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Title
Representing the "European refugee crisis" in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and
difference, life and death
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xr0m9rr
Journal
American Ethnologist, 43(1)
ISSN
0094-0496
Authors
Holmes, SM
Castañeda, H
Publication Date
2016-02-01
DOI
10.1111/amet.12259
Peer reviewed
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University of California
SETH M. HOLMES
University of California, Berkeley, and Humboldt-Universit
¨
at zu Berlin
HEIDE CASTA
˜
NEDA
University of South Florida and Freie Universit
¨
at Berlin
Representing the “European refugee
crisis” in Germany and beyond:
Deservingness and difference, life and death
ABSTRACT
The European refugee crisis has gained worldwide
attention with daily media coverage both in and
outside Germany. Representations of refugees in
media and political discourse in relation to Germany
participate in a Gramscian “war of position” over
symbols, policies, and, ultimately, social and
material resources, with potentially fatal
consequences. These representations shift blame
from historical, political-economic structures to the
displaced people themselves. They demarcate the
“deserving” refugee from the “undeserving” migrant
and play into fear of cultural, religious, and ethnic
difference in the midst of increasing anxiety and
precarity for many in Europe. Comparative
perspectives suggest that anthropology can play an
important role in analyzing these phenomena,
highlighting sites of contestation, imagining
alternatives, and working toward them. [refugee,
media, immigration, crisis, Germany, Europe]
I
n the first nine months of 2015, more than 487,000 people arrived
on Europe’s Mediterranean shores, twice the number for all of 2014
(Banulescu-Bogdan and Fratzke 2015). Many of them were Syrians
fleeing their country’s civil war, which began in 2011; since then, al-
most 429,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe (UNHCR
2015). The “crisis,” as it came to be represented and experienced, was not
a new phenomenon in the summer of 2015. In addition, large numbers
of refugees from across the world have entered western Europe at var-
ious times in its history (Baldwin-Edwards 2006, 2008; Fortune, October
15, 2015). According to some estimates, however, there are 1 million more
refugees yet to come, leading the European Commission to call this the
“largest global humanitarian crisis” of our time (ECHO 2015, 1). And Ger-
man chancellor Angela Merkel has asserted that the contemporary crisis
will define this decade (UK Guardian, August 15, 2015).
Thoroughly examining the current crisis, together with its historical
and ongoing violent production, is beyond the scope of any single arti-
cle. And while the specifics of the multisided war in and outside Syria
are centrally important, we focus here on the simultaneous and re-
lated struggle over meaning, legitimization, and power in representa-
tions of the refugee crisis, specifically through the lens of Ger many. In
doing so, we employ concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci (1971) in
the Prison Notebooks, where he defines a “war of position”—on a con-
tinuum and in contrast with an all-out military “war of maneuver”—
as the ongoing struggle over symbols that legitimize and transform
political-economic structures. According to Gramsci, then, hegemony is
always incomplete, contested, and agonistic. Media reports, political state-
ments, and popular discourse on the refugee crisis engaged in such
a war of position over symbols, legitimizing and—at times—resisting
the political-economic dynamics that inflected the many ways people
in Europe responded to the people arriving at their borders. Far from
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 12–24, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425.
C
2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12259
Representing the “European refugee crisis”
American Ethnologist
reducing the crisis to mere text or discourse, we seek to
understand how representations engage with the violent
political, economic, and material realities of primary im-
portance in the production of and response to this crisis. In
this instance, we analyze representations as simultaneous
symbolic, social, political, and legal categories of inclusion
and exclusion with potentially fatal consequences. These
categories, at times, form a “lexicon of terror” (Feitlowitz
1998) as boats of refugees are turned b ack to sea (Klepp
2013), refugee centers are set on fire (Agence France-Presse,
August 26, 2015), politicians are violently attacked for
supporting refugees (Agence France-Presse, October 19,
2015), and Syrian refugees are imagined as connected to the
violent November 2015 attacks in Paris (Reuters, November
16, 2015).
