National Melodramas : Mass Media, the Syrian Exodus and Mother Merkel

Melodrama, it has been argued, is a quintessentially modern and democratic mode of sense-making. It emerges conterminously with the modern nation state: a historic turning point in the West when the hegemony of autocratic governing regimes begins to give way to proto-democratic republics. Stage drama moves from the court and theater to the streets as a mirror for the masses and a means of representing mass sensibilities. Today, melodrama is seen as a mode of expression that is ubiquitous in Western culture (and beyond) and that we encounter in popular culture as much as in daily news coverage.

If as Peter Brooks suggests melodrama is rooted in notions of home inextricable from nation-state and national identity (with reference to the French Revolution), then what might its role be in the representation of what for many commentators is one of the greatest social and political upheavals in Europe since WWII: the Syrian refugee crisis? What modes of narration enable a logical plotting of such experiences? And what aesthetic strategies are available to articulate them?

The mass exodus of political refugees from Syria into EU states lends itself to interpretation through the lens of melodrama in many regards. As victims driven from their own home, Syrian refugees appear to have found a hero in German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Born to a generation that would grow up in a nationally divided home and witness its recuperation, Merkel’s political career began at the moment of German reunification, shortly after which she was elected to the Bundestag as representative of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a federal state that had disappeared in the wake of WWII and reemerged with the removal of the German-German inner border in 1990. With her personal biography, as German Chancellor and senior leader of the G7, and currently as the most publically prominent political figure of the EU, Merkel – often derided and attacked at home for an alleged lack of empathy and feeling – seems predestined to play the role of maternal hero in the domestic melodrama of Syrian exodus. And indeed, national medias in the EU are falling in line with melodramatic sensibilities, storylines and aesthetic strategies. Melodrama has the capacity to reduce social and political complexity in the service of moral legibility, but as much as images and reports resonate with its habitus, the Syrian refugee crisis and its representation resist Manichaean categorization and thus call for a reassessment of melodrama’s suitability.

Our talk will address the different facets of melodrama (i.e. the nation, the family, race, and religion) and their impact on representations of the crisis in various international media (both in traditional mass-media broadcast and digital media user-generated content) with the aim of parsing out both the uses and inadequacies of melodramatic strategies.