Influencer fraud, liveable cities and the Israel taboo
We’re kicking off the new year with a heady mix of urban policy, cake-based scandal and political controversy. Find out which European city ranks as the most ‘liveable’ in Good Week, and dive into the fraud case embroiling Italian mega-influencer Chiara Ferragni in Bad Week. And in this week’s interview, hear from historian Quinn Slobodian about the parallel he sees between the current discourse around Israel-Palestine in Germany, and events 50 years ago.
Quinn is Professor of History at Boston University. You can follow him on Twitter here and read his New Statesman article, ‘Germany’s new years of lead’, here.
Resources for this episode:
Report on the quality of life in European cities, 2023
‘How to define genocide’: an interview with historian Omer Bartov in The New Yorker
German police statistics on politically-motivated crimes
The Guardian: ‘New “riskier” wave of British musicals to challenge West End’s established order’
Quinn Slobodian. Credit: Tony Luong
00:22 Happy 2024, listeners!
02:57 Good Week: Europe's most liveable city?
08:17 Bad Week: Italian mega-influencer Chiara Ferragni
20:49 Interview: Quinn Slobodian on Germany's history of 'militant democracy'
40:31 The Inspiration Station: 'Oral' by Björk and Rosalía; Continental Riffs; Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
44:12 Happy Ending: Rodney's helping hand
Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak
Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
00’22” - INTRODUCTION
DOMINIC: We're back! It's grey, it's cold. it's January. It's 2024, and this is The Europeans podcast. We're here to satisfy that European itch you didn't even know you had. Happy New Year, Katy!
KATY: Happy New Year. ‘It's grey, it's cold’ – that's gonna really get everyone's juices flowing for a new year of podcasts. It is absolutely freezing, though. Do you know what, when I saw you just after the New Year, you were wearing this weird wooden hood that I said made you look a bit like a mediaeval executioner. But now that it's insanely cold, I'm actually very jealous of it. I want one.
D: Thank you, I think. And it was cashmere. It was my Christmas present from my husband.
K: Very practical.
D: I think we call it a snood, no?
K: I don't know. As you'll hear later in the show, I don’t know anything about fashion.
D: Should we say who we are? Because it's a new year, and people might have forgotten our names.
K: Yeah, and also because I think we have quite a few new listeners, a lot of people seem to have found The Europeans via the mini-series that we made about Oatly, over the holidays. So hello, new listeners. I'm Katy. I'm in Paris.
D: I'm Dominic, and I'm in Amsterdam. And we're old friends who like to get together each week and talk about Europe.
K: Yeah, and Europe in a very broad sense. So we talk about what's been happening in European politics, and also European culture, and life in general. And we generally try to celebrate Europe as being about much more than decisions that get made in Brussels. Is that a good summary?
D: Yeah, and the only thing I'd add is maybe that we also tried to talk about stories that maybe aren't getting a lot of attention from the mainstream media, or if they are, then we try and look at them from a slightly different angle that you wouldn't expect
K: So does that mean that I'm not allowed to talk about our handsome new French prime minister?
D: You're not allowed to talk about the handsome new French prime minister, and we're not allowed to talk about the new Danish king, because that's all my news feed has been full of the last week.
K: So what are we talking about?
D: Well, there are a lot of other things to talk about, it's a very diverse episode we've got coming up for you. We'll kick things off by handing out our first Good Weeks and Bad Weeks of the year. Katy will then be calling up this week's guest, the historian Quinn Slobodian, to talk about a historical parallel he sees between the discourse around Israel Palestine in present-day Germany, and the comparable situation in the German public sphere around 50 years ago. But let's kick things off. It's time to find out who has had a good week, and who has had a bad week in Europe.
02’57” - GOOD WEEK
K: Who has had a good week?
D: Well, before I tell you that, can I start by asking you a question? How satisfied are you with your life in Paris, Katy?
K: Very satisfied. I live in a beautiful city. And something that I realised while visiting London recently is that I really like the size of Paris, and that I can get most places on my bicycle very quickly, which is not true in a giant, sprawly city like London. So yeah, I'd say I'm like 92% happy.
D: That's really nice to hear. But do you want to know where you should be living instead of Paris?
K: Go on.
D: Where you'd be even more satisfied? Well, I'm giving Good Week to the residents of Zurich, because they are the residents in Europe who are most satisfied with their city, according to a European Commission report into the quality of life in European cities.
K: It's quite ironic that the winning city is outside the EU and this is an EU study.
D: Yeah, it's a bit awkward. But it also makes it very clear that the European Commission have not rigged the results of this study.
K: So what is it about Zurich that makes it such an apparently livable place?