These current events are framed and experienced as
a crisis (Kehr 2015), entering the daily media, capturing
worldwide political attention, and producing diverse and
contradictory discourses and responses.
1
While the con-
struction of events as a crisis can lead to repression and
intensification of vertical politics (Kallius, Monterescu,
and Rajaram 2016), we focus on these phenomena as
crisis in the sense conceptualized by Gramsci—that is, as
a moment in the war of position and war of maneuver
when hegemony and the architecture of a social world
are at stake, with future structural and symbolic realities
unknown. He writes of crisis as a moment of openness in
which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (1971,
276). By analyzing representations of the European refugee
crisis through the particular lens of Germany, in the midst
of shifting material, social, political, and symbolic ground,
we aim to inspire further work on how displaced people
are framed and how various actors respond to them. The
discursive frames used in the media and in political and
popular narratives can help us learn a great deal about
how the responsibility for suffering is shifted; how fears
of cultural, ethnic, and religious difference are mobilized;
and how boundaries of social categories are made and
unmade (Latour 2007), sorting people into undeser ving
trespassers versus those who deserve rights and care from
the state. This crisis highlights an unknown future for
Germany, with its tendencies toward both xenophobia and
Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome), as well as for
Europe more generally, in terms of internal relations and
contradictory orientations toward the outside world.
How displaced people are framed reveals a great deal
about anxieties in Europe regarding diversity and change
within a paradigm of limited good (Foster 1965) informed
by debt, austerity, and neoliberal disassembling of social
systems. Media reports and political statements project
these anxieties onto displaced people by morally delineat-
ing the deserving refugee from the undeserving migrant
while casting both groups as outsiders threatening the well-
being of an imagined homogenous Europe. While many of
the tragedies in this crisis directly result from policies that
have sought to selectively control and restrict migration
to Europe for the past quarter century (Hess et al. 2015),
the discourse of deservingness displaces responsibility
from historical political and economic policies supported
by powerful actors in Europe and the United States and
instead locates it in displaced people themselves. Yet such
discourses are also sites of contestation, with numerous
actors and grassroots organizations resisting these di-
chotomies. As Jacques Derrida (2001) notes, state interests
and local ethics of hospitality are always in tension. On the
one hand, states limit the right to residence; on the other
hand, local communities may respond with hospitality
to newcomers and offer refuge. Derrida points to this
contradictory logic not to suggest that political action is
impossible, but instead to foster it: in such a crisis, we may
simply not yet recognize the possibilities for new forms of
inclusion as well as novel horizontal solidar ities (see also
Kallius, Monterescu, and Rajaram 2016).
We conclude this article by asking the following:
What can anthropology contribute regarding the Euro-
pean refugee crisis? What particular perspective on these
events can comparative perspective, social theory, and
ethnographic methods provide that media representa-
tions cannot, and how can they help us understand the
media representation themselves? In a moment of crisis
that brings into relief unknown futures, how can we, as
anthropologists, participate in imagining alternatives to
contemporary sociopolitical structures and values as well
as to the dominant “communicable cartographies” (Briggs
2005; 2007) in which we are also imbricated? Charles L.
Briggs has developed this concept to indicate how narra-
tives project certain subject positions that have differential
access to the production of those narratives themselves.
We use this concept to analyze current media and political
discourse in the refugee crisis as well as to consider the
political implications of ethnography.
