Keywords

1 Introduction

Since the 1980s, migration has been an integral part of sociological debates and, moreover, a popular topic of socio-political debates in Germany (Broden and Mecheril 2014, p. 7). In recent years, this can be observed in particular in the specific migration phenomenon of flight. In addition to political debates, the representations in print and online media as well as in film are of importance for the discourse on flight. The latter, however, have hardly been taken into account in German-language research on flight. This article aims to address this desideratum by examining the family comedy “Welcome to Germany” (Willkommen bei den Hartmanns, WbdH) (2016, FRG, directed by Simon Verhoeven, produced by Wiedemann & Berg Film/Warner Bros.), the German film production with the highest audience in 2016. The film deals with the topic of “welcome culture” by means of a whiteFootnote 1 affluent, middle-class family that decides to take in a Black refugee. In a sociological analysis of the film, this article elaborates which subject positions are articulated within a “welcoming culture” presented in the film against the background of current refugee movements. The elaborated offers of identity and fundamentally the construct of “welcome culture” will be subjected to a critical reading of racism. WbdH is thus considered as a case study for the analysis of contemporary discourses on refugees. Here, I follow Manfred Mai and Rainer Winter’s (2006) perspective and understand film sociology as a “social analysis that leads us directly to the social conflicts, structures of meaning, and ideologies that shape our actions” (Mai and Winter 2006, p. 14). First, the critical perspective on racism of the study is presented, which is followed by a differentiated account of the paradigm of “welcome culture”. This is followed by the discourse-theoretical research perspective on film analysis and the envisaged research interest of reconstructing the subject positions staged in film. In the main part, the results of the sociological film analysis are presented.Footnote 2 Finally, a summary of the results and a critical reflection on racism are presented.

2 Critical Race Theory Perspectives on “Welcome Culture”

The socio-political discourse on flight and migration is highly polarised and includes both emancipatory welcoming formulas such as “Refugees Welcome” as well as positions directed against the admission of refugees. The debate reproduces racisms that are not only to be found on the side of the extreme right, but specifically in the so-called centre of society (do Mar Castro Varela and Mecheril 2016, p. 8). Against this background, it is even more important to contour racism and everyday racism. Racism is understood as the construction and hierarchisation of groups of people with reference to “ethnic origin”, language, religion or “cultural affiliation”, to whom supposedly “natural”, unchangeable abilities and characteristics are attributed. Moreover, the effectiveness of these distinctions is linked to specific power relations. Racism ultimately serves to “exclude certain groups from access to cultural or symbolic resources” (Hall 2000, p. 7).

While racist classifications were legitimised in the course of the colonial period and afterwards with biological, supposedly scientific assumptions, a recourse to “culture” can be observed above all for the last decades (Balibar 1991). Supposed cultural differences serve here as a basis of legitimation for racist discrimination and structural inequalities. Racism can manifest itself on an individual level or as structural and institutional discrimination, for example in the labour market or the education system (Pott 2016, p. 185) – it is thus to be addressed as a problem of society as a whole. Racism received its historical foundations through the establishment of racial theories beginning in the colonial era, through their dissemination of racial ideology by the Nazi regime, up to the present, where it continues to structure power and domination relations as a “collective heritage” (Arndt 2017, p. 44).

At its (founding) core, racism is concerned with establishing the ‘white race’ along with Christianity, which is understood to be inherent in whiteness, as a supposedly natural norm(ality) in order to legitimise and secure its own claims to domination, power, and privilege. (Arndt 2017, p. 32)

It should also be noted that racist discrimination occurs in different areas of society, in different forms such as xenophobia or Islamophobia, and in very different spatial and geographical contextsFootnote 3: “Racism must be thought of in the plural” (Pott 2016, p. 188).

Following this, it can be noted that racisms do not only occur in the form of physical violence and conspicuous, pejorative attributions to ethno-natio-culturally read others, but they are also actualised in everyday practice. Taking Rudolf Leiprecht’s concept of everyday racism as a starting point, the article subjects “[a]llday forms of expression of racism, ethinicism and nationalism” (Leiprecht 2001, p. 2), which continuously reproduce the dualism of “us” and “the others”, are to a thorough examination. This has different functions: On the one hand, it uncovers unconscious and inconspicuous racist acts; on the other hand, everyday racisms point to structures that exist in the majority society and secure white privileges.

