Shock and Awe – Images of war between documentation and ideology

Maren Niemeyer, editorial director of the Arte women’s magazine LOLA, knows war reporting in the media from her own experience: During the Gulf War in 1991, she worked for CNN in the USA, and in 1999 she reported from Kosovo for ARD Kulturreport. Using her own reports, broadcast and unedited material, she will talk about the production constraints, i.e. the fast, often censored media images, and about alternatives to them. In a report on the war photographer Anja Niedrighaus, she will address the questions “Do female war reporters take different pictures of war than their male colleagues and do men and women differ in their view of war?” and at the same time address her own work.

Born in Bremen in 1964, Maren Niemeyer studied journalism and film studies in Paris and Berlin and has worked as a journalist and author for ARD, ZDF, ARTE, PRO 7 and PREMIERE since 1986. In 1991, she spent several months in the USA on an Arthur F. Burns scholarship, where she worked for the news channel CNN during the first Gulf War.