The Western world (in this case, Germany) starts to wake up to the fact that it's not replacing itself, and produces a PSA that makes a few good (and touching) points:
I agree, it had some touching moments, and declining birth rate may prove to be a problem in the future, but the last few seconds where it took a slightly nationalistic turn seemed kind of...eerie, to me.
Also, I counted two non-caucasian faces in the entire video. And if the video is implying what you and I think it's implying, I wonder how immigrant minorities in Germany will react to it--like the Turks, for one.
Granted, on the nationalistic part, but I wonder if we just feel that way because it's Germany. If this had been a Canadian ad, and had ended with a clip of a hockey game and "You are Canada", would we react the same way?
I hadn't really noticed the lack of visible minorities before, so you bring up a good point. They should have made the cast of the video more representative if the population (though only 8% of the German population is of a visible minority, that still works out to be a substantial number of people). Multiculturalism has quite a long way to go in Germany. I hope that the choice of cast is more an ignorant oversight (in the same way that Canadian PSAs 30 years ago may have been unrepresentative of minorities simply because the producers didn't think about it) than a deliberate message that only caucasians should be having children.
P.S. I counted five people who were non-caucasian, as well as two children who appear to have developmental disabilities, so at least some small effort was made towards diversity.
I was curious and so I did some googling to put the video in perspective. These two articles talk about the "Du bist Deutschland" ad campaign as being part of an initiative to make Germans feel happier about themselves and their future as a country:
Here is one of the first ads (no subtitles this time, unfortunately):
And here are all the 30-second spots from the 2nd set of ads, the ones focused on children. Overall, they seem to be a little more ethnically diverse than the one I originally posted, so I think it can be safe to assume that the people behind the ads were not deliberately saying only caucasians should be encouraged to have children
( ... )
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Also, I counted two non-caucasian faces in the entire video. And if the video is implying what you and I think it's implying, I wonder how immigrant minorities in Germany will react to it--like the Turks, for one.
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I hadn't really noticed the lack of visible minorities before, so you bring up a good point. They should have made the cast of the video more representative if the population (though only 8% of the German population is of a visible minority, that still works out to be a substantial number of people). Multiculturalism has quite a long way to go in Germany. I hope that the choice of cast is more an ignorant oversight (in the same way that Canadian PSAs 30 years ago may have been unrepresentative of minorities simply because the producers didn't think about it) than a deliberate message that only caucasians should be having children.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/16/world/fg-peptalk16
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/06/news/germany.php?page=2
Here is one of the first ads (no subtitles this time, unfortunately):
And here are all the 30-second spots from the 2nd set of ads, the ones focused on children. Overall, they seem to be a little more ethnically diverse than the one I originally posted, so I think it can be safe to assume that the people behind the ads were not deliberately saying only caucasians should be encouraged to have children ( ... )
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_are_Germany
Okay, I'm done for now. I'll wait for more replies before I contribute to the discussion more.
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