that is, whether we associate “victims or villains” (Anderson
2013) when we read about refugees—literally depends on what we are shown.
What struck us during the first months of the migration crisis in the second
half of 2015 was the difference relative to a similar experience 20 years ago,
when hundreds of thousands fleeing the war in what was then Yugoslavia
arrived in the newly unified Germany. Although many fewer refugees arrived in
the years between 1990 and 1992 than in the current case (numbers peaked in
1990 at about 389,000), the German media and particularly the tabloid press
has not employed the negative and hostile language toward newcomers as critical
observers expected. The creation of hysteria and scandals (Butterwegge &
Hentges, 2006) are not found to the usual extent. The standard topoi of antiimmigration
sentiments, for example, that immigration in general may be
defined as a “problem” or a “financial/economic burden,” or as a “threat” to the
welfare state and the “indigenous” culture, and so forth (see e.g., Vollmer, 2011;
Wodak, 2015; Wodak & van Dijk, 2000) did not entirely propel the negative
standard topics of regarding refugees such as “bogus asylum seekers” or the
accusation of “abusing the social services.” Up to a certain point in time, even
the powerful topic of numbers or, as Vollmer (2014) argued the “Malthusian
paranoia”—that is, the fear of “overpopulation”—did not gain momentum. For
a remarkably long period of time, media outlets such as the newspapers of the
Springer Press4
have covered the whole process in a language supportive of the
cause of refugees and hostile toward right-wing populist movements such as
PEGIDA.5
One can hardly overestimate the general euphoria that captured
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 3
large parts of the civil society for a few months, when numerous organizations
(the press, companies, trade unions, associations, schools and universities, and
so forth) joined in efforts to “welcome” the refugees.
However, the discourse did not remain to behave in this manner, it moved and
fluctuated in its quality and productivity. Our analysis will reveal the distilled
metamorphosis of the discourse and highlight the volatility in which the cause of
refugees is being framed. For these reasons we will look at this very volatility and
examine its effects and implications. We will refer to shifts in the public discourse,
which implies that the described changes may also overlap, run parallel or interrelate;
thus, we will not be able to pinpoint the exact moments of shifts. However, we
can claim that changes have taken place and that effects on power relations can be
cautiously denoted.
Observing migration discourses in the course of 2015, migration can be increasingly
understood as an act—occurrences of acts—that, as we see it, were increasingly
staged. For our analysis we will use the conceptual framework of discursive
events. We do not use the concept discursive event in a causal relationship of discourse
and event—that is, a discourse causes an event or events cause or start a discourse.
We would like to take a different understanding than Foucault in his
philosophy of language (1989), as we do not argue for a certain formation and
development of discourse that we need to be discovered. We do not intend to discover
a new “Big D-view” of discourse in which “historically specific systems of
meaning […] form the identities of subjects and objects” (Howarth, 2000, p. 9).
Positioning each discursive element in relation to other elements in the series is
not in the foremost objective of our concept, which would prioritize methodological
constructions of contingencies or causal historiography, but we focus on the
impact of staging talk, speech, and imagery objects. We use the concept of discursive
event as a theatrical and at the same time rhetoric matter. It defines an installation
of imaginary and realist configurations and representations. This may be given
by text, image, context, and history. Performative quality of discursive events gains
often most attention by the perceivers and, therefore, we use discursive events and
their performative quality as producers of “critical discourse moments” (Chilton,
1987). Through these eventful and staged moments, as we understand it, meaning
is mobilized (Chilton, 1987, p. 17) and the performance becomes visible and, therefore,
registered and “processed” by the audience.
Discursive events are linked to “depth hermeneutics” (Thompson, 1990) that
are designed to bridge performed text and historical social situations. Eyerman
(2008) points out that the difference between occurrences and events is the
framework of interpretation, which makes an event much more understandable,
or that a process of “making an event” is at stake. “Agents positioned in a discursive
field” create meaning by defining the situation of the, in our case, migration
act and therefore preoccupy background narrative “genres and tropes,” which
again introduce different levels beyond the situational. Yet, discursive events
have more texture and more staging character. The discursive events that we will
4 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
discuss did not just happen, but they triggered and mobilized the growing flows
and exchanges articulated by a plethora of institutional actors as well as the
European/German public. People started to partake in these events and coproduced
a certain discourse, which circulated through various kinds of media.
The analytical concept of discursive events allows us to link media discourse and
the event-making processes that have an impact on the public discourse. And by
applying historical/critical discourse analysis, we will discuss three stages of
discursive events: borders, arrival, and presence. Each of these stages is marked
by one or several discursive events, which bring about a shift in the public
discourse toward refugees.
Horrified of the work of borders
This is all but a new event since people have been dying at EU borders for the past
decades and people still die at borders. The visibility of these deaths highly depends
on the circumstances though: While the many migrants and refugees whose boats
sunk on their passage to the Italian shores mostly remain unnoticed, the situation
is different at the mainland borders, as we will show in this article.
The European Union’s external border is one of the most lethal borders in the
world. Against the advice and recurrent requests by the academic community and
the international NGO community, the European Union and its member-states
have increasingly restricted their migration regimes and have strengthened their
border control (Vaughan-Williams, 2015; Vollmer, 2014, 2016a). Yet, these migration
flows were differently covered by the media; they were staged. For instance,
the sight of boats crammed with people became an icon of migration and is one of
the elements of the discursive event “borders.” Taking a critical iconological
approach (Belting, 2005; Bredekamp, 2003; Mitchell, 1987, 2005) points out how
images are invented, mobilized, and re-inscribed by and through the discursive
practices. Reading the images of boats crammed with people gives us a good starting
point for our argument in this section: There has been a growing empathy
among the European and German public, which has identified itself increasingly
with the horror that takes place at its “own” borders; we follow this argument,
looking at a particular picture of a 3-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, and show a public
that has increasingly participated in migrants’ fates and started to share their
plight. Finally and moving along the migration trajectory, we discuss border fences.