The article follows María do Mar Castro Varela and Paul Mecheril’s critical perspective on racism, in which “natio-ethno-culturally coded distinctions” (do Mar Castro Varela and Mecheril 2016, p. 16; Mecheril 2004; Melter and Mecheril 2009) are related to racist practices of differentiation and discrimination, as it is assumed that these are potentially intertwined and reinforced.Footnote 4 The aim of this article is to make a contribution with an exemplary consideration of WbdH that explicitly focuses on cinematic modes of representation.

In this paper, “Willkommenskultur” is understood as an appreciative and open attitude and mentality towards people migrating to Germany “on an individual, […] institutional and overall societal level” (Bade 2015, p. 53). “Welcome culture” aims not only at equal participation of persons with a migration background, but also at communal and solidary living together in Germany. In order to enable the goal of a participation-oriented society, institutional regulations and socio-cultural everyday routines must be coordinated (Kösemen 2017, p. 2). The year 2015 in particular was marked by a great, publicly articulated willingness to welcome, which is quite remarkable against the background of the high increase in the number of refugees arriving in Germany that summer, and which set in motion a wave of civil society engagement (Schäfer et al. 2016, p. 5). At the same time, the new flight movements were perceived as a “crisis” by certain population groups. The “welcome culture” is opposed by a “farewell culture” (Schäfer et al. 2016, p. 7), indicating a tendency for positive attitudes regarding the reception of refugees to decline in parts of society. The counter-alliance consists, among others, of right-wing extremist and right-wing nationalist groups and parties (Pegida, AfD, Hogesa, etc.) (Bade 2016, p. 9). The electoral successes of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland – Alternative for Germany), the spread of far-right attitudes far into the so-called “centre” of society (Decker et al. 2016) and the many attacks on asylum seekers and their shelters are current evidence of racism in society (BKA 2018).Footnote 5

Nevertheless, the representative study conducted in 2017 by the Bertelsmann Foundation (Kösemen 2017), for example, indicates that “welcome culture” continues to be associated with an open attitude of the population towards migrants and refugees, even if the level has fallen somewhat compared to older study results. According to the opinions of the respondents, refugees are welcomed by the citizens less well to a certain degree than the group of immigrants. Basically, it can be stated that the refugee movements of recent years have influenced the perception of whether cultural diversity is seen as an enrichment or a problem (Kösemen 2017, p. 5).

Klaus Bade’s (2016) reflections on the welcome paradigm are very relevant for this article. He shares the perception of an “alleged welcome culture politically instigated from above” (Bade 2016, p. 33), but embeds this in a reflection of socio-political conditions. He advocates a living culture of welcome, which, however, needs considerable improvement. As a demographic-economic immigration concept, it has a selective effect, as only certain people (namely highly qualified people) are desired, and the concept also overlooks the already existing migrant communities. Ultimately, the welcome concept does not help against “defensive attitudes towards immigrants and asylum seekers” and their “insufficient acceptance and participation opportunities” (Bade 2016, p. 63) in society. Mere lip service to a welcoming culture could therefore even conceal racism.

Not to be overlooked alongside top-down concepts, however, are the bottom-up initiatives that engage with refugees with great commitment and form a relevant part of the welcome paradigm. In the case of the refugee movement in the summer of 2015, one can speak of an unforeseen voluntary commitment in the form of a “social citizens’ movement” (van Spankeren 2016, p. 17).

In addition to the functioning of state institutions and NGOs, a successful “welcoming culture” includes voluntary refugee work that can compensate for structural and adjustment problems in authorities with regard to dealing with and understanding new refugee arrivals. This is followed by the concept of solidarity, which is understood as a political practice of action that presupposes a certain degree of involvement and empathy. Thinking and acting in solidarity deals with power structures and social relations of inequality. This critical and resistant perspective is directed towards social changes that are not based on a purely economic calculation of benefits, but rather aim to achieve equal participation in the migration society (Broden and Mecheril 2014, pp. 13–15).