D: Well, 97% of its residents surveyed said they were satisfied with living there. And why is that? The things that I could glean from this study are that Zurich seems to be the best place to live as an LGBTIQ person, the best place to live as an older person, its residents have the highest satisfaction with their public transport, with their health care, and with the city's cultural facilities. It also had the highest satisfaction with air quality. And it was ranked in the top 10 for quite a few other categories, so things like how safe residents feel when they're walking around alone at night, satisfaction with public spaces. So it's a combination of all these things. And perhaps it's not surprising that such an incredibly wealthy city would be voted as the nicest city to live in in Europe. According to a report last year, Zurich has the 14th most millionaires and billionaires, from all the cities in the world, living there.
K: Do you think they just surveyed a bunch of billionaires and asked them how happy they were?
D: Yeah! So yeah, great that almost everyone in Zurich loves it there. But the problem for the rest of us is that most of us wouldn't be able to afford to live there. And it's absolutely worth stressing that in this study, Zurich was in the bottom 10 when it came to residents saying they're able to find affordable housing. And according to a ranking on Expatistan.com, Zurich has the second highest cost of living in the whole of Europe after London, which takes the shameful number one spot in this cost of living ranking from hell.
K: Okay, sounds like I should probably stick with Paris, which isn't exactly a cheap place to live, but probably cheaper than Zurich. Actually, did Paris make it into this ranking of very livable cities?
D: I'm afraid it didn't make it into the top 10. The one thing I saw Paris was topping was the city in which people walk the most.
K: There you are, that's what I said! It's a nice compact place for a capital.
D: The other cities that made up the top 10 overall satisfaction were Groningen and Copenhagen, followed by Gdansk, Leipzig, Stockholm, Geneva, Rostock in Germany, Cluj-Napoca in Romania, and Braga in Portugal.
K: Our former producer Andrei used to live in Cluj, and he said it was an amazing place to live.
D: Yeah, I actually looked into why it is that Cluj-Napoca is seen as so satisfying to live in. It's the unofficial capital of the Transylvania region in Romania, if you don't know where it is. It's got a booming tech industry, so apparently, it's one of the places where people say there are loads of job opportunities, which might have something to do with the satisfaction. It's also one of the top cities where the satisfaction in the city has improved the most over the past five years since this study was last done. And quite strikingly, the countries that had improved were almost all on the eastern side of the continent, whereas satisfaction in the cities in the west of Europe is decreasing. One other pattern that was noted by the EU commissioner for cohesion and reforms in her introduction to this report is that even if the East-West gap is starting to close, there is still a big North-South gap, with the lowest satisfaction in cities reported in the south of the continent. There's also a pattern that people in Europe are generally happier in small- and medium-sized cities compared to very large cities. And the EU commissioner uses this to argue that policymakers should be making sure that they help spread economic activity across different areas, which can reduce housing problems and congestion in the larger cities. But I'll end with some positive news for all European city-dwellers. Nine in 10 residents of cities in Europe are satisfied with living in the city they are currently living in. So perhaps we don't all need to move to Zurich after all. And I found that actually quite cheering, that nine and 10 people are happy with where they're living.
K: That is nice. Does it include you?
D: It does, I love Amsterdam.
K: I'm glad to hear it.
08’17” - BAD WEEK
D: Who's had a bad week, Katy?
K: I'm gonna give Bad Week to the Italian social media influencer Chiara Ferragni. I assume, Dominic, that you are among Chiara’s 29 million Instagram followers?
D: I am not, I'm afraid.
K: Embarrassing for you.
D: What is she influencing?
K: Everything. She's actually the third most followed person in Italy. And I have to confess I don't really understand it, because her account is quite boring. She posts a lot of sort of generic influencer content, like pictures of herself looking nice while wearing clothes, videos of her kids being cute, and very enviable pictures of her holiday house on Lake Como with its beautiful, mostly beige interiors. And all of these posts have like many hundreds of thousands of likes, which, yeah, I don't get, because they're quite bland. But what do I know? I'm very old. Chiara also has lots of posts in which she has teamed up with a big brand to sell something. So like, Chiara smiling while holding a Louis Vuitton bag. Chiara telling everyone how she simply can't live without Pantene hair products. Oh, actually, there was quite a good one that she did with Alpro, the oat milk brand, where she made a pink oat milk latte by adding beetroot.
[SOUND CLIP]
K: But suffice to say that Chiara has built a huge business empire off of being a social media celebrity. This business empire was estimated a couple of years ago to be worth 40 million euros.
D: Oh my goodness, we're in the wrong industry.
K: Apparently so. Chiara has a reality TV show. She has her own brand, so Chiara Ferragni clothes and makeup. And, of course, she does all of these sponsored posts where other brands pay her to promote their stuff on her social media channels.
D: Sounds like she's having a very good week, lots of very good weeks after another. Why are you giving her a bad week?