Boats
One of the numerous images of “boat people of the Mediterranean” we refer to was
made from the air and depicted a boat full of people who all were looking up at a
flying vehicle. Nearly all of the people look up synchronically, almost as in a theatrical
choreography created for the observer, who seems to be looked at. The refugees
on the boat seem to cry for help; they look straight into the observer’s eyes and
wish to be in the flying vehicle bringing them to a safe haven. This look is, however,
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 5
accompanied by the horror of being on this boat: exposed to the sun, strong winds,
and further adverse weather conditions or simply the exposure of this hazardous
journey. Significantly, these kinds of images are entitled or are accompanied with
text, which often sets critical undertones, such as “Refugee graveyard: The Mediterranean
sea” (Der Focus, April 20, 2015).6
The right-conservative tabloid press follows
the same lead with titles such as “The Mediterranean sea becomes a mass-graveyard”
(Bild, September 20, 2015).7
By then, the term mass migration was not
employed but, rather, mass casualties, which has different connotations and discursive
consequences. Such media accounts not only put the border situation into a
critical spotlight, they even support the idea that “we” should help “them” by, for
example, using ferries. These image/text packages are then circulated, discussed and
often re-framed in social media.
Boat images became an icon as such, especially in Germany in the course of the
“refugee crisis.” The image and also the metaphor of “sitting in the same boat” and
this boat representing Germany as a country, has been used frequently in political
discourse and long before the “refugee crisis” of 2015. In the discursive setting of
the 1990s, the boat metaphor mainly expressed the notion of the limitation of
space. “Boat” was a metaphor for capacity. This expression was frequently used in
the 1990s by center-right parties (Vollmer, 2014). In recent debates in Germany
the statement rather became featured as a critical request, such as: “Is the boat
really full?” (Der Spiegel, April 15, 2014).8
Yet, similar to the 1990s, the conservative
wing of the CDU/CSU used this well-known metaphor to criticize the policy
of their chairwoman, Angela Merkel, as, for instance, the Der Tagesspiegel reported
(September 23, 2015).9
Nevertheless, as more people arrived (as we will discuss
below) the metaphor increasingly transformed to a threat metaphor transporting
the meaning of sinking or drowning. Depending of the political spectrum of the
newspaper outlet, the meaning of threat had been explicitly used already in March
2015 (e.g., Junge Freiheit, a far-right weekly newspaper)10
or less explicitly and yet
exposing more frequently the reader to the expression “the boat is full” in February
2016 (e.g., Der Focus, center-right weekly magazine).11
Apart from metaphorical images and the discursive framing of the event (as a
threat or as a tragedy), beyond the outright positive or negative assessment, the
mere fact that refugees were treated as if they were victims of a natural disaster
and the language of a state of emergency that accompanied the entire event is
worth an analysis on its own. It is part of the logic of modern mass media to focus
on the extraordinary. This structurally induced selection bias goes hand in hand
with the creation of the extraordinary circumstances of the migration wave of
2015. While many experts, including the European Commission and the Italian
government, had called the European governments to prepare for increased numbers
of refugees, almost no measures were taken.12
The fact that several hundred
thousand migrants had to make their way on foot, to camp in open fields and eventually
to be sheltered in makeshift camps and school gyms provided precisely the
landscape of catastrophe and extraordinariness, which then was largely the focus
6 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
of media coverage of that process. When it comes to the catastrophism of the
migration crisis, a reality created by the political sphere in the first place was reinforced
by the “spectacles of the journalists”—that is, the search for the sensational
and spectacular (Bourdieu, 1998). Natural disasters require exceptional measures
or, rather, the invalidation of those norms and regulations, which seemingly are
only valid in “normal times”—which is probably why early in the crisis, several
demands for the suspension of such regulations were raised (such as for the abolition
of the minimum wage,13
and why the demand for an Obergrenze, a “cap” for
refugees,” 14
seemed to be legitimate.
Similarly, images of boats became representations of people on the move or of
an “invasion” from outside the EU. Yet, the violence that lies behind them and the
plight that made them flee often remained invisible. Constellations of power are
produced by this visibility, hence the depicted becomes foregrounded as the invisibility
of other violence of the territorial border, such as deportation camps, are
neglected (see also Bischoff, Falk, & Kafehsy, 2010). Indeed, Mitchell already
pointed out that the critical understanding of pictures also requires one to “grasp
the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen” (1984, p. 526). Arguing in favor
of a pictorial turn in the 1990s, he stated that “although we have thousands of
words about pictures, we do not have a satisfactory theory of them” (Mitchell,
1994, p. 9). We need to be careful not “to heal the split between words and images,
but to see what interests and powers it serves” (1984, p. 530). Contextualization is
the key, otherwise the “double consciousness” may take over: believing in the magical
power of images and accusing images as manipulative in one go (Mitchell,
2005). A vivid exemplification is the image of Aylan Kurdi.
Aylan Kurdi
In a next iconographic stage, which became the most powerful picture and contributed
to the discourse event of bordering, was the picture of the dead body of a 3year-old
boy, Aylan Kurdi. On September 2, 2015, the body of Aylan Kurdi, a
Syrian of Kurdish origin, was found washed up on the beach at Bodrum, Turkey.