The explorative, two-part EFA study by Serhat Karakayali and Olaf Kleist (2015, 2016) analyses volunteer refugee work and shows that the surveyed volunteers are above average often female, have a high level of education and a migration history. They take on tasks in the areas of the state institutions of refugee protection where deficits arise, for example, they support the refugees in their dealings with the authorities and/or help with translations. In addition to the goal of improving the living situation of refugees, a majority of the volunteers stated that they wanted to help shape society as an incentive for their commitment. Basically, the motivations for offering civil society support in refugee assistance range from “political-activist” to “religious-moral” to “psychological-self-oriented” interests (Pries 2016a, S. S.). interests (Pries 2016a, p. 66).

In this context, it is important to point out voids in the debate, namely that the focus in the reporting is often on initiatives by members of the majority society, which makes the continuous anti-racist migration and refugee struggles invisible (Danielzik and Bendix 2016).

“Welcome culture” is more than the endeavour of a one-sided integration of immigrants and refugees into a society of arrival.Footnote 6 Ludger Pries continues by formulating the narrative of arrival in terms of the challenges that a “welcoming culture” has to face (Pries 2016a, b). Arrival is not limited to the refugees, but at the same time refers to the members of the society of arrival: “In Germany, too, welcoming and accepting refugees enables the various social groups to arrive more fully at themselves.” (Pries 2016a, p. 129) Arrival differs on the one hand into reaching the destination country physically intact and on the other hand into psychic (self-)locating or being accepted in the society of arrival. The process of arrival is described as open-ended, implying that arrivals recognise institutional rules but do not have to distance themselves completely from their society of origin. As a result, refugees can be described as active actors who find themselves in an interactive and reciprocal in-between. “Every arrival is therefore an intensive process of negotiating new boundaries, it requires self-reflection and induces social innovation.” (Pries 2016b, p. 83).

The argumentation illustrates that refugees are considered to play an active role in the transnational movement of refugees and the process of arrival. According to the Geneva Convention, refugees are those who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, religion and other affiliations, as well as political beliefs in their country of citizenship. The reasons for flight, which must be credibly demonstrated by the refugees in the asylum-seeking state, define the persons as a “refugee” (Kleist 2018, p. 4).

In addition to the political-legal discourse, the media discourse is currently shaping the public perception of refugees to a particular extent. In the German-language media, negative portrayals of refugees can be observed above all (Müller 2005, p. 101). Simon Goebel (2017) presented a first exploratory study on the discursive reality construction of flight in political talk shows. Among other things, the study makes visible that a “dominant line of difference between ‘the refugees’ and ‘the Germans’” (Goebel 2017) is set and (re-)produced in polit-talks. A brief insight into the visual media coverage of the “welcome culture” in Germany is provided by the media studies work of Margreth Lünenborg and Tanja Maier (2017, pp. 68–75). The following section presents the discourse-theoretical perspective on films and the methodological approach.

3 Researching “Welcome Culture” in Film – Research Perspective and Method

The film interpretation focuses on the question which of the insights into flight and migration presented here are negotiated on the basis of the paradigm of “welcome culture” in WbdH. I assume that the normations of what can be seen and said are produced through discourse structures. The concept of discourse does not refer to the common understanding in everyday life, as opinions and discussion debates circulating in public, but means

a complex of propositional events and practices embedded therein that are interconnected via a reconstructible structural context and process specific orders of knowledge of reality. (Keller 2005a, p. 230)

In this context, media are not considered specialised discourses, such as economics, biology and psychology, but can be characterised as interdiscourses. Compared to the specialised discourses of science, they are less differentiated and can mediate integratively between disciplinary bodies of knowledge (Winkler 2004, p. 190; Link 2006, p. 412). Films are seen as part of the discursive negotiation, as they are

as elements of the representational order of a society articulating current social discourses, are involved in social conflicts and disputes, and are therefore saturated with social meanings. (Mai and Winter 2006, p. 10f)

Stuart Hall’s (2007) encoding/decoding concept, developed in cultural studies, offers a discourse-theoretical approach to film. Through the production process of the film text, social discourses are productively and ambiguously incorporated with the help of cinematic aesthetics and narration, as a result of which films are actively appropriated by recipients against the background of different identity categories and horizons of meaning. It should be emphasised that the connection between production, representation and reception does not involve deterministic causality, but is a reciprocal process (Geimer 2010, p. 91f).