K: Well, you will be delighted to know that this is a story about cake, specifically pandoro, which is a light sweet bread that gets eaten a lot around Christmas time. Internationally I guess it's the kind of lesser known friend or cousin of pannetonne, but without the dried fruit in it.
D: Oh, yeah. It's in a kind of star shape, isn't it?
K: It is in a sort of star shape, very festive. But back in the winter of 2022, so about a year ago, a cake company called Balocco teamed up with Chiara to do what is known in the influencer industry as a collab. Do you know what a collab is, or are you too old?
D: I know what a collab is.
K: So, a collaboration, for the other old people out there. But this collab involved the release of a special Chiara Ferragni pandoro cake, which had a beautiful dusting of pink icing sugar on it. And this cake cost nine euros, which is like three times the usual cost of Balocco’s pandoro cakes. But that seemed kind of justified because the promo material around the cake implied that the proceeds from the sales would be donated to a children's hospital in Turin. Very worthy cause. Fast forward to last month. Italy's competition authority announces that it is finding Ferragni one million euros, and the cake company is also being fined 420,000 euros, for misleading customers.
D: That is a lot of money.
K: It is a lot of money. Even though the cake had been marketed as, you know, ‘proceeds are going to the children's hospital’, that wasn't quite accurate. It turns out that the cake company did donate to the hospital – it gave them 50,000 euros before the launch of this celebrity cake collab – but there wasn't any connection between the donation and the collaboration with Chiara. And Chiara, in fact, reaped a huge amount of money from this deal. According to the competition authority, she personally made more than a million euros out of it. And extra damaging for her, emails between her team and the cake company showed that it was her people who had insisted that the press material around the collaboration made a link between the cake and the donation to the children's hospital. So it really does look like it was Chiara’s team who wanted this to look like a charity thing rather than a purely commercial deal from which she was making a million euros.
D: I'm just, like, twigging and realising we spoke about Chiara Ferragni on the podcast ages ago. Do you remember?
K: Did we?!
D: Yeah, she's married to Fedez, who's this Italian rapper. And a few years ago, he was wanting to criticise rightwing politicians on television. And there was this like argument with the broadcaster, Rai, who were accused of trying to censor him.
K: I totally don't remember that. Our finger’s apparently more on the young person cultural pulse than I realised.
D: Absolutely. And also, you keep saying that we're old, but Chiara Ferragni is actually older than me.
K: Yes! That makes you feel so good, given that I've been having a bit of a crisis because the new French prime minister is younger than me. And it doesn't feel good that prime ministers are now younger than me.
D: Anyway, seems like she's got herself in a bit of a pickle here.
K: It does indeed. So December, the month when she got the fine, that was already a pretty bad month for Chiara. But things actually got worse in this past week, because she is now facing a criminal investigation over this cake scandal. Prosecutors in Milan have launched a case against her and the cake company for aggravated fraud. And they're also investigating a similar deal that she did with a different company a few years back, selling branded Easter eggs. That time it was supposedly to raise money for an autism charity. But there are now similar questions over how much money from that deal went to the charity and how much went to Chiara.
D: Oh, ouch. Has she started seeing a drop in follower numbers as well?
K: Yeah, she absolutely has. She's been trying to limit the damage with a video that she put out apologising for the scandal. And she said it had happened because of a communication error. And she also announced that she was going to be donating a million euros of her own money to the Regina Margherita Children's Hospital in Turin that was supposed to be getting the money in the first place. So basically, she's donating all the money that she privately made out of the cake deal. But it doesn't seem like the apology has fixed everything. She's already lost a couple of hundred thousand followers over this. And obviously Chiara’s following is her income. If she loses followers, that's not great. It's also affecting some of her big commercial partnerships already. So she has been dropped by Coca-Cola and the glasses brands Safilo, and some other brands have also signalled that they're thinking about ending their relationship with her. And if you read the comments under her posts, people are really not holding back on the criticism. Like this post with these pictures of her beautiful holiday home on Lake Como – a lot of the comments say stuff like, ‘Nice house you’ve bought with money that you stole from children!’ But yeah, it’s really captured attention, this story of a disgraced social media queen. Even the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has commented on it.
D: Yeah well, she's part of a couple that have been quite critical of Meloni, I think. So that doesn't surprise me.
K: Yeah, it was a nice opportunity for Meloni to get a return jab in.
D: This story, like on the surface seems quite frivolous. And I do kind of find myself wondering why we're talking about it. But on the other hand, it's a huge amount of money. And this like influencer industry seems to be something that's very unregulated at the moment.