His family tried to cross the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Kos but their
boat capsized. The images of this boy became a sensation and represented the horrors
of the refugee protection crisis of 2015. It mobilized people because it touched
the perceivers of this image. Combined forces of mainstream media and social
media demonstrated the power of virality in the digital age. It testified to the power
of visuality at a scale similar to the images of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The
images became—for a short period of time—representative of the EU border
regime and its practices. Research of visual construction of subjects has shown
how “non-verbal communication” that are visual articulations are vetted in the
given discourse and how they offer “insights into the manner in which subjectivities—and
realities—are constituted” (van Veeren, 2011, p. 1724). Making sense of
a textual account becomes sidelined by the explicit power of visuality, especially
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 7
when it comes to the stories of plight, horror, and survival. The case of Aylan
Kurdi and his image helps to shed light on three dimensions of the shift in public
discourse about refugees.
The image, as we argue, supports the legitimacy of the refugee cause through the
“innocence” represented in the child. The difference between this image and many
others representing dead migrants’ bodies that usually circulate is that the latter
are mostly almost “unbearable” (as a British newspaper15
put it), as they show
human beings as disfigured, with open mouths or bloody wounds. What is so powerful
about the Aylan Kurdi image is that we can look at it, it is not unbearable at
first sight. It appears to be an unhurt, undamaged body.16
The sleeping child is at the same time the utmost symbol of innocence that
childhood stands for. Regarding this image of Aylan Kurdi, therefore, is not
regarding “pain” in the first instance. The impact of the image might be related to
the contradiction transmitted in the emotions that it invokes subsequently: After
the feeling of familiarity17
and innocence comes the painful realization that the
child is actually dead. Massumi (2002), in his analysis of these types of seemingly
paradoxical perceptions, comes to the conclusion that it is the subject’s inability to
“make sense,” which renders these experiences to enter the realms of emergence
and of transformation. The child simultaneously fits into the major frame that has
governed the migration discourse for several decades, which divides the migrant
population into villains and victims (Anderson, 2008).
And at the same time the medium itself (in the case of social media though),
played its part in this image. When it comes to social media as carriers and hosts
of images we might recall Belting (2005), who argued that images cannot reach us
unmediated and, hence, the images’ visibility rests on their particular mediality
and by which the perception of the observers is controlled for. However, this seems
not to be case with social media wherein the power of virality governs the visibility
of the image. This makes the depiction of, in particular the display of dead bodies,
convoluted. Instead of posing with the corpse of the enemy, which has a long and
rich history (Auchter, 2015), the meaning of this dead body is shame, failure, and
shared pain. The power of this image comes from the discursive materiality of bodies
(Shinko, 2010, p. 738) and how this has gained meaning of consternation and
shared dismay.
Fences
Partially deterred by the sea route, increasingly, more migrants decided to take the
longer but potentially safer land route, which also allowed more families and physically
disabled migrants to make the journey; this in turn contributed to a more
heterogeneous composition of the refugee as a group. As a consequence, both the
land borders and the migrants became increasingly part of this discursive event
exposing the work of borders through the endeavors of journalists and activists
who documented every step and action of the migrants and the border guard. The
8 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
main reason for this is the visibility that the land border allows: other than with the
sea route, the blockade leads to the amassing of refugees, resulting in encampments
and, subsequently, to visual representations, protests, and violent clashes between
border enforcement personnel and refugees.
A trajectory of border sites became the focus of this discursive event. Taking the
Balkan route as an example, various border-crossing points in Turkey/Greece (e.g.,
Akcale), Turkey/Bulgaria, Greece/Macedonia (e.g., Gevgelija), Croatia/Hungary,
Croatia/Slovenia became frequently covered by the media. Accounts and images of
people waiting at fences, attempting to climb them, squeezing themselves and their
families through barbed wires while others ask for food or water were accompanied
with reports that describe the proceedings of border practices by state authorities.
Video snippets and images like Macedonian security officers teargasing refugees or
of the Hungarian camerawoman that tripped a male refugee with his child in his
arms were only possible at the land borders.18
Some media reports pointed to the
consequences of the newly installed barbed-wire fences sending a signal of the uselessness
of such new fences, by quoting a migrant response: “We will eat the fence”
(Die Zeit, August 10, 2015). Earlier accounts had already tried to envisage the perspective
of the people waiting at this fence and being kept off of EU territory. The
Neue Z€uricher Zeitung (June 19, 2016) wrote: “Hope waits at the Turkish border
fence.”19
In early 2016 the question of empathy with refugees became a critical public issue,
with conservatives and right-wing populists accusing mainstream media for showing
pictures of suffering refugee children. Alexander Gauland, a representative of the
newly rising right-wing populist Alternative f€ur Deutschland (AfD) argued that
Germans must be able to withstand the plight of “children’s eyes.” Thus, an image
itself does not suffice to provoke a certain reaction, as Sontag has famously argued
in her essay on “Regarding the pain of others” (2003). Enemies in war consider only
their own suffering, as in the case of the war in Bosnia, for example, where both
sides used the very same images of dead children to mobilize empathy and support
for their cause. Images depicting the sufferings of the opposition are usually considered
to be manufactured (see also Boltanski, 1999, or Chouliaraki, 2006). However,
in the current debates in Germany, to denounce the images as manufactured or to
frame children simply as enemies did not have the needed resonance. Yet, some
traction of potentially emotionalizing images and, therefore, their impact on deservingness
had found resonance in the public discourse which led the minister of home
affairs, Thomas de Maiziere (CDU), to recommend that the German public has to
“endure” tough images such as the encampments in Idomeni (Greece/Macedonia).