Based on a discourse-oriented film analysis, the discursive offers of interpretation and subject positions are identified, which were dramaturgically and staged in the film. The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse according to Reiner Keller (2005a, 2018) provides me with a target-oriented research programme in which the discourse concept is connected with a research interest in the role of the actors, especially through the offered subject positions. Furthermore, the connection between Foucaultian discourse analysis (2002) and the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1991) allows the integration of the interpretative paradigm into qualitative film analysis (Keller 2005a, p. 186f).Footnote 7

Subject positionsFootnote 8 are, according to Keller (Keller 2005a, p. 212, 230), positioning processes of social actors within the discourse, which contain interpretation schemes and provide offers of identity. The subject positions are “components of the historically contingent social stock of knowledge”, which in turn “can be appropriated in various socialisation processes” (Keller 2005a, p. 212f). As an example, the subject position of the refugee(s) represented in the film can be given in the form of Diallo. Power relations have an effect on her, and at the same time possibilities for participation and self-liberation are inherent in her.

Furthermore, in the film, which is to be understood as a “contribution to discourse” in the sense of Schwab-Trapp (2006), lines of conflict that have an impact on the public are revealed, in which perceptions and “interpretations” offered by the discourse are condensed and which could be institutionalised through willing consent to “interpretive prescriptions” (Schwab-Trapp 2006, p. 265)Footnote 9 (Keller 2005a, p. 233). The negotiation of “welcome culture” in the film WbdH is characterized by familial and socio-political conflicts, presenting different “discursive[.] offers of interpretation[.]” (Keller 2005a, p. 261), which can be analysed in terms of specific subject positions.Footnote 10

4 Subject Positions of the “Welcome Culture” with the Hartmanns

The film “Welcome to Germany” (Willkommen bei den Hartmanns) selected for the case study can be characterised as a “discursive event” (Jäger and Jäger 2010, p. 16; Keller 2005a, p. 229), as the film addresses several contemporary issues such as flight, integration and racism and stages them with a genre that is popular in Germany – the socio-critical comedy (Prommer et al. 2011, p. 297) – and a popular cast for older and younger cinema-goers.

According to Keller (2005a, p. 201), discursive events are the materialised expressions of a discourse, without which discourse structures would not exist, just as the meaning of discourse events cannot be interpreted without discourses. Not every film realizes significant utterances for discourse, but the significance of film language statements can be determined by audience and critic success. With 3.8 million viewers, the film was the most successful German cinema production in 2016 (Koll 2017, p. 34). Measured in terms of reviews and film awards,Footnote 11 the film can also be regarded as a well-directed film that is recognised in cinematic discourse.

In the broadest sense, WbdH can be assigned to the genre of migration cinema,Footnote 12 since it projects thematic focuses such as migration, flight and integration onto the screen. The genre of migration cinema includes, among other things, films that stage the clichéd oppression and backwardness of non-Western cultures in order to “ultimately assert the superiority of German culture” (Göktürk 2000, p. 336).Footnote 13 Especially due to the funding and production conditionsFootnote 14 in Germany, the film WbdH, can at the same time be described as a “standard film”, i.e. the cinematic product ties in with collective value concepts and normative rules of behaviour of the majority society in the form of stereotypical representations and political attitudes: “This is the famous ‘the audience wants’ of the producers” (Friedmann and Morin 2010, p. 30). Accordingly, I assume that a high proportion of hegemonic discourse positions are inscribed in WbdH, which I will demonstrate through the plot and character drawing.

At the centre of the film’s plot is the white, heterosexual, middle-class, well-educated family: the Hartmanns (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A framework includes, refugee shelter, neighborhood, state bureau of investigation, family Hartmann, and work life. The links between them are indicated as allies, friends, job, and negative relationship. The State Bureau of Investigation has a negative relationship with family Hartmann.

Character constellation WbdH

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An (almost) retired couple Angelika (Senta Berger) and Richard Hartmann (Heiner Lauterbach) live together in an opulent house with a leafy garden in a Munich suburb. Richard, who is a doctor, has problems with getting older. Angelika, a retired teacher and caring mother, is becoming increasingly involved in helping refugees. Driven by her former colleague Heike (Ulrike Kriener), she decides to take in a refugee.

