It's not exactly how one expects to see German Chancellor Angela Merkel: The broad, friendly smile seems completely at odds with her open blouse, two bare breasts spilling out. On each breast, one of Poland's governing Kaczynski twins is affixed - Prime Minister Jaroslaw is suckling on the left, President Lech has attached himself to the right. One of them is holding up the "victory" sign right in Merkel's cleavage. The image is on the cover of this week's Wprost, a conservative Polish newsmagazine that has not shied away from firing barbs at Germany in the past. The headline reads: "Europe's Step-Mother." As current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, Merkel, the magazine seems to be saying, is treating the rest of Europe like her step-children. And during last week's EU summit in Brussels, the article inside makes clear, she has been particularly condescending to the Poles. The magazine writes of Germany's "post-colonial reflexes" and says that six decades after the end of World War II, "the Germans still aren't able to treat Poles like partners." "The cover's message," Stanislaw Janecki, editor-in-chief of Wprost, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "is that Germany, especially Ms. Merkel, was trying to treat Poles and the Polish leaders as small children completely unable to act on their own and somehow dependent on Germany.... There is the impression that Germany, being more powerful, wants to dominate Poland and that the Kaczynski brothers want to stand up to this domination."
Merkel's Head with a 21-Year-Old Body
"We imagined it to be a little funny," Janecki says. "The stepmother is often more sexy and more friendly that the real mother is. The body is of a young, 21-year-old model. I would say it is quite a nice body, and we didn't want to say anything bad about Ms. Merkel." He says they got the image from a model agency the magazine works with and they were looking for somebody "who was not so thin but someone who also has a good body." It's not the first time the Polish weekly Wprost has gotten in trouble in Germany. This week, the cover depicts Chancellor Angela Merkel breast-feeding the Kaczynski twins. But it could have been worse, the editor-in-chief points out. At least they used a 21-year-old model.
Relationship 'Clearly Not Working'
German reactions to the cover photograph have been predictably shrill. News agency dpa called the image "drastic." Many papers, including the Cologne daily Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, wrote of the Chancellor being "mocked" and "ridiculed." Tabloid Bild dove into its Rolodex and quotes a number of German politicians angrily denouncing the image's "tastelessness." The Wprost cover is just the most recent salvo fired in an ongoing media war (more...) between the two countries. Janecki's weekly has attracted unwanted attention for its covers on more than one occasion, the most offensive being a 2003 cover showing then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder being ridden dominatrix style by Erika Steinbach - head of a group representing Germans booted out of Poland following World War II - clad in Nazi garb. More recently, Germany's Die Tageszeitung has printed images of the Kaczynskis with potatoes as heads. And DER SPIEGEL recently switched around the Wprost cover by depicting Merkel being ridden by the Polish leaders. But reaction in the Polish press this week to the EU summit, which saw Merkel pushing through an 11th hour compromise deal (more...) after threatening to isolate Poland, has been far from universally critical of Germany. Daily Dziennik criticized Prime Minister Jaroslaw's pre-summit suggestion that Poland would have more influence in the EU had 6 million Poles not been killed in World War II (more...). And the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said that the Kaczynskis had "crossed the line of European good taste."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,490795,00.html
JPTF 26/06/2007
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