Empathy and solidarity on arrival
The refugee discourse up to the escalation at the train station in Budapest by the
end of August, where hundreds and then thousands of refugees were refused further
travel, seemed to have prepared the ground for what has been called the
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 9
“September fairy tale”20
in Germany. All over Germany, volunteers showed up at
train stations to welcome refugees cheering, singing, and applauding. They helped
by providing basic needs but also with gestures of hospitality. German society, it
seemed during the summer and autumn of 2015, was full of empathy for the cause
of refugees. During those first weeks, representations of “welcoming” and hospitality
dominated the discursive landscape. Similar to the function of the children’s
body in the Aylan Kurdi theme, it was encounters with refugee children at
arrival—prepared by media coverage in the preceding weeks—that came to represent
the philanthropic relationship, in which German citizens performed acts of
welcoming. Germany had become, in the words of the Green politician Katrin
G€oring Eckhardt, the “world champion of hospitality,” whilst adding a personal
note stating that it was “the first time, she can say she is proud to be German.”21
An image depicted in the liberal newspaper S€uddeutsche Zeitung on September 5,
2015 (with the second biggest circulation after Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung),22
we see a German police officer, member of the Federal Police, the authority
responsible for border control, taking a child by the hand. When performed by
representatives of the state the gestures and acts of welcoming become even more
significant. While we can’t be sure who the volunteering citizens are—they might
belong to a particular and even marginal part of the society—the police officer represents
the “average man on the street” and symbolically tell us that the state itself
stands with the welcoming population. What the police officer tells us additionally
in this picture is this: “The refugee” is indeed not a threat since she as a security
official is treating him/her rather as a guest or a friend.
Another image, printed this time in the conservative newspaper Die Welt in the
first week of September 2015, shows a refugee child looking through a bus win-
dow.23
The text of the article accommodating this picture, the Die Welt, described
the scene:
“… tears of happiness, as arriving children receive their cuddly toys. One woman brought
used toys from her own children. However she does not want to get her picture taken,
stating: “Otherwise I will cry.” When some of the arriving children grab one of her cuddly
toys, she started crying after all—she could not hide her emotions.
At a later stage and as a corresponding response to these reported developments
of a “September fairy tale” in Germany and the political stance that the German
government had decided to take, the same conservative newspaper (Die Welt)
stated that “the world is praising Germany: heart-warming!”24
A subliminal element
of pride can be noticed that may also have had a mobilizing effect on the
German public to help those arriving, which is related to the proudness-narrative
mentioned earlier. Das Handelsblatt (a newspaper focusing on trade and macroeconomics)
underlined Angela Merkel’s determination, even if her policies could
split the European Union, in this moment in time to offer a helping hand—her
own and Germany’s as a nation reaching out to the people fleeing their countries
(“Merkel please help me!”25
). The motto that Merkel has famously announced in a
10 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
press conference has poignantly reached the German public’s hearts and minds:
“We can do this.”26
A recent representative study (Ahrens, 2015) revealed that around 8 million
Germans were in some way involved in the welcoming, at least donated something
to refugees during the first months of the so-called refugee crisis. Above all, it
might be meaningful to relate to the concept of “atmosphere,” as it has been discussed
recently by scholars such as Anderson (2014) in a Spinozian framework, by
scholars in the realm of aesthetics or with a phenomenological approach (L€offler,
2013). It is bound to spatial and material situations and constellations. These might
be architectures and public spaces and other forms of complex cultural environments,
in which meaning (as a mere content analysis would be confined to) is combined
with “sentiments,” with affective states and emotions. In our case, the
atmosphere was established in the physical encounter with arriving refugees at
train stations all over Germany and the distribution of images, stories, and short
videos about these events through the media. Also, an accelerative dynamic of
institutions and organizations, who publicly declared their support of the cause of
refugees contributed to the atmospheric change. However, as the meteorological
metaphor suggests, atmospheres are not stable and subject to sudden change,
which will be discussed later in this article.
When it comes to the diverse elements that contributed to the emergence of this
atmosphere, the conventional press played a significant role. Most importantly,
media outlets, which have a broad readership and are usually regarded as the “people’s
voice,” such as the Bild, made an impact. Bild—up to about April 2016—had
adopted the slogan “Refugees Welcome,” which formerly was exclusively used by
radical (refugee-supporting) groups, also published a supplement in the Berlin issue
in early September 2015 in Arabic,27
particularly addressing refugees who had
arrived in Berlin. In terms of its representational value, similarly to the police, newspapers
like the Bild address and speak in the name of the “average man on the
street.” Its influence is widely accepted among politicians and opinionmakers in
Germany.28
Another indicator of this atmospheric change accelerated by media channels
such as the Bild is the spread of welcoming practices in German civil society. As
Karakayali and Kleist (2015) have shown, volunteering work for refugees increased
continuously over the last few years, since the beginning of the war in Syria. This
growing field of civic engagement might have prepared the grounds for the volunteering
and welcoming practices to increase under certain circumstances. Their
data suggest that the discursive event of August and September 2015 mobilized a
population that was hitherto not active in terms of refugee support.
Disappointment and betrayal?
The atmosphere of hospitality was always fragile and in trying to understand the
volatility of the discourse toward migrants and refugees, the seemingly sudden
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 11
ruptures and changes in attitude and tonality, we want to focus in this section on
two particular discursive events. While we analyze discursive material on the one
hand, we need to emphasize on the other hand that the metamorphosis also
includes a relational and affective dimension—that is, the changes in the emerged
philanthropic relationship.