Furthermore, the family consists of daughter Sofie (Palina Rojinski), who is portrayed as a permanent student. She has had several unhappy relationships. In the film, she is stalked by a taxi driver and therefore temporarily moves in with her parents.Footnote 15 At the end of the film, Sofie gets a happy ending with Dr. Tarek Berger (Elyas M’Barek), Richard’s young colleague. Sofie’s brother Philipp (Florian David Fitz), who has recently become a single parent, has problems balancing parenting and work, so his son Basti has to move in temporarily with his grandparents.Footnote 16

Diallo Makabourie (Eric Kabongo), a Nigerian refugee, moves in with the Hartmanns after an interview and becomes part of the family and thus also part of their family and relationship problems. Other issues such as asylum procedures and state surveillance are negotiated through him. In the following, four offered subject positions in the discursive structure of the “welcome culture” are explored.

  1. 1.

    Subject Position: “Refugee”

Diallo is presented in his first shot (Fig. 2)Footnote 17 with a self-critical look in the mirror. The close-up with blurred background, which is also the first frame of the film, creates a focused view of Diallo’s face and thus an access to his emotions and into his inner self (Prommer 2016, p. 57). The symmetrical framing and the central camera perspective constitute the first impression of an orderly and clear staging of Diallo.

Fig. 2
A close up photograph of a man who stares into the camera with his eyebrows raised. The background scene is blurred.

Photogram from WbdH – 0:00:27 (The time of the film is given in hour:minute:second)

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The scrutinising look in the mirror is directed at his outward appearance: Diallo has a high eagerness to work and wants to find a job, so he adapts to the conditions of the job market. He decides to put on his glasses as a serious accessory and goes to the hairdresser to shorten his frizzy black hair. The hair-cutting in particular points to a high degree of adaptability to white, Western labour market conventions. Throughout the film’s plot, Diallo is constructed as a work-motivated, adaptable, and industrious craftsman, which is related to his status as a refugee. Moreover, Diallo’s continuous gardening in the Hartmanns’ household points to the fact that the work he does is not synonymous with wage labour that requires insurance. The work done can also be read as Diallo’s gratitude. In general, Diallo is very friendly, talkative and inquisitive. Notions of bi-relationships and gender relations that are staged as modern confuse Diallo, as more traditional views are supposedly attributed to him, which was used as a common staging strategy in earlier migration or minority cinema (Göktürk 2000, pp. 332–336). Furthermore, Diallo manifests a disorientation that obviously stems from the processing of his traumatic past. Although he is initially silent about his escape story, at the end of the film he gives a moving lecture to Basti’s class about the civil war conditions in Nigeria caused by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, which cost the lives of his parents and siblings, and about his life-threatening escape route. The religiously based violence represented by the terrorist militia Boko Haram is explicitly delineated from Diallo’s understanding of Islam. The key scene in the last third of the film brings the film to a close via the emotionally charged background music and the montage of the sequence, i.e. the alternation between the shot of the crying Diallo and Basti, the disintegrated faces of the children and the evidential images of terror and flight in the lecture presentation, brings the emotionalisation of Diallo as a legitimate refugee to a climax: the “Germany is looking for the super-refugee” (0:32:03–0:32:05), grotesquely formulated by Basti at the beginning of the film, crowns Diallo as the winner at this point in the film narrative at the latest. The positive outcome of the judicial decision on Diallo’s asylum application was achieved and made legally binding primarily with the help of the video of the lecture at school.Footnote 18

The cinematic construction of Diallo as a positively occupied subject position produces, through demarcation, also excluded offers of identity of the welcome understanding. In the following, the key passage “interview” (0:24:19–0:26:25) is briefly described in order to concretise the negatively connoted subject positions: In the scene, refugees introduce themselves as potential roommates* in the Hartmanns’ living room. The scene is shot in a shot-counter-shot process, which creates a boundary between the Hartmanns and the refugees, as both parties are never seen together in the scene. The introduction scene is divided into two parts. In the first half (0:24:19–0:25:12), all the refugee characters are shown not gaining access to the Hartmanns’ house. An interpretation beyond the scene would be that they are thus denied welcome and arrival. Among them are many families in the most diverse constellations, but also people who are associated with dishonesty and denied refugee status because of their Italian roots. In the second part of the key scene, Richard and Angelika meet Diallo in the same spatial setting. The scene is more calmly staged in terms of the editing sequence and background music, so that the second section is clearly distinguished from the first. Diallo’s aforementioned confusion is clearly addressed in the conversation, but this is no reason for exclusion. Richard’s racist description of people as “black sheep” (0:25:24) emphatically excludes criminals and sex offendersFootnote 19 from the Hartmanns’ offer of support.