K: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, today, influencers play a hugely important role in the way that we do consumerism. Like, these days, if somebody who looks like you – or maybe a kind of aspirational version of you – if they tell you on their Instagram that they just love this product, you are much more likely to believe them than a straight ad from the brand, because it has this ring of authenticity around it. And you're right. For a really, really long time, the influencer economy has been super under-regulated because there's been this tendency for us to just think, oh, you know, this is just a bunch of hot idiots taking selfies. But Chiara Ferragni, she's just one example of how rich and powerful the biggest players in this industry have become. And internationally, it feels like the regulators are finally catching up. In Italy, in particular, as a result of the scandal, the communications watchdog announced some pretty tough new rules last week that are initially just going to apply to influencers with more than a million followers, but they'll eventually be rolled out more widely. But yeah, from now on, influencers will have to much more explicitly label posts that are adverts or otherwise, they risk potential fines of up to 600,000 euros.
D: Whoa. And is this the first time that a government in Europe has passed legislation like this?
K: No, it's not the first, and there is some basic EU regulation that says influencers in all member states have to tell their followers when the thing that they're promoting is part of a paid deal with a brand. But the way that that gets enforced varies a lot from country to country. I do think we can say with the size of these potential fines that Italy is going to be one of the strictest countries on this so far. And that kind of builds on Italy as having this growing reputation of being quite hot on tech regulation. You'll remember that we talked about the Italian crackdown on TikTok a while back. But France has also been cracking down on influencers recently, there's been some controversy here in particular over influencers promoting dodgy cryptocurrencies. And the French government passed a new law on the influencer economy last year, which it bills at least as being the most thorough in the world in terms of covering all aspects of influencing. So it requires written contracts on collabs over a certain size. There's also a ban on promoting certain products and services like plastic surgery. And something that's been working quite well in France already is that if you get caught misleading your followers, you have to post this like ugly post by the anti-fraud office on your profile, telling your followers that you've been busted, which I think is actually quite a good disincentive.
D: Yeah, clever policymaking!
K: Yeah!
D: And meanwhile, what's gonna happen to Chiara?
K: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of speculation in the influencer world over whether this could be her downfall. I suspect that it probably isn't. I mean, at the end of the day, she still has this absolutely enormous platform for selling stuff. Even if she lost a million followers as a result of this scandal, she'd still have like 28 million. Also, I think Chiara got here by being an incredibly savvy businesswoman. She has built an empire worth tens of millions of euros off the back of a fashion blog that she launched about 15 years ago. And I think she'll probably just craft a clever response to this that will allow her to bounce back from it slowly. She certainly hired some very expensive public relations people to help her do that. Donating a million euros to the children's hospital is a good start, and she'll probably do a lot more sort of do-gooder charity stuff in the months to come as penance for this cake crime of hers. I mean, I do want to mention to her credit, in between all the pictures of her wearing nice clothes and holding products, Chara does promote some good ideas. She's done posts recently about challenging gender norms for kids. Going a bit further back she helped to encourage people to wear masks during Covid. And she's also credited with bringing in lots of young people to the Uffizi Gallery by posting a selfie in front of the Birth of Venus.
D: Hmm.
K: And she posted a great beetroot latte recipe. It’s not all bad.
D: Not all bad.
* * *
D: We have made it into another year, and our podcast continues to thrive only thanks to the generosity of our amazing Patreon supporters. Thank you all so much. Sorry if you're bored of our thanks, but we're gonna keep thanking you. This week. We have quite a few amazing people to thank after our winter break. Thank you to Eva, Sophie, Madisson, Carol, Fuzzmz, Ibrahim, James, Irina, Oliver, Katie, Andrei, Sarah, Richard, Lilu, Mario, and thank you to, Anna, Willem, Gemma, Ashli, Victor and Tobias for increasing. We couldn't do this without y'all.
K: Thank you so much everyone, We're really, really happy to be able to carry on making the podcast this year. But as always, we are still super reliant on our listeners to keep this thing going. So if you feel like kicking off your 2024 by doing a good deed, and supporting a very, very small-scale, independent outlet that is keeping Europe in your ears, we'd be incredibly grateful. All amounts big and small really, really help us out and you can give as little as two euros a month at patreon.com/europeans podcast.