As Boltanski (1999) convincingly argued in his book on distant suffering,
our empathy (and consequential help) toward strangers depends not only on
their deservingness but also on a specific type of reaction on the side of the
recipients of help. When German citizens provide hospitality, it is implicitly
expected and required that refugees respond with gratitude. It is quite clear
that such a philanthropic relationship is highly precarious since it depends
entirely on the constant repetition of an asymmetric pattern in which refugees
need to act according to the needs of the emotional investment of the providers
of help. This can be observed both on the level of face-to-face-interaction
and on the level of the public discourse. Interviews and other accounts
with, for instance, volunteers, provide useful insights about the pitfalls of these
patterns, such as when an elderly woman who worked in a shelter in Berlin
reflected about her indignation when a young refugee from Eritrea did not
conform to these patterns (see Heinrich-B€oll-Stiftung, 2016, p. 11). The “disappointment”
can be even more intensive when there is no direct and personal
involvement with refugees—that is, when the welcoming attitude was
entirely based on the image of the innocent and grateful refugee.
In November 2015, the Paris terror attacks took place, which have foregrounded
an uneasiness about the new arrivals for some parts of the German society. The
topos of an infiltrated risk and fear of terror swiftly appeared as soon as the message
trickled through that one of the involved terrorists recently arrived disguised
as a refugee. “Paris changes everything,” the magazine Der Focus proclaimed.29
The Wall Street Journal anticipated that the “Paris terror attacks [would] transform
the debate over Europe’s migration crisis.”30
The far-right party, AfD, instantly
used the opportunity and made Angela Merkel also responsible for the terror
attacks in Paris, as Der Spiegel31
reported. Other media outlets published warnings,
for example, the Rheinische Post: “Don’t make the mistake and compare terrorists
with refugees”32
and right-conservative TV stations regretted that the Paris attacks
had started “an attack on the welcoming-culture.”33
Yet, the topos (fear and panic)
that had been influential in political discourses in the past (Huysmans & Buonfino,
2008; Vollmer, 2014, 2016b) seemed to be back in charge. Although, it comparatively
gained less power and the discursive effects had only moderate implications
for the overall discourse in Germany; the negative trend mentioned above, however,
continued. Representative surveys have shown that the fear of new arrivals
has not substantially increased among the German population,34
neither did the
numbers of volunteers decrease.35
The discursive shift took place 1 month later, after New Year’s Eve of 2016,
when hundreds of (allegedly) northern African men sexually assaulted women in
12 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
and around Cologne main station. According to reports, some of the men had
arrived in Germany during the course of summer 2015. In other words, the assaults
were seemingly performed by the very group that was newly welcomed and previously
framed as help deserving. It is no coincidence that the shift in the discourse
went along with a shift in the representation regime, from families and children
(as a vulnerable and help-deserving group) to young male adults. The notion or
the concept36
of the young male adult ranges at the opposite end of the vulnerability-deservingness
scale and more easily fulfills the requirements of a discursive pattern
in which migrants are framed as evil-doers.
While the support for Merkel’s course remained relatively high until
January, after the event, the number of people who said that Germany could
not handle the high numbers of refugees rose from 46 percent to over 60
percent.37
After Cologne, particularly social media platforms (and commentary
sections on online editions of magazines and newspapers38
) were flooded with
anti-immigration and outright xenophobic and racist indignations. Antirefugee
sentiment was not confined to the virtual sphere: Buses with arriving
refugees in some places were stopped and refugees in them attacked by antiimmigration
groups, people expressed their opposition at town hall meetings,
gatherings, and political manifestations. Attacks on refugee accommodations
(mostly uninhabited) increased from 199 in 2014 to 1,005 in 2015, according
to a report of the Federal Bureau of Crime (BKA).39
The event in Cologne fueled the association of refugees as potential harbingers
of terror and violence. While on the extremist end of the political spectrum violence
both against refugees and their German supporters was promoted, those
associations became increasingly legitimized in the mainstream (the “interdiscourse,”
as Link [1997] would put it): Members of the democratic parties seemed
to support the idea that refugees are to be seen as a potentially dangerous group of
people, when they wanted the text of the German Constitution to be distributed in
Arabic or when a teachers’ association recommended that German girls restrain
from engaging in sexual relationships with male refugees.40
And this shift in the public discourse was noticed by a number of media outlets;
for instance, on January 2 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that “trust has
been lost” and that citizens are getting more “sceptical than politicians,” giving the
“refugee crisis a new spirit.”41
Initially, Der Focus (January 6, 2016) talks about “a
fragile climate”42
and questions whether one should draw consequences regarding
the incidences in Cologne for the debate about refugees but soon after publishes a
title page: “the night of disgrace” (January 8, 2016).43
The subheadlines indicate
not only who the perpetrators are (“After the sex assaults of migrants: Are we still
tolerant or already blinded?”), they also broach the issue of betrayal as “our tolerance”
(which can be interpreted as particles of one chain of signifiers with “our gestures
of welcoming,” “our hospitality,” and so forth), which was to be questioned.
Der Spiegel reported that the “friendly face of Chancellor Merkel has vanished.
Not a word about welcoming gestures with which newcomers looking for shelter
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 13
were received.”44
This shift was also noticed by volunteers in interviews led
between February and March 2016 (Karakayali & Kleist, 2016), where volunteers
in different German cities voiced their discontent about the lack of media coverage
since the beginning of the year. Thus, a discursive shift was in process which
diluted the formerly so clearly framed label of “refugees that need help” with
suspicion. Questions arose that revisited the genuineness: Are they after all “bogus
refugees” and “economic migrants” that mainly intend to exploit the German
empathy, welcoming culture, and welfare state?
