27 – The podcast about the European elections
ABBA and Bullerbü still shape the image of Sweden in this country today. But the Scandinavian country has changed in the recent past. Shootings and murders in big cities, once hardly conceivable, now repeatedly make headlines. Anyone who has an overly romantic idea of an idyll in the north might want to rethink it. The host Hannes Kunz takes his listeners on a journey through the EU member states in ten episodes until the European elections on June 9th. Together with the ARD correspondents, he takes up individual fates in order to show the basics, classifies them – and helps to redraw possibly entrenched images of our European neighbors. Sweden, for example, has the most gunshot victims in the EU in terms of population. Violence also plays a role in the episode about the Czech Republic. Kunz addresses a rape in a bar. In the Eastern European country, sexual crimes against women are still not taken seriously enough. The future is uncertain for young people, especially in Italy: How can it be that well-educated people cannot find work in times of skilled labor shortages? But that is Europe too. A continent full of stories. Marvin Zubrod
System settings
The stories sound as absurd as they are frightening. A journalist uses the link to a banned left-wing website in one of his texts, and a few months later he is rung out of bed early in the morning. Various police officers are standing in front of his door with a search warrant – his apartment, that of a colleague and his editorial office are to be searched. What initially seems like scenes from an autocracy actually took place in tranquil Freiburg in 2023 and is now the first of seven stories in the podcast series System settingsa true crime format of a different kind. These carefully prepared audio stories from netzpolitik.org are dedicated to those cases in which the state supposedly went too far. The host Serafin Dinges leads through a podcast based on personal conversations with those affected, which has been lovingly designed both musically and dramaturgically. Even small anecdotes and emotional moments never distract from the legitimate question: What happens when the state breaks into your home? Saladin Salem
On the mud
Maybe it all started innocently enough. Not only in everyday private life, but also in the GDR’s commercial enterprises, improvisations often had to be made because something or other was missing. In any case, Sascha Lüttich is a shipyard worker and trade unionist with a GDR biography. At the point at which this six-part crime thriller radio play podcast, written by Marcel Raabe and Lars Werner and directed by Janine Lüttmann for NDR, begins, it is no longer about dealing with the shortage creatively. But rather semi-illegal to illegal side businesses whose operators have convinced themselves for too long that their under-the-table deals are petty crimes. At least Liège is not making a big deal, but rather securing its precarious financial existence. When his foster father, the union boss, dies under dubious circumstances, Liège has to do everything he can to get himself elected to office so that things can stay as they always were. On the mud With a great ensemble – Peter Kurth plays Liège, Bjarne Mädel, Anne Ratte-Polle and Charles Brauer are also there – tells how honest people, out of awkwardness and desperation, rotate in a criminal vicious circle, which makes them do fatal things. Stefan Fischer
To Catch a Scorpion
Thousands of people risk their lives every year in tiny, overcrowded boats in the middle of the sea. Transporting them to Europe and giving them hope for a better life is a million-dollar business for Barzan Majeed. For two years, police conducted an international investigation into the people smuggler and his ruthless criminal group, known as the “Scorpion Gang.” However, the leader managed to escape. In order to confront Majeed alias Scorpion and get him to talk, BBC journalist Sue Mitchell and refugee worker Rob Lawrie embark on a daring journey of discovery. You meet the gang’s accomplices and their victims and learn how the business works along the refugee routes. After a tireless search, the two manage to meet Scorpion. He doesn’t know how many people he left to their fate on the way to Europe. “Maybe a thousand, maybe ten thousand. I didn’t count.” Who is this man who finances a life of luxury with human lives? Sue Mitchell and her colleagues from the BBC answer this question impressively and with resonance. Pascal Moser
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