Behind the story - How a concert in Kiev left me perplexed
Making-of - that's the name of our new format on stern.de. We want to give you a personal look behind the scenes, tell you about our everyday journalistic life, what we experience during research and what moves us in the editorial office. We are starting with a short series in which we look back on our moments in 2023.
It was the first time I had traveled to a country at war and I was correspondingly nervous. Yes, in Kiev in February 2023, the front was already quite far away and I was supposed to accompany the Green Party's Katrin Göring-Eckardt, which is why BKA people trained for war zones were there. But I also had a bulletproof vest and helmet with me and had downloaded the air alert app. Göring-Eckardt could probably tell that I was excited; a few days before I left, she assured me that everything would be much more normal than I had imagined.
And indeed, it only took a few hours in Kiev for me to become more relaxed. Everything was much more normal than I could ever have imagined. At one sight, someone was walking around in a Minion costume - in case tourists wanted to take photos. The hotel served a big breakfast with a view over the city. In addition to alcohol, the minibar also had hemp chewing gum and condoms, which wasn't normal, but it wasn't a state of war either.
And then we went to a concert just outside the city. Zhadan i Sobaky, the ska band of the writer Serhij Zhadan, were due to play. The bar was wood-paneled, there were flags and neon signs on the walls, the people there were young, wearing bell bottoms with snake patterns and tattoos across their necks.
The naivety is a little embarrassing today
But before the band took to the stage, it suddenly went dark. I thought, and this naivety is a bit embarrassing in retrospect, that the concert would start, but the people didn't start cheering, nobody went closer to the stage, no music. In fact, nothing happened at all, the concertgoers ignored the darkness, carried on talking and drinking their beers. It was another power cut - normality for the people there, for me a sign that nothing was quite normal.
Shortly afterwards it really started, Zhadan shouted into the microphone and the crowd screamed along. He was dressed as a clown, in between he auctioned off some objects and I really didn't understand what was going on. That was a shame, because I understood that much: of course it was about the war, the country, the resistance against Russia. "Slava Ukraini", people kept shouting - victory for Ukraine.
It was very difficult for me the whole trip to decide what I wanted to share with the outside world, what I should write down in articles and what I should post on Twitter (back then it really was Twitter!). I was in the country for a week. But other people lived there, they were always there or had relatives in the city - many had lost loved ones. For me it was a week of exciting impressions, for others it was everyday life. I felt it was disrespectful to share my insights or to pretend that I understood something better than others. So I was rather reserved, shared my observations with friends and family, but hardly wrote anything publicly.
Back in the German net reality
After this concert, that changed and I had the feeling that it should be shown: People here don't let it get them down, they keep partying, they dress up, they drink beer. So I tweeted a video of the concert. And then something happened that I had never experienced before (with my modest Twitter reach).
Seit Mittwoch bin ich mit @GoeringEckardt in der Ukraine. Wir waren unter anderem bei diesem Konzert. (Fast) alles andere habe ich hier aufgeschrieben: https://t.co/urgeGxvPrp @sternde pic.twitter.com/AK8wWmDSeb
— Nele Spandick (@nurnelo) February 4, 2023
The video got into the wrong circles. Lots of trolls commented, they saw the video as proof of all sorts of things: that there was in fact no war in Ukraine; that the Greens let people fight in the war and go dancing themselves; for the war tourism of "those up there". It was the first time I turned off my messages on Twitter and blocked everyone who commented. I knew they were wrong, but at the same time I wondered if I just shouldn't have posted it, if it needed more categorization, if it was disrespectful.
At the time, I would have thought that I would think back to that day, to that concert, to the atmosphere in that country, all the time. That I would now perceive every piece of news from Ukraine completely differently. To be honest, it didn't turn out that way. I hardly ever think about that concert, I no longer read every news item from Ukraine, I deleted the Air Alert app from my phone a few weeks ago.
But now, while writing this text, I looked it up again: Zhadan i Sobaky are still playing, not only in Kiev, but also in Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odessa. Hopefully at some point without power cuts again.
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- Despite being in a war-torn Ukraine, the Green Party's Katrin Göring-Eckardt and I attended a concert outside Kiev by the ska band Zhadan i Sobaky, led by writer Serhij Zhadan.
- Following the power cut before the concert, I was surprised to see the audience continue drinking their beers and ignoring the darkness, a sign of resilience in the face of war.
- After sharing a video of the concert on Twitter, the post attracted negative attention, with critics misinterpreting the scene as proof of war tourism or the Greens' indifference towards the conflict in Ukraine.
Source: www.stern.de