Anthropology can establish impor tant links between
human experience and macro–political-economic struc-
tures, contextualizing both in historical perspective and
challenging the marking of people through tropes of de-
servingness and difference. In addition, ethnographic work
can highlight limits to abstract tropes of “the refugee” and
“the migrant,” suggesting that more carefully contextual-
ized work is required to trace the political subjectivities
of diverse displaced communities—and the social groups
responding to them—through time and space. At the same
time, anthropologists may challenge power hierarchies
in the production and circulation of representations,
including within our own writing. Analyzing the current
crisis requires us simultaneously to consider the subject
positions afforded displaced people, the audience, and the
anthropologist as author within the communicable models
not only of media representations but also of ethnography
13
American Ethnologist
Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
itself (Briggs 2005, 2007). In a sense, the current crisis high-
lights openness and unknown futures not only for Germany
and Europe but also, on a different level, for anthropology,
its identities, and its future modes of engagement with
the world. Here, we hope to explore how simultaneous
reflexive engagement with current events and social theory
might allow anthropology to reimagine its own contribu-
tions to political possibilities, emboldening and perhaps
even moving beyond our tried and true specialties of
contextualization and complexification.
Europe, Germany, Syria, and media
representations of the crisis
While there is clearly no unified “Europe” in relation to
the refugee crisis, some important patterns emerge. Media
reports on the response to the crisis touch on many aspects,
including the fairness of the quota system for distributing
refugees among various countries and the question of
which countries should take more or fewer refugees and
which should or should not propose quotas for others.
Reflected in all this are struggles in the war of position to
define “Europe” as well as to establish who will have access
to the various forms of capital associated with this defini-
tion. Here, we focus particularly on representations of the
crisis in relation to Germany. Exercising often controversial
leadership as Europe’s largest economy, Germany played
an especially important role in responding to the crisis
in the summer and fall of 2015, occupying an important
political and rhetorical position within media narratives.
While countries such as Israel and most of the Gulf states
have uniformly turned away refugees, and others such as
Hungary have answered with direct violence, Germany
has responded with an ambivalent hospitality that is
uniquely nuanced and conditioned by memories (and
some present-day realities) of xenophobia and fascism.
As would be suggested by Gramsci’s conceptualization
of hegemony and the war of position, there is also no
unified Germany in response to the crisis. Some within
Merkel’s own political party have criticized her response
as “too generous” and warned that the crisis is turning
into a “national catastrophe” (Frankfurter Rundschau,
October 15, 2015). In response, she famously stated, “We
will make it!” (Wir schaffen das!) and “If we now have to
start apologizing for showing a friendly face to emergency
situations, then this is not my country” (Wenn wir jetzt
anfangen m
¨
ussen, uns zu entschuldigen daf
¨
ur, dass wir in
Notsituationen ein freundliches Gesicht zeigen, dann ist das
nicht mein Land; Spiegel Online, September 16, 2015). On
the subway in the nation’s capital, one can hear people
discussing whether Germany has done enough in response
to the crisis through the course of a regular day. Simultane-
ously, as officials debate and enact policies to receive some
people and tur n away others, xenophobic groups stage
demonstrations calling for refugees to be kept out (Agence
France-Presse, October 19, 2015), while throughout the
country there are many offers of hospitality to those arriving
from local organizations and neighborhood associations
(e.g., www.moabit-hilft.de). We consider these realities as
anthropologists variously involved in participant obser-
vation and observant par t icipation (Sufrin 2015) in the
refugee crisis in Germany. Our analysis of the sorting and
othering of people occurs in comparative perspective with
our ongoing work with migrants in Germany (Casta
˜
neda)
as well as with undocumented Latin American im/migrants
and refugees in the United States (Casta
˜
neda and
Holmes).
2
During the spring and early summer of 2015, German
officials repeatedly emphasized the EU policy that refugees
must claim asylum in the first country of entry—in this
case, most often, Greece and Italy. Various German civic
groups responded with calls for more compassion, drawing
attention to the deaths of those trying to enter the Euro-
pean Union and to the fact that the points of entry are some
of the poorest EU member states. For example, one group
called the Center for Political Beauty held a large-scale
“burial of refugee bodies” on the lawn of the Reichstag
in Berlin, complete with shovels, dirt mounds, and small,
white crosses (see Figures 1 and 2). This group produces its
own accounts of the crisis in its actions and on its website
(PoliticalBeauty.de), challenging dominant communicable
models in which state officials and journalists are the
primary subjects who can speak the truth.