20’49” - INTERVIEW WITH QUINN SLOBODIAN
K: So, we are now in 2024 and the horrific war in Gaza shows no sign of abating, a little over three months since the terrible Hamas attacks in Israel. Over the past couple of months, we've received quite a few requests from our listeners to talk about Europe's role in this conflict – how European governments are responding to it, trying to understand Europe's role in shaping the history of the region. And to be honest, the reason that it's taken us a little while is that it's hard to know how to talk about this conflict in the right way. We will no doubt have listeners whose sympathies lie on very different sides. Even within my own neighbourhood, there are posters on the walls of Israeli kids who were taken hostage by Hamas, and there’ve also been protests in this neighbourhood over the appalling civilian deaths and injuries – including thousands of kids – that we have seen in Gaza as a result of Israeli bombardment. So we feel nervous talking about it. Like I feel like whatever we say, we're probably going to get a few messages accusing us of being either anti-Semitic, or anti-Palestinian, or maybe both. But we do want to talk about it, because Europe does play a role in this conflict, both in terms of the history of how we got here, and how the war plays out right now. And it would be easy but wrong to ignore that. So we're probably gonna be coming back to Europe's relationship to the story of this land a couple of times in the coming months. This week, we wanted to talk about something that we've been very struck by, which is the huge difference in how the conflict gets talked about from country to country within Europe. So if you take Ireland, for example, there's been a lot of public expression of sympathy for Palestinian civilians there. And that makes sense given that a lot of Irish people see themselves as sharing a history with Palestinians of being colonised by Britain. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have Germany, where there have been various pro-Palestinian solidarity protests banned and cultural events getting cancelled, because they've been seen as potentially giving oxygen to anti-Semitic views. Now, it goes without saying that this is a hugely sensitive issue in a country with a unique and terrible history of anti-Semitism. And anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany at the moment, as it is in much of the world. But to a lot of outsiders, these bans in Germany feel like they go too far in conflating criticism of Israel with being anti-Semitic. In quite a lot of these cases, the people and groups who’ve been shut down while trying to voice support for Palestinians have been Jewish. Just a couple of weeks ago, a Jewish woman named Iris Hefets was arrested in Berlin for a second time for holding a sign accusing Israel of genocide. And she's Jewish.
D: Yeah, I've also been following the news around this Jewish South African artist, Candice Breitz, who is based in Berlin, and had an exhibition cancelled at the Saarland museum’s modern gallery because of views she had shared in relation to Israel-Palestine. Views which, at least from my bubble, didn't seem worthy of cancelling someone. She was calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and she described the Israeli bombardment as grotesque and inhumane whilst also calling for the hostages to be released. And she's repeatedly condemned Hamas. She isn't a backer of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. But the museum said they cancelled her work so as, quote, not to offer artists a podium who don't recognise Hamas’s terror as a breach of civilization.
K: There was also this prize giving for the writer Masha Gessen that became the centre of a big pallava because Gessen had compared the treatment of civilians in Gaza to the ghettos that Jews had put in during World War II. And again, Gessen is Jewish. But the sponsors of the prize felt obliged to pull out because of what they'd said. There was also the award ceremony for the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair that got cancelled, quote, due to the war started by Hamas. And there've been several other cases besides. So how are we supposed to make sense of all of these bans and cancellations? Well, we thought it might be helpful to speak to a historian. Quinn Slobodian is a Canadian historian of modern German and international history. And he recently wrote about the history of censorship in post-war Germany. Dominic wasn't able to join me this week, but both of us found Quinn's article really helpful for making sense of what we've been seeing recently. So I gave him a ring.
Quinn, thank you so much for joining us today.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Happy to be here.
K: You have drawn a parallel between how pro-Palestinian activism is being treated right now in Germany, and a wave of censorship that we saw in Germany about half a century ago. Can you set the scene for us – if we go back to the 70s, what was happening back then, what was the chancellor, Willy Brandt, dealing with at the time?
Q: Well, the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany, was obviously the successor state of the Third Reich, to Nazi Germany. And their determination to be the opposite of Nazi authoritarianism led them to want to create conditions for liberal free speech, contestation, multiparty democracy. But also they were plagued by a kind of concern of the radical extremes from either the left or the right corroding the centre. And the worry of repeating the tragedies of the Weimar Republic were sort of ever-present in the minds of statesmen in West Germany in the 60s and 70s. And in the 1960s, there was obviously a kind of outburst of activism from young, often socialist university students, often opposing the American-led war on Vietnam. And that by the early 1970s had turned into a wave of leftwing terrorist attacks, to which the West German government responded with quite censorious and heavy-handed forms of surveillance, prohibiting people from holding public office, raiding leftwing bookstores, censoring publications. And a lot of people at the time saw this as a kind of a paradox, that this new democracy, relatively speaking, was protecting its democracy through acts of censorship and shutting down speech. The German statesman themselves however, and stateswomen, defended their actions by the principle of what they called ‘militant democracy’. So their argument was that democracy needs to be able to defend itself against threats which are seen as beyond the pale. In that sense I think, we're seeing a kind of a recurrence of that today, where things that are judged to be undermining of the core principles of West German, now federal republic, democracy are being treated with some level of censorship and repression.
K: Can you tell me about a few of the examples of things that made you draw this parallel?