Acts of hospitality displayed both by very high numbers of individuals and the
vast majority of media and civil society including many large companies in
Germany was remarkable, yet they were about to change again. Members of the
German parliament (e.g., Philipp Lengsfeld, CDU) started criticizing the media to
frame issues as “too emotional,” which would “invite” refugees to come to Europe,
while journalists such as the editor of the Bild online (Julian Reichel) rejected these
accusations. Further critics of the seemingly new emotional trend in politics
(Robert, 2016) have argued that citizens become passivized by merely emotionally
reacting to media-driven events instead of referring to reason. What comes immediately
into mind in the case of public support for refugees is instability. Once the
representation of refugees, or immigrants at large, as deserving is damaged,
the whole procedure might be reversed. This volatility perfectly resonates with the
dichotomy between victims and villains (Anderson, 2008) that has governed the
politics of migration for decades.
Similarly, the discourse in Germany seems to have shifted back into the social
norms of the “undeserving non-members”—that is, the “undeserving stranger” as
Bommes and Geddes (2000) have argued. Citizens of countries with an affluent
welfare system see immigrants as a group of the “new undeserving poor” (Bommes
& Geddes, 2000), yet less deserving (for help by the state in form of benefits etc.)
than other “full members” (citizens) of the host society such as elderly or disabled
persons. A large proportion of Europeans argue that citizenship is the requirement
for “deserving help” made possible by their tax contributions (Mewes & Mau, 2012).
However the attitude changes concerning refugees (deservingness for help is
attributed) and yet again stays unchanged concerning “economic migrants” (see
e.g., O’Rourke & Sinnott, 2006). Transferring this pattern of deservingness to the
question of “when help and compassion is deserved,” it becomes the focus of the
present discussion. The previous section has demonstrated how compassion and
the threshold of “deserving help” can change through discursive events such as a
“welcoming euphoria” and how it generates solidarity and empathy. However, the
change in attitude is seemingly of a volatile nature: whether refugee or economic
migrant, the discourse event of New Year’s Eve of 2016 has contributed to a change
in the view toward refugees as “deserving help” (apart from volunteers whose
activities continue).
This discursive shift raises questions about the symbolic-expressive nature of the
surfacing discourse of empathy (Edelman, 1971, 1977) and the first conceptual
14 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
shift from “migrant to refugee” as we can find it in the course of the summer 2015.
We need to ask the question of how far the trend of the discourse was used and
instrumentalized by the political elite that would in part explain the sudden change
and highly volatile nature of it. The driver of the political elite can be explained to
some extent by strategic moves within the field of party politics (e.g., Cicero & Carville,
2012) and with regard to European politics45
whilst the response of the German
public as such is a much more complex puzzle. Its volatility may come from
the classic barriers of empathy that have gained prominence and that is egoism.
The driver of the discourse of empathy might never have been morality or compassion
but a form of egoism-motivated empathy or, as Boltanski (1999, p. xiv)
put it, that served as an “opportunity to cultivate themselves through absorption in
their own pity at the spectacle of someone else’s suffering.” Arendt (1990) took
this problem up in “the social question,” where she contrasts pity and compassion.
Where the latter is of a practical nature and is based on face-to-face encounters
between those who suffer and those who help them, pity seems to be a particularly
political procedure, which, according to Arendt (1990), is heavily invested with the
mobilization of emotions. In this sense, the rise of refugee-supporting activities
might be explained through the very nature of the emotional drive behind them.
Questions arise if the emerging increase of empathy was in a Rousseauian sense
driven by compassion and a motive of egalitarianism creating henceforth moreegalitarian
conditions of living for members of the society and potentially new
members of the society. Clearly, the subliminal work of a media-driven empathy
has played a part in this (Rifkin, 2009). The function of distance in this mediadriven
empathy has had its effects (see above social media effect), a multitude of
empathetic and compassionate responses were expressed from a distance and
through various channels. The developments of this distant participatory compassion
reminds us of interactions as Collins (2004, p. 85) described as “the spirit of
the performance by not questioning it but by taking it in a situational mood.”
However, in the case of this exemplification taking place in Germany, a number of
people not only communicated compassion from a distance while also supporting
the elites’ politics and especially the ones of Angela Merkel, but also acted upon
the source of empathy. A number of people not only felt pity and compassion with
people on their journeys (which works from a distance), but also, seemingly,
started to express their empathy by action and making some investment of their
emotional self. They gave “attention to the particularities of the concrete situation”
as Rehg (1994, p. 17) would argue. Their sense of collective solidarity went “beyond
being passive observers to actively taking part” and responding to people, in fact,
“affecting them thus becoming more of a part of the mutual entrainment by throwing
oneself into it more fully” (Collins 2004, p. 82).
One can speculate that the active supporters of the refugee movements and
arrivals in Germany are not the ones that lost their faith in their actions and beliefs
after the incidents in Paris and Cologne and that there is a different cohort of people
that was possibly driven by the media and instrumentalized to some extent by
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 15
the political elites, who suddenly revisited their former framing of the notion of
“the migrant.” Tendencies of creating a cosmopolitan solidarity (Karakayali, 2013)
seem to have dampened or come to a standstill, leaving them to have remained
acts of “episodic solidarity” (Holzer, 2008). Ongoing developments point to opposite
directions, of symbolic politics, of hypocritical humanitarian measures, and
policy practices, which is of course not a novum (see e.g., Vollmer, 2016a, b, c).