On July 16, 2015, Merkel addressed a group of teenagers
in the northern city of Rostock in a talk titled “Good Life in
Germany.” One of the teenagers, a Palestinian girl named
Reem, explained in fluent German that she and her family
were threatened with deportation. She said, “I have goals
like everyone else. I want to go to university like them.” She
added, “It’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy
life, and I can’t myself.” Merkel responded that there were
“thousands and thousands” of refugees like her and that
Germany “just can’t manage” to help them all. According to
reports, Merkel stopped midsentence and whispered, “Oh
Gott,” as Reem began to cry. The chancellor walked over
to the girl and tried to console her, stroking her shoulder
and telling her she had “done a good job” (Das has du doch
prima gemacht; Connolly 2015). The incident caught in-
ternational attention, trending on Twitter with the hashtag
#MerkelStreichelt (Merkel Strokes) as many people mocked
her awkward response.
In August, Merkel announced that Germany would ad-
mit Syrian refugees even if they did not claim asylum in the
first EU country they entered, thereby changing direction
and suspending the key EU procedure known as the Dublin
Regulation (Vox, August 28, 2015). The interaction between
Merkel and Reem and the social media responses to it fur-
ther challenged state-authority communicable models and
14
Representing the “European refugee crisis”
American Ethnologist
Figure 1. The Center for Political Beauty, an artistic and activist group in Berlin, stages a mock burial of refugees in front of the Reichstag, June 2015.
(Jennifer Burrell)
seem to have, thus, contributed to this significant change
in discourse and policy (Die Tageszeitung, October 18,
2015).
3
Reports of a surge of refugees to Germany followed
this announcement, further influencing public opinion
and overwhelming local sites of reception, as witnessed by
Casta
˜
neda in the state of Hessen in early August. By Octo-
ber, Germany had admitted more refugees in the 2015 crisis
than any other country in Europe—though Sweden and
Turkey showed comparable hospitality. Some see Germany
as having significant responsibility within the European
Union, given its relative wealth and its recent, widely
publicized leadership role supporting austerity measures
in the Greek debt crisis. In 2015, Germany celebrated World
Refugee Day for this first time, and G erman president
Joachim Gauck argued that Germany had a “moral duty”
to provide safe refuge because Germans were refugees
themselves after World War II.
These events are in line with the complex conversation
about immigration and multiculturalism in contemporary
German society produced within the historical legacy of
the 20th century. While restrictive immigration policies are
generally well received, there has been occasional public
resistance to their implementation, especially in the case of
individuals and families framed as “deserving” (Casta
˜
neda
2010). In general, Syrian families are seen as deserving
because they are understood to have been forced to flee
by the ongoing civil war and the involvement in this war
of its international protagonists, especially the United
States and Russia. In some ways, then, the realities clash
with ongoing anti-immigrant rhetoric, which penetrates
German society and is strongly reflected in the country’s
contemporary policies on immigration and “integration.”
Especially important here are contemporary anti-Muslim
movements such as Patriotic Europeans against the Islam-
icization of the Occident (PEGIDA), founded in Dresden
in 2014, and how people, including major political parties,
have taken up and acted on such rhetoric (Deutsche
Welle 2015). Anti-immigrant sentiment has coalesced
with neoliberal policies ever since the mid-1990s, leading
Germany to dismantle and defund many of its refugee
reception centers, thus contributing to the experience of
crisis (Fullerton 2001; International Business Times,April9,
2014). More common is the rhetoric of integration, which
positions immigrants as having the responsibility to adapt
to German society, both culturally and bureaucratically,
though in ways that can never be complete (cf. Blommaert
and Verschueren 1998; Casta
˜
neda 2012). These dynamics
reflect Germany’s historical struggle between xenophobic
tendencies and liberal aspirations (Lehr 2015). Previously,
Germany had a strong, constitutionally embedded r ight
to asylum—it was the only nation to formalize it in such
a way—and this right held an important place in politi-
cal life and in the consciousness of postwar society. But
amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, the German
15
