Through the Looking Glass: Der Spiegel’s Presentation of America’s Image in the Iraq War

Der Spiegel, the weekly German news magazine, offered extensive coverage of the beginnings of the Iraq War. The magazine blended historical fact and cinematic and historical comparisons to present its decidedly negative view of the conflict. The twofold purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the German attitudes towards the war and the American culture from which it sprang and to explore some of the comparisons and metaphors and the visuals used to communicate this viewpoint. The intent is to examine the gap between the abstract position the magazine expresses and the wider scope of meaning created by the metaphors and visuals.

Chapter I concentrates on the magazine's presentation of a perceived history of failures on the part of the American CIA and the manner in which this is combined with allusions to the Rambo image. Through the use of the Rambo figure and other references to film characters (James Bond), the magazine suggests that both U.S. leaders such as George W. Bush and the population at large are victims of their own cinematic myths and vastly overestimate their own capacity to determine the world's fate. Sharply contrasting portraits of two CIA agents who were casualties of the war, Alabama born Michael Spann and German born Helge Philipp Boes, cast the American as an inept blunderer and the German as an idealistic and sensitive defender of Western freedoms.

Chapter II concerns the way in which historical comparisons are used to illuminate the conflict. The magazine suggests that the U.S. is an empire in decline. The very heterogeneous selection of examples offered in defense of this argument (e.g. the Roman, British, and Soviet empires) all spring from material that would be familiar to German readers. They offer cursory and arguably superficial analogies to explain today's complex situation. Part II of the chapter explores the use of images from 20^th century history, particularly World War II, to explain events. Very often the comparisons seem overblown and particularly inappropriate (e.g. Stalingrad and the Battle of Baghdad; the bombing of Dresden and the bombing of Baghdad). Rhetorically the magazine sometimes distances itself from these questionable analogies by attributing them to others (anonymous "observers"). Such comparisons speak to a specifically German historical sensibility and the deep emotions these events evoke in German readers rather than to the explanatory power of the examples.