Sylt, One Year Later

919 words ^[1]

On the one year anniversary of the “Sylt scandal”, the German newspaper Zeit ^[2] published a “Where are they now?” article. You might remember: The video of a group of twenty-somethings on the island of Sylt singing along ^[3] to Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours”, with the added catchy refrain “Ausländer raus” (“Foreigners out”).

Zeit’s article is behind a paywall, but RT Germany summed up its findings in an article ^[4] of its own.

It is, sadly, an all too familiar story, albeit with a bit of a twist. The backlash was massive. Predictably, the young people in the video were doxed, and almost all of them lost their jobs, their places at university or their internship positions. Some had to change their place of residence. According to RT Germany, there were also “threats of violence and rape fantasies”.

Where this case differs from so many similar ones is that the revelers in the video come from money. As RT Germany writes (my translation),

They come from Hamburg and the Munich area. They are well off, their fathers are doctors, entrepreneurs, consultants. At the time the video is recorded, some of them are enrolled at university, doing internships. Others are employed by large companies, such as Vodafone or Deutsche Bank, or have founded their own company.

While this obviously did not protect them from the inevitable fallout, it meant that they had the means to disappear completely from the Internet, an extremely costly endeavor. Their profiles on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, on the career network LinkedIn, but also the photos that others had posted of them, quotes, Google reviews – all of it was erased.

Four of the people in the video were the focus of investigations launched by the Flensburg public prosecutor’s office. All cases but one were dropped. Only the man who showed a sort of mock “Hitler salute” (which was actually called the German salute at the time) was charged with “using symbols of unconstitutional organizations.” He was given a suspended sentence and had to make a payment of 2,500 euros to a charitable organization. According to the newspaper Bild, he has apologized.

His gestures were “not an expression of his inner attitude”, he is claimed to have said. The man lived in Munich’s old town, in a house that was subsequently smeared with the words “Sylt Nazi pig”. He had been a working student at an advertising agency and was, of course, dismissed without notice.

The young woman seen prominently in front of the camera, whose clients immediately distanced themselves from her after the scandal, has made an apology, as well. The others have also lost their jobs. Their employers, including Deutsche Bank, have released statements distancing themselves from their employees who became notorious overnight. Even those who did not join in the singing have been badly affected by this incident, according to Zeit.

Apparently, it’s still a mystery how the video went online in the first place. Obviously either one of the partygoers or someone they sent it to uploaded it. RT Germany comments,

As unconcerned as the people involved looked into the camera, they were probably sure that the recording would not appear in anyone else’s memory bank afterwards. Or they had misjudged the limits of what is “singable” in today’s Germany in a drunken mood. Either way, it was a mistake.

This, of course, from the media outlet that routinely goes on about the “Ukrainian Nazis”.

Was it a mistake? That would depend on how you define it. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to ascribe political motives to those young partygoers. Maybe for some of them, it was political; maybe it wasn’t. Maybe they simply got drunk and thought singing politically incorrect lyrics was funny. But that is not the definition of a mistake. At most, it’s called being stupid.

But what RT Germany means, of course, is the societal aspect. Don’t sing that stuff, because “in today’s Germany”, that is to invite all kinds of trouble. Anyone could have told them what would happen. That is the “mistake” RT Germany talks about. While this is undoubtedly true, it begs the question: How is today’s Germany ever going to change for the better if everybody keeps adhering to the accepted norms?

Maybe we need more “mistakes”. Or better yet, we need people consciously stepping outside the bounds of polite society. Some of my friends and acquaintances would certainly call my writing for Counter-Currents a mistake. It’s not. It’s a conscious choice. And I am very conscious of the fact that it might get me in trouble with my employer – even if it probably wouldn’t be grounds for a dismissal. What would I do in that case? I have been thinking about it for a while now. I’d agree to cease writing under my own name, and just continue under an alias. That would be the de-escalatory approach. But I wouldn’t apologize. For what? Nothing I write could be considered “extreme” by any sane person; but we all know we don’t live in a sane society. “In today’s Germany”, my views are probably extreme.

However, what I do, I do out of my personal conviction. Again, I don’t know if the same is true for the young partygoers of Sylt. I would wish it were so; it might make things a little easier for them. Their lives are basically ruined for as long as that video is still out there and Antifa’s memory exists. The denunciation apparatus (as RT Germany so succinctly called it) never sleeps.