Conclusion
In this article we have outlined how the initially unexpected positive discourse
toward refugees in Germany has been challenged, tumbled, and eventually disintegrated,
however, without having fully reversed. One of our assumptions was that
the positive attitude toward refugees was mainly a result of a particular form of
mediatized representation of refugees, which prepared the ground for the welcoming
practices and atmosphere during the first weeks. The land route facilitated the
migration of more women and children and this had the effect of more deserving
migrants moving into the spotlight of the media. We have discussed the impact of
this shift focusing on “deserving migrants” and how it transformed the mediatization
and how it politicized the public discourse in its own way. By these particular
processes of mediatization and politicization of the “deserving migrant,” a positive
attitude and a new degree of empathy has evolved that led to an intricate and interdependent
philanthropic relationship between the host country’s population and
the refugees. Ticktin (2011) commented earlier on such relational structures, which
she understands as “humanitarianism” or “humanitarian power,” and which has
become, as she argues, hegemonic especially with the end of the East-West conflict
and has put forth a new militarily-inclined humanitarian complex (Moyn, 2010).
Under the rationale of humanitarianism, we can also speak of a political economy
of “humanitarian crisis” based on the ability of the European border regime to
recode incidents as emergencies (Calhoun, 2004), calling for ad hoc, exceptional
actions. Fassin (2012) characterizes such exceptional politics as a central dimension
of humanitarianism. And indeed, if we look back, we can see that this kind of
emergency policy was highly productive and one of the main driving forces in
transforming Frontex into a major organization with an ever-increasing budget.
Because of global events and the ones taking place in the context of the German
migration discourse in which the groups’ representation as innocent and deserving
became questionable, attitudes have changed again and revived older patterns of
hostility and suspicion toward refugees. The shift in the public discourse we critically
discussed in the last part of the article, revisiting questions of the power of the
media, practices of journalism, and the critical impact of social media and the digitalization
of social spaces. Yet, the most crucial point is the re-demonizing process
of refugees and their labeling as undeserving migrants or “economic migrant.” This
presented a window of ideological opportunity that has opened for right-wing parties
across the European Union. However, the inherent and more acute danger of
16 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
this discursive shift and the implications of this relabeling process is the expansionary
character of the category “economic migrants.” This category potentially
encompasses a high number of people forced to leave their countries as a result of
socioeconomic conditions and the threat of poverty or malnutrition. Demonizing
and illegitimizing an even broader category of forced migrants is alarming and represents
a new form of categorical processes of exclusion in Germany, the rest of
Europe, and across the globe.
Notes
1. Der Spiegel, July 10, 1973.
2. One of the popular methods of including the impact of social media are analyses based on
Twitter data (see e.g., Barbera, 2015). For the German context this did not seem plausible
to employ, firstly, because Twitter is not very popular in Germany (the number of users is
significantly lower than in the UK, for instance) and, secondly, because the available software
to analyze content (including “sentiment analysis” software) does not include the German
language. Other social media platforms such as Facebook do not provide data to
researchers at all. Thus, although we are aware that discourses cease to be only operated
through the channels of mainstream media, such as newspapers and television, our analysis
will be based on such media sources.
3. Our method of building our text corpus is similar to the one developed and used by Baker
et al. (2008) or Vollmer (2017). After cleaning the data set, we have included 72 articles in
our final corpus.
4. Not to be confused with the Springer Verlag founded by Julius Springer, the Springer Press
is a term related to the Axel Springer publishing company that is mainly associated with
tabloid/right-wing newspapers such as the Bild.
5. The acronym PEGIDA stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West.
PEGIDA is a right-wing populist movement particularly strong in parts of Sachsen, but also
Sachsen-Anhalt and other eastern German L€ander. PEGIDA organized marches in the city
of Dresden, which were drawing ever-increasing numbers of participants (allegedly up to
30,000, which it turned out later to be extremely overestimated). It drew particular attention
through hostility toward media—journalists were regularly shouted at with the slogan
L€ugenpresse (lying press). The enmity concerning the press was related both to the mostly
critical coverage about PEGIDA itself and to the often positive coverage of refugees.
6. But also already stated in 2013 by for instance the liberal Die Tageszeitung (October 12,
2013), yet also similarly by the right-conservative TV station RTL (October 12, 2013).
7. http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/fluechtlingskrise/fluechtlingsticker-42646244.bild.html
8. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-126511946.html
9. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/gegenwind-fuer-merkel-das-boot-ist-voll-kritik-in-der-
fraktion-an-fluechtlingspolitik-der-kanzlerin/12359920.html
10. https://jungefreiheit.de/debatte/kommentar/2015/das-boot-ist-voll-2/
11. http://www.focus.de/schlagwoerter/themen/d/das-boot-ist-voll/
12. The apparent indolence can also be interpreted as a result of the asymmetric structure
inscribed in the asylum system of the European Union, in which the states of first arrival
(Spain, Greece, Italy) according to the Dublin regulations have to shoulder the administrative,
financial, and political costs of refugee migration.
13. http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article146977925/CDU-erwaegt-Ausnahmen-vomMindestlohn-fuer-Fluechtlinge.html
http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article146977925/
CDU-erwaegt-Ausnahmen-vom-Mindestlohn-fuer-Fluechtlinge.html
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 17
14. The demand for an upper limit was raised soon after Merkel’s decision by many delegates
of the CDU in preparation for a party convention. However, Merkel was able to achieve a
compromise that did not contain the critical term upper limit (which would have been in
conflict with both constitutional law and European Asylum law).
