The War in Our Backyard. The Bosnia and Kosovo Wars through the Lens of the German Print Media

The wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s were traumatic events; also for those abroad, traumatic media events. Of course, they were a lot more than that; among other things, they were important points of redefinition of a changing post-Cold-War world, perhaps especially for Germany. All those who have experienced these wars as a frequently traumatizing media spectacle will probably expect a lot, if not too much, from a book like that by Margit V. Wunsch Gaarmann, which deals with the ways these wars were being discussed in the German print media at the time.

Gaarmann’s book focuses mainly on relatively narrow-framed periods of analysis, questions of guilt, and the person of Slobodan Milošević. In this fashion, the war in Bosnia is reduced to a few weeks at the beginning (first period of analysis), Srebrenica (second period), and Dayton (third period). The Kosovo War is discussed in another three chapters. Srebrenica was, of course, a central event in the Bosnian War, but there was much more—more massacres, more trauma, and more continuous media interest. Srebrenica was, in a certain fashion, the endpoint of escalating violence, the genocidal apex of a long series of massacres. German audiences were continuously exposed to this violence from the beginning. This dimension and others, such as, for example, Sarajevo as a separate category of analysis, are absent in Gaarmann’s book.

Among the papers analyzed in this book are Die Welt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Frankfurter Rundschau, and the Tageszeitung (Taz), as well as a few week-lies, the tabloid Bild, and the Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung (here it becomes apparent that the author does not quite grasp the scope and purpose of a minority weekly—one cannot expect such a paper to cover all current political events fully). Throughout the book it remains unclear what the guiding questions were, what is the central purpose of the analysis, and what kind of analysis was actually carried out. Often it appears that the author has merely checked the media coverage for some form of objectivity and ex post factocorrectness. The author also pays special attention to how the term ‘genocide’ was used and how Milošević was judged in the press. It appears that she mainly tried to uncover, reconstruct, and criticize antiSerbian, pro-Bosnian, and pro-Kosovo Albanian perspectives. In general, it remains unclear what the discourses she reconstructs really tell us about German press discourses as such, about German politics in these years, or more generally about the international reception of the wars. A more comparative approach could have helped here, especially since similar studies for other countries already exist. Perhaps, too, it would have been helpful to try to group certain discourses beyond the individual paper—typologically, in order to better understand their development, interaction, and overall importance. Throughout, one feels that perhaps the empirical basis was not adequate for this topic.

A major deficit of the study—in terms of both overall approach and analysis—is the absence of something that was crucial for the wars, and especially for their reception in Germany, a notion of the proximity and of the trauma of these wars. Here it becomes obvious that the siege of Sarajevo would need to be a central category in such an analysis; one cannot simply push it aside and treat it as of secondary importance, as is done in this book. Perhaps it is difficult to grasp the importance of Sarajevo from a temporal distance: a European city that had been for some years dangerous, a city under siege, a victim to blind aggression and continuous terror, shelling, siege, and sniper fire. Steady and almost simultaneous streams of news, pictures, diary notes, and in-depth coverage reached the world in general, and Germany in particular. Sarajevo was always very close. While Sarajevo was certainly one of the key traumata of the post-Soviet years, it is almost completely absent from Gaarmann’s book. And then of course, this was televised: the horror of the war ready and in color for the breakfast and dinner were crucial points for reception of the experience and should have been, at least in some form, part of this analysis. As well as the intense media coverage and geographical proximity, there were further layers of proximity and distance. For instance, there was even a biographical affinity with Yugoslavia for many living in Germany—from people themselves from former Yugoslavia living in Germany, to tourists from both the former West and East Germany who went on vacation there, to Turkish Germans who were used to travelling along the autoput to Turkey in the summer. All these aspects hint at a conflict between distance and proximity that was neither resolved in any meaningful way in the 1990s nor identified as a point for analysis in this book.

The study strongly covers four aspects. First, the plurality of standpoints and editorial opinions that the author uncovers, even within many of the papers; so, for example, she shows how the positions put forward in the otherwise left Taz were often in line with those of conservative papers; or that Der Spiegel sometimes offered conflicting opinions, depending on the author. Second, Gaarmann is able to show how the newspaper coverage was actually composed, analyzing how much was contributed by the papers’ own correspondents and how much was taken from the wire services. Third, Gaarmann illustrates the conflicted role of victims and their accounts in the coverage—even, as in the case of Srebrenica, when there were still no other sources, the papers were very reluctant to print the victims’ stories. And finally, Gaarmann shows how German history could be, and was, used both for and against interventionist policies. Her discussion and exposition of the development of the historical argument from the beginning of the Bosnian War to intervention in the Kosovo War is one of the most interesting parts of the study. Unfortunately, here as well when it comes to the wider aspects, the study remains on the surface and offers readers little that is new.