“To whom honor is due”: Mediated crime-scenes and minority stigmatization in a border-crossing context

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on a scandal surrounding the airing of an episode of Germany's most famous TV crime series, in which there occurred a murder in an Alevi immigrant family originally attributed to a Sunni Muslim who had just arrived from Turkey. The Alevi father and head of the family was then found out to have murdered his own daughter after she had threatened to reveal that he was sexually abusing her sister. The episode was met with an enormous outcry from Alevis based in Germany as well as in Turkey. This essay analyzes the protests for what they reveal about the trans-nationalization of stereotypes and immigrant demands for fair media representation in Germany. It is argued that it marks a new stage in the development of border-crossing public spheres in which the politics of cultural struggle in relation to ethnic and religious hierarchies lose some of their national moorings.