What would Sophie Scholl’s Instagram account have looked like? A question that SWR and BR found so exciting that between May 2021 and April 2022 they launched the project “@I’mSophieScholl” started on the platform. Scholl as an influencer, played by an actress, that’s the idea. Scholl’s path into the resistance should be seen in what the makers called “simulated real-time.” Insta-Scholl collected almost 930,000 followers at their weddings. Now it turns out that young people were hardly there. “Even if the public service broadcaster changes the media platform in order to convey history attractively, young people between the ages of 14 and 19 hardly notice it,” according to a study by the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH).
Christian Kuchler, head of the teaching and research department for didactics of social sciences at the RWTH, surveyed 1,250 schoolchildren from Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland. Four out of five respondents have an Instagram account, but the project was not particularly well known among the students. More than three quarters of the users had never heard of “@IchbinSophieScholl”. Only 145 of the 1,250 students clicked on the channel, mostly just once.
A failure? SWR doesn’t see it that way. “The fact that, according to the RWTH study, as far as it is already available, 23 percent of the 13 to 19 year olds knew the channel, i.e. almost a quarter, we rate as quite successful,” reports the SWR. The project was primarily aimed at users between the ages of 18 and 24, mostly women. Around 23 percent of the users belonged to this core target group. The series was even more successful with the adjoining target group of 25 to 34 year olds, who accounted for around 45 percent.
Some were disturbed by the very free treatment of the historical Sophie Scholl
The Instagram project received a lot of media attention and won prizes, including the “Bunte New Faces Award Film” for actors and team. But there was also criticism. “Through a strong focus on white, Christian, German resistance, the actual victims of the National Socialist policy of annihilation and conquest inevitably recede into the background,” said the Anne Frank educational institution, for example. Jan Böhmermann also came in a contribution from ZDF Magazine Royal to the result: “Well meant, poorly implemented”. Historical associations and educational institutions were also bothered by the excessively free handling of historical facts. The quotes from “Insta-Scholl” did not always correspond to those of the historical Sophie Scholl.
Of course, this fictionalization becomes problematic at the latest when it is not recognized or identified as such. And here Kuchler’s study does not give the project good marks: “Among the followers there are many uncritical voices who do not perceive the fictionality of the presentation.” Instagram is said to have a high level of credibility, and the students deliberately separated what is on offer there from platforms such as Netflix, where they expect fiction. That’s why “one could have shown more clearly what is fiction and what is fact,” says Kuchler.
The 1,250 young people surveyed at least signaled an interest in similar projects in which historical figures appear on social media. They suggested – in this order – as particularly interesting historical figures: Anne Frank, Adolf Hitler and Julius Caesar.