Imaging welcome culture: Visual border politics and Holocaust postmemory during Germany’s long summer of migration

Abstract

This article contributes to debates on visuality in international politics by focusing on how images come to matter in the context of migration and border politics. It examines how political actors mobilized photographic images during Germany’s so-called “refugee crisis” 2015 and how the mobilization of images influenced bordering practices. The article suggests understanding visual (border) politics as situated processes of meaning-making. Whether images can be mobilized to legitimate policies depends on a number of contextual factors, such as previous policies, the wider public and policy discourse, collective visual memories, and viewing habits. Developing a multimodal analytical framework and applying it to the case of Germany, I argue that visual memories of the Holocaust centrally affected how images of the “refugee crisis” were discussed in policy discourses and became politically performative. As the analysis illustrates, the iconic image of “Alan Kurdi” was not the key visual motif in Germany, but political actors primarily referred to images of welcome culture, train stations, and the “Balkan Route” when legitimating appropriate policy responses. The article concludes by arguing that this humanitarian framing and focus on German “welcome culture” contributed to create conditions of possibility for restrictive policies in the aftermath of the “refugee crisis.”