Q: That actually has a direct connection in terms of the the actual topics that have been engaged with too, because the early 1970s were not only a time of leftwing terrorism from the kind of ethnic white, West German left, but also, this was sort of converging with often Palestinian activism or activism in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle in the context of the Yom Kippur War, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the late 60s and early 70s. And most spectacularly, the kidnapping or hostage-holding of the Israeli national team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. So at that time, we already had this association made between criticisms of Israel being equivalent or synonymous with anti-Semitism, being synonymous with kind of a relapse into authoritarian or Nazi fascist-like tendencies. And that was the premise on which a lot of these repressions were happening. The similarities to the present moment are quite direct, in the sense that Palestinian activism has been met with prohibitions and bans on protests in places like Berlin, even prohibited from demonstrating in support of a ceasefire and in support of the people of Gaza. People went ahead and demonstrated anyway. But legally speaking, that was against the law. The recent moves, especially in the cultural world, have been to support the idea that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. Only last week, the Berlin Senate, which is the government of the city of Berlin, said that to get a grant as a cultural organisation or as an artistic organisation, you needed to sign a statement now agreeing with a rather controversial statement produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, which equates criticism, or as they call it demonisation of the state of Israel, to anti-Semitism. And this, for a lot of people, seems like a pretty clear overreach into the space of political speech.
K: Germany is often praised for its remembrance culture, for the way it tries to make sure that we don't forget the horrors of what happened in the last century. I mean, to what extent should we understand this censorship as part of that? I mean, I hesitate to even ask you that, because I know it's an idea that's been associated with the far-right in Germany, this idea that remembrance culture has gone too far. Can we draw a link? Should we draw link?
Q: Oh, absolutely. I don't think you can take the two apart. I think that it's correct to praise Germany for the way that remembrance of the Holocaust and the persecution and mass murder of the Jewish people of Europe was perpetrated by the Germans. It’s something that kids learn about from a very young age in schools. I think they should be praised for that level of self-reflection, as painful as it is, about the actions of their own parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Ironically, the very sensitivity that the kind of German public has to the problem of genocide has produced a kind of a blind spot about other acts of mass murder that could indeed qualify as genocides, because this focus on the Holocaust only means that only the Holocaust can stand alone, and other things cannot sort of enter that space. So to compare, for example, what's happening right now in Gaza, to what happened under the Nazis to the Jews, is something that will lead you to be expelled from public life almost immediately, as the journalist Masha Gessen found out when she made a similar comparison a few months ago.
K: I mean, German officials insist that criticism of Israel is allowed, as is support for Palestinian rights. But very clearly, it's been extremely difficult for people, especially people in the public eye, to feel like they can critique the Israeli state without risking a big, big backlash. But have you noticed any kind of shift in the discourse as the war drags on, and Israel is increasingly attracting mounting, mounting criticism by rights organisations and more and more Western states?
Q: I think there was a little bit of a softening of the position in the sense that the German cabinet is now open to calls for a ceasefire, which they categorically were against a couple of months ago. But I think it's also important to see the way that kind of legal language gets weaponised here, because it's not just that people are worried that they'll experience ostracism through their peers or professionally by coming out in support of the people of Gaza in their moment of destruction, but there's also a sense that they're legally not permitted to speak on these issues. And that is related to something that was passed through the German parliament, the Bundestag, a few years ago, that equated the BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement with anti-Semitism. It was a resolution, non-binding, but the language was such that it produced the sense that if any entity receives German official funding, then they could not express sympathy with the BDS movement, or they would be considered anti-Semitic and thus unable to receive funding. Because German universities are all public and all German university professors are all technically civil servants, I have spoken directly to university professors who believed that they could not sign a BDS resolution, or they could not speak out in ways that are overly critical of Israel, because that would contravene their kind of terms with their contract. It's not true. But it can serve as both a kind of a supplement to a chilling effect, which is what was intended, and also as a kind of an excuse for a lack of civil courage, I would say in some cases. So I think that two-sided, legalistic, bureaucratic sense of pressure, or even, you know, concern of repercussions on the one hand, along with the kind of ambient sort of culture of, of German sort of over-concern about accidentally doing something anti-Xemitic, even when the terms of real political engagement are quite clear,arer perhaps unique. I can't think of another national culture where you have that combination of kind of historical pressure, and then kind of legal pressure combined with the kind of peer pressure.
K: Yeah, but at the same time, it does, it feels very McCarthyist just in terms of the way that what cannot be said leads people to self-censor a lot of the time.