In the course of the plot, Diallo’s recognised position as a refugee is also consolidated via a demarcation line to the character Rayhan Magmus (Samir Fuchs), to whom the position of an Islamist terrorist is attributed. Via the two figures Diallo and Rayhan, a dualism prevailing in current discourse is reproduced: “refugee as victim” and “fraudulent refugee” (Inhetveen 2010, p. 158). Accordingly, the staging of the figure of Rayhan as a supposed potential threat to public safety reproduces the currently dominant discourse of demonisation of the Other (do Mar Castro Varela and Mecheril 2016, p. 10). The status of the refugee in need of help is mostly referred to women and children, yet he is granted this position via his emotional backstory. Katharina Inhetveen has also emphasised that in the current European context the two contrasting social figures are increasingly merging (Inhetveen 2010, p. 158).

  1. 2.

    Subject Positions Helpers and Sceptics, Racist Positioning

The fundamental decision about accepting a refugee into the Hartmann family home was controversially discussed at a family dinner. In the family and political debate, two subject positions attributed to the majority society are emerging, which manifest themselves over the course of the film: “helpers” and “sceptics”. Their formulation takes place in the debate.

Philipp diagnoses the two women – mother Angelika and daughter Sofie – with the “helper syndrome” (0:21:50), which makes them take the position of the helpers in the discussion. In the family argument, the two unsympathetically portrayed adult men of the family – father Richard and son Philipp – represent the sceptics. The polar gender division of subject positions is broken up in the film by secondary characters such as grandson Basti and Sophie’s friend Tarek, who also appear as helpers and supporters. And even Angelika cannot completely free herself from the scepticism or fear of an advancing “Islamisation”. Helpers justify their existence by making the problems of the refugees visible and thus refer to the urgency of support. In the discussion, they emphasise the seriousness of the situation, which can be exemplified by Sophie’s statement to Philipp:

Well, I don’t know what’s so funny about that, Philip. Do you think these people’s lives are a joke? (0:20:06-0:20:09)

The helping figures underline the seriousness of the difficult reality of the refugees’ lives in current socio-political events and at the same time maintain a compassionate and slightly naïve manner of dealing with them, or they are attributed feminised and childlike character traits in order to question their political views. Overall, the helpers are characterised by a democratic attitude and an emotional willingness to communicate and emphatically distinguish themselves from an authoritarian style of conducting conversations, which is attributed more to the sceptics.

The designation “sceptics” owes itself to a self-attribution of Philipp in the court process around Diallo’s asylum application:

[…] I was not one of those people who shouted welcome loudly and I was very sceptical whether this was the right signal […] (1:43:38–1:43:42)

Although Philipp wants to be supportive towards Diallo, who has become a friend of the family and his son, he emphatically positions himself as a sceptic within the welcome discourse. In the family conversation, the sceptics emphasise their lack of knowledge about and mistrust of refugees. Suspicions of dishonesty in government registration are expressed, actualising the “figure of the illegal refugee” (Inhetveen 2010, p. 156). There is also criticism of a loss of control by the government and the authorities. With these arguments, the skeptical figures highlight the crisis nature in Germany. The characters critical of the “welcome culture” are characterised as vain, wasteful and heartless, such as Richard, who is described by his wife as follows:

Richard what have you become, getting your wrinkles injected for a lot of dough and having no heart for these [people] (0:21:25-0:21:32)

In addition, the sceptics emphasise a strong professional orientation, in which educational certificates and management positions with high salaries count more than empathy and compassion for other fellow human beings. This is accompanied by a lack of interest in the problems of refugees. Sofie laments this attitude exaggeratedly and angrily as “asshole syndrome” (0:21:53).Footnote 20

The film constructs another negatively staged subject position, namely an openly racist and radical right-wing positioning. Heike Broscher, who is portrayed as an exaggerated image of an Antifa spokeswoman, screams with a megaphone at the right-wing populist demonstrators, calling them “you right-wing vermin, you disgusting right-wing rats” (1:37:45–1:37:49). Sophie’s stalker, the neighbour and the rest of the nationalist demonstrators are resolutely excluded from the welcome paradigm through the narration and especially through images of a New Right demonstration.