15. For instance, the Daily Mirror, September 3, 2015.
16. The decisive point here is that the horror of the image does not reveal itself immediately
but is built upon an association that seems to emerge for spectators at first sight—that is,
the image not of a dead but sleeping child. We arrived at this interpretation through various
comments of social media users, which we systematically scanned for the time span in
question. This is assumingly also one of the reasons why the image resonated strongly with
the public and reached very high circulation rates. It has shifted public opinion toward
more empathy, as Vis and Goriunova (2015) have argued.
17. Familiarity was expressed, e.g., in statements such as “This could have been my child.” See
http://time.com/4022765/aylan-kurdi-photo/ or: “Aylan, I have a son who’s not much older
than you” http://www.mamamia.com.au/refugee-toddler-aylan-kurdi-has-touched-hearts-
worldwide/
18. See http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/09/europe/hungarian-camerawoman-migrant-firing/
19. http://www.nzz.ch/bildstrecken/bildstrecken-international/bildstrecke/syrische-fluecht
linge-an-der-tuerkischen-grenze-1.18564072#&gidD1&pidD1
20. The term was coined by Katrin G€oring Eckhardt of the Green party. See http://www.bayeri
sche-staatszeitung.de/staatszeitung/politik/detailansicht-politik/artikel/ein-september
maerchen-mit-fluechtlingen.html)
21. The proposition “to be proud to be German” in the German context is particularly associated
with nationalist ideologies and usually rejected by social democrat, left-wing, and liberal
speakers. http://www.bayerische-staatszeitung.de/staatszeitung/politik/detailansicht-
politik/artikel/ein-septembermaerchen-mit-fluechtlingen.html
22. Unfortunately we were not given permission to use the image.
23. Unfortunately we were not given permission to use the image.
24. http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article146079572/Die-Welt-bejubelt-Deutschland-
herzerwaermend.html
25. http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/fluechtlingspolitik-spaltet-die-eu-mer
kel-bitte-hilf-mir/12284548.htmlhttp://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/
fluechtlingspolitik-spaltet-die-eu-merkel-bitte-hilf-mir/12284548.html
26. https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Mitschrift/Pressekonferenzen/2015/08/
2015-08-31-pk-merkel.html
27. Unfortunately we were not given permission to use the image. Please go to: http://www.bz-
berlin.de/berlin/fluechtlinge-sagen-danke-fuer-die-b-z-sonderbeilage
28. In a critical study of the role (Arlt & Storz, 2011) the Bild played in the Euro crisis and the
debate about Greece’s debts, while Arlt & Storz (2011) also analyzed to what extent Bild
had an agenda-setting function in the political arena. Both politicians and journalists, the
authors claim (based on expert interviews), follow the newspapers’ agenda on a daily basis.
29. http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/paris-aendert-alles-markus-soeder-polarisiert-
mit-seinem-tweet-zum-thema-fluechtlinge_id_5088422.html
30. http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-terror-attacks-transform-debate-over-europes-migra
tion-crisis-1447608944
31. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/anschlaege-von-paris-afd-gibt-merkel-mit
schuld-a-1063676.html
32. http://www.rp-online.de/politik/eu/politiker-warnen-terroristen-nicht-mit-fluechtlin
gen-gleichsetzen-aid-1.5563716http://www.rp-online.de/politik/eu/politiker-warnen-
terroristen-nicht-mit-fluechtlingen-gleichsetzen-aid-1.5563716
18 B. VOLLMER AND S. KARAKAYALI
33. http://www.n-tv.de/politik/politik_kommentare/Der-Angriff-auf-die-Willkommenskultur-
beginnt-article16358301.htmlhttp://www.n-tv.de/politik/politik_kommentare/Der-Angriff-
auf-die-Willkommenskultur-beginnt-article16358301.html
34. Infratest Dimap, November 2015, see also ZDF Politbarometer.
35. In a survey conducted by the online edition of the weekly journal Die ZEIT, a huge majority
of volunteers (more than 90% of 3,486 participants) said the Paris attacks did not affect
their engagement; some answered that they were even more motivated. See http://www.
zeit.de/2015/50/fluechtlingen-helfen-umfrage-weiteres-engagement
36. This is emphasized here, since in the case of war refugees, young male adults might be considered
as equally or maybe even more in danger of being victimized, as warring parties are
particularly interested in recruiting them.
37. http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/zdf-umfrage-offenbart-so-haben-die-silvester-
uebergriffe-beeinflusst-was-deutsche-ueber-fluechtlinge-denken_id_5213962.html
38. At Spiegel Online, online edition of the most influential weekly magazine in Germany, the
commentary section of many articles regarding the refugee issue were closed by the editors
due to the flood of hate speech. Other media outlets utilize software to filter content. Out
of 117 news outlets, 27 declared that they took censoring or filtering measures. See e.g.,
http://meedia.de/2016/03/01/ueberfordert-vom-leser-hass-zeitungsredaktionen-schraenken-
kommentarfunktion-ein/
39. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/fluechtlingsheime-bundeskriminalamt-zaehlt-
mehr-als-1000-attacken-a-1074448.html
40. http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-11/sachsen-anhalt-sexualitaet-mus
lime-maenner-maedchen
41. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/jahreswechsel-und-fluechtlingskrise-das-verlorene-
vertrauen-13993219.html
42. http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/deutschland-vor-schwierigen-debatten-fragiles-
klima-die-uebergriffe-von-koeln-und-die-folgen_id_5191989.html
43. http://www.focus.de/politik/focus-titel-die-nacht-der-schande_id_5198275.html
44. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/koeln-und-die-folgen-angela-merkels-neue-
haerte-a-1071150.html
45. What comes to mind here is the increasing realization towards the end of 2015 that there
would be no political solution on the European level, mainly through the rejection of any
meaningful re-distribution scheme by a critical minority of member states.
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