Anti-Racism Groups Slam German Ads

Ad industry denies accusations

The German advertising industry denies accusations of being racially insensitive.

Michael Preiswerk, company board spokesman for the Art Directors Club (ADC), a Berlin-based advertising group that awarded the gold prize to the Wagner poster earlier this year, defended the move.

"It's an excellent poster that goes beyond cultures to form a great work and that very strikingly and succinctly shows Asian culture." He denied it was meant to cause offense. "It's charming and funny and shows openness and multiculturalism," Preiswerk said.

He admitted, however, when asked, that had Nagano been a black American, it would have been "more complicated" to come up with a creative concept.

Volker Nickel, press spokesman of the Deutscher Werberat, an advertising watchdog, also saw the Wagner poster as acceptable. "People who feel directly affected naturally feel upset about such things, but you have to see the advertisement in its entirety," he said.

Though the watchdog has drawn up a list of fundamental rules against discrimination of people in advertising on the basis of ethnicity, race, language and origins among others, it has rarely asked a company to drop an advertisement on those grounds.

Nickel underlined that there had not been any "racist advertisements" in Germany over the 33 years of the industry watchdog's existence, only "questionable" ones and that the country enjoyed high advertising standards.

"There's a great deal of sensitivity in German society and even among companies and people towards other ethnicities -- we really don't need to worry about that," he said. He added that the Werberat received only between one and three cases a year amid some 400-600 complaints about "racist" ads. "It really is a fringe phenomenon," he said.

German reality not just white

Anti-racism groups aren't convinced.

There's agreement that lack of awareness is a big part of the problem -- a sign that the country still needs to make huge strides to become truly multicultural. A further stumbling block is presented by the fact that unlike in the UK and US -- which admittedly also have their own share of racism -- there's no central body or forum in Germany where members of racial minorities can turn when they have a complaint.

An advertisement for Penisplus, a site for surgical penis enlargements. The ad won an advertising award in 2003.

Others say that average Germans are also to blame. "In Germany, it's very important for people not to seem racist. But they're more worried about how the British press is referring to them and about Nazi comparisons abroad than about how racial minorities are portrayed in their own country," So said.

She added that, since white people are rarely the target of racial stereotyping, it's almost impossible for white Germans to understand how people of color feel when their ethnicity is ridiculed or portrayed disrespectfully.

"German reality isn’t only white," So said, pointing out that there are some 300,000 black Germans living in Germany today. "But to hear and see the mainstream public sphere in Germany, you’d think that all Germans are white."