Q: Oh, absolutely. That dynamic is there. I think there's also, if you think about the parallel, the concern of McCarthy was obviously the kind of creeping subversion of American institutions by communists, who were people who had been poisoned ideologically by foreign influences. The debate in Germany is also especially acute because of the high number of Palestinians who live in Germany. If you follow the German media coverage, the place that you'll hear about and see images about again and again, is the neighbourhood of Neukölln in Berlin, which has a sizable group of Palestinians who came mostly as refugees in the 1980s, and then larger groups of descendants of Turkish guest workers who are often in many cases quite sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and the plight of Palestinian people. So this isn't just for Germans about, kind of, sympathy or lack of sympathy for some distant event. It's also about domestic politics and the concern amongst a conservative section of the population, which by this time is, you know, well over half of it, that this group of specifically Arab people with migration backgrounds are sort of unassimilable and constitute a kind of alien foreign cell, within German political culture, not unlike the way that someone like McCarthy would see kind of foreign communist influences as always on the brink of subverting homegrown American domestic culture. So you have the Holocaust story, you have the sort of hangover of the 60s and 70s, leftwing radicalism story. But then you have most acutely, I would say, like the present day immigration story, which is now becoming one of the ways that this sort of Gaza conflict is becoming a proxy for discussing immigration policy within Germany. And it's obviously one of the things that's driving the surging popularity of the Alternative for Germany party at the polls, which is now I think, 23 or 26%, with the projected share of the vote that they would get if the vote was held this week.
K: You've written about why you think the current attitude towards Israel-Palestine in Germany is potentially dangerous, given that rise in popularity of the AfD. Can you expand your thinking on the link between the two things?
Q: Well, I think it's mostly just, you know, focusing on the wrong target. I think, at a basic level, the crimes of anti-Semitism and political violence are not being committed by supporters of Palestine or people of Palestinian background, but they're being committed by people on the far-right, who are overwhelmingly ethnic white Germans. So to be worried about a kind of a spreading culture of radicalism and the potential of violence on German soil. And in that spirit, to be looking at a place like Palestine and immigrants is just completely wrong-headed. It's often immigrants themselves who are the targets of far-right violence. And it's as recently as a couple of years ago that there was the exposure of a pretty widely based network of white far-right extremists who were trying to plan a coup to overthrow the current German government. So at some level, it's a foolish tactic to simply ignore what is a clear and manifest threat, to focus on what is often more of a rhetorical or prospective threat. But I think it also just gives red meat to the far-right party, because if you are criticising people overstepping the bounds of political speech in Germany, then you're sort of asking for a stronger position against it. And the far-right party will always offer a stronger position. Because they will say, you know, if the Christian Democrats say, ‘Well, we'll make people sign this oath’, then the AfD will respond by saying, ‘Why would we just make them sign an oath? We should just kick them out of the country altogether.’ And just at the level of kind of mobilising rhetoric, that's always the more attractive, extreme position to take than the soft bureaucratic one. So I think that militant democracy in this case, with its imbalanced focus on the left or the pro-Palestinian position, rather than the threats from the right, is actually just enabling the further ascendance of the right wing.
* * *
K: What did you make of that conversation?
D: Well, I found it really interesting to hear some historical context. But yeah, as we said, beforehand – it's so difficult to talk about this topic, even when you're only really talking about talking about it.
K: Yeah.
D: But yeah, this conflict is not going to go away anytime soon. So I do think we have to talk about it. And of course, Quinn's voice is just one voice. There will be opportunities to hear other voices and other opinions in future weeks. We will continue trying our best to cover this topic with the seriousness that it deserves.
K: Absolutely. And if listeners have recommendations for people that we should be talking about Europe's role in the conflict and the history of the region, I'd love to hear from you. I also wanted to share a couple of resources that I found useful coming out of that conversation. There's been a lot of debate over whether the word genocide should be applied to what's happening in Gaza, not least in light of the case that opened against Israel in the International Court of Justice last week. The New Yorker ran an interview with a historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, on how we should go about thinking about defining genocide. And personally I found that interview to be the best thing I've read in terms of allowing people to wrestle with the moral case themselves and make up their own minds. So I'll share a link to that in the show notes. The second thing is that you'll have heard Quinn reference this idea that the majority of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany are actually committed by the far-right. These are actually federal police statistics and they're quite illuminating. So for those interested, I will share a link to those too.
THE INSPIRATION STATION - 40’41”
K: I would like to hear about what you've been putting into your eyes and ears over the holidays.
D: Well, I wanted to talk about a collaboration between two of Europe's most original and brilliant female pop artists, the Catalan artists Rosalía and Icelandic superstar Björk have teamed up and released a really nice song called Oral that also has a political element to it, with a song they're hoping to raise awareness and money for ongoing legal battles against open pen salmon fishing in Iceland. Fishing which has been run by a couple of Norwegian billionaires. I actually really want to interview Björk about this sometime, so I won't go into it now. Björk if you're listening, come on the show.
K: Come on the show, Björk.
D: But do go and watch the music video or listen to the song. It's called Oral. I think it's a great amalgamation of Rosalía and Björk’s musical talents, and the video is brilliantly weird, and I think AI-assisted.