From this it becomes clear that open racism is thematised via the nationalist subject position. In the film images, the negative staging of radical right-wing figures and symbols is dominant. At the same time, tendencies to trivialise right-wing violence become visible through the comedic portrayal. In the film, the discourse of a New Right is taken up, that “sometimes burn down a refugee home for the purpose of active neighbourly help” (Bade 2016, p. 32) or, as in the film, demonstrate in front of the Hartmanns’ house in a riotous and violent manner.

  1. 3.

    Interpretations of the “Welcome Culture”

The Hartmanns’ engagement can be interpreted as part of the bottom-up “welcome movement” (Bade 2016, p. 33). Furthermore, tendencies of depoliticisation become recognisable on the basis of the criticism of state institutions and current politics on the one hand and the engagement in refugee aid on the other. The responsibility for “the so-called refugee crisis” (Bade 2016, p. 1) is thus located at the individual level.Footnote 21 One could speak of voluntary commitment-isation, as the figures predominantly offer help voluntarily in solidarity. The motives can differ greatly in this context: In addition to the reading of selfless help, the support can also be read as a practice of self-actualisation and recognition.

An exception would be the film character of the asylum home director, who represents a state institution, but also appears in part overburdened. The ironic, exaggerated drawing of the surveillance state in the form of the two investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation (Landeskriminalamt – LKA) points to an overload and loss of control of state institutions. In general, the film connects to critical discourses about the current refugee policy, for example through the demonstration as well as through the staging of the fear of “Islamisation” and alienation.

The film analysis concludes with the discursive offer of interpretation of the familialisation of the “welcome culture”. It takes up the critical discourses of “welcome culture” and includes the three subject positions (“refugee”, “helper” and “sceptic”). The family celebration in the Hartmanns’ garden at the end of the film concludes the negotiation of “welcome culture”; both on a linguistic level and on the level of iconic film images (Fig. 3), an arrival can be identified according to Ludger Pries (2016a, b). The integration into a well-situated average family, which provides identity offers via its stereotypical and polarising character drawings of the family members, enables an emotionalisation of the subject position of the “refugee” on the one hand and creates a cohesion between the three dominant subject positions on the other hand.

Fig. 3
A group photograph of eight persons who smile and pose for the camera. They wave or raise their hands.

Photogram from WbdH – 1:44:51

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5 Conclusion: (Everyday) Racism in the “Welcome Culture”?

The aim of this article was to work out the subject positions offered by the “welcome culture” in the film “Welcome to the Hartmanns”. Finally, a racism-critical conclusion is drawn.

The film analysis was able to identify four subject positions that both the discourse of media entertainment takes up and ties in with existing social discourses. The film pursues the strategy of representing Diallo as a work-motivated and adaptable refugee and distinguishes him from negatively connoted images of refugees. The helpers support and the sceptics distrust the “welcome culture”. Furthermore, openly racist and radical right-wing positions are pushed to the social fringes. The film deals critically with the “welcome culture”, which can be seen in the tendency towards depoliticisation, which becomes clear in the film through the deficits of state authorities and critical statements about existing migration policy. The focus on the Hartmann family enables an emotionalisation of the “welcome culture” (Lünenborg and Maier 2017, p. 70). At the same time, the film actualises the crisis discourse, as exemplified by the discussion at the family dinner. On the one hand, the film refers back to and actualises the polarised positions of culture-optimistic and -pessimistic; on the other hand, the film offers the interpretation to unravel the contrasting views and bring them together through the motif of the bourgeois family. The emotionalisation of the “welcome culture” in the film WbdH explains the cohesion and the arrival in a divided immigration society, which has to struggle with right-wing populist defensive attitudes.

In conclusion, it can be stated that (everyday) racism within the “welcome culture” is little problematised. Diallo as a refugee experiences traumatic events that he has lived through in Nigeria and during his flight. Racist discrimination is not playing a role in his trauma management. As a consequence, everyday racism is played down and made invisible. Additionally, the idealisation of Diallo as a work-motivated and sympathetic refugee captured in the film, excludes other asylum-seekers from the “welcoming culture” and establishes the “limits of hospitality” (Friese 2017, p. 19). Consequently, the thematisation of “welcoming culture” as well as its realisation should always be linked to a perspective critical of racism.