K: It's so fun that there's two European superstars involved in this AND it's about fishing, it just feels like a very ‘us’ recommendation.
D: It does, doesn't it! It was made for us. What have you been enjoying Katy?
K: I wanted to recommend a nice podcast series that I dipped into over the holidays. It's from the Irish national broadcaster RTE, and it is called Continental Riffs. And it's a series of conversations, mostly between artists and people in the cultural world, reflecting on their personal relationships with Europe.
D: Continental Riffs, or Continental Rifts?
K: Continental riffs, R I F F S. It's a pun.
D: NIce.
K: In a lot of cases, it's conversations between pairs of people who know each other really well, so they're really nice and intimate. And yeah, I really enjoyed them. There is a particularly nice one between the actor Cillian Murphy and the architect Andrew Clancy. And the thing I really liked about it is, it talks about discovering neighbouring countries for the first time when you're really young, like when you're a kid or in your 20s. And it's really nice to have a reminder of how exciting that is. So yeah, it's a really nice series for remembering that Europe is something tangible, it's not just about politics and abstract things. Continental Riffs from RTE, check it out. The other thing that I enjoyed over the holidays was a musical comedy that I went to see at a theatre in London. It is called Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. And it was co-written by none other than the magnificent talent behind the music for this podcast, our friend, Jim Barne.
D: Yay! And I read in the newspaper that it’s been transferred to the West End, which is amazing.
K: It is so exciting. For the non-Brits out there, the West End is the big, fancy theatres in the centre of London. So it is a massive deal that this very joyful show, about a chance meeting between two wedding guests – it's a huge, huge deal that is going on the West End.
D: And it's a big hit. It got amazing reviews. I really cannot wait to see it.
K: Yeah, and it's gonna be an even bigger hit once it goes to the West End. I am so excited for them. So yeah, if you're going to be in London this year, make sure you catch the show. It is just as warm and funny as our friend Jim is. It is called Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York.
D: Do you think before we know it, we're gonna have to be saying, ‘our jingle music was created by Tony Award-winning composer Jim Barne’?
K: He's probably going to charge us loads of royalties.
D: Yeah, he is!
44’12” - HAPPY ENDING
D: Time for a happy ending to close out this week's show with a smile. This week I'm taking you to Wales where a man called Rodney was flummoxed by a mysterious thing that was happening in his shed night after night. Rodney kept going into his shed in the morning and discovering that bits and pieces that he'd left out on his workbench the night before had been tidied away into a small little wooden box on the bench. He did what any respectable sleuth would do, and rigged up a night camera to film his workbench. And what he found was like something out of the film Ratatouille. There was a little mouse who was spending the night tidying up his workbench, collecting all these little knickknacks that Rodney had left out and putting them in the wooden box.
K: Why is a mouse tidying things?!
D: Well, the video of the mouse has gone viral online, and it was such a huge news story that the BBC even decided to interview a scientist who studies the behaviour of mice. So I may have an answer for you. She says that the mouse is probably collecting items that might be useful for a nest. Apparently, mice are kind of hoarders. Most of us think of mice as pests in our homes. But I'm very happy for Rodney that he's getting some benefits from his uninvited mouse resident in his shed, although I wonder how long it will be before Rodney calls in pest control to get rid of his Welsh tidy mouse because as an Amsterdammer, I know very well that one mouse very quickly becomes many, many mice.
K: Yeah, it's cute when you think about it as ‘the mouse’, not when you think about it as ‘the hundreds of mice living under my floor’.
D: Yeah.
K: How freaked out would you be if you got back to your desk every morning and someone had tidied it for you?
D: I'd actually be really pleased. And just, like, take it and assume my husband was doing something nice for me.
K: Ask no questions.
* * *
K: Oh, it's nice to be back, isn't it?
D: It is nice to be back, yeah. And nice that you're back fully. In a new studio!
K: Yeah, I'm in a fancy, properly sound-isolated room for a change.
D: No baby noise in the background. Although actually ironically, my friend is staying with me with her baby. So you may have heard baby noises. It's not Katy, it’s me this time.
K: Next week, we are going to be talking about all of that plastic that you diligently sort into your recycling bins and then forget about. Spoiler alert, that bit of food packaging that you merrily tossed away probably isn't getting turned into another bit of food packaging. Tune in for that cheery conversation next week. And in the meantime, come and hang out with us on some social media platforms and help us reach 29 million followers so that we can sell cakes and pretend it’s for charity.
D: No, we're not going to do that.
K: Well regardless, we are on Instagram @europeanspodcast, on Twitter @europeanspod, and we're trying out Threads, so come and find us if you're there @europeanspodcast.
D: Have a good week, everyone. We'll be back on Thursday next week.
K: Ciao ciao.
D: Uf Widerluege.