HEIST

Die Linke won the Berlin state elections for the first time last week. In another historic first, their leader Elif Eralp could become the first mayor of Turkish descent.

But the backlash is here.

The impact of these kinds of electoral firsts can be hard to make out in the immediate aftermath, and the media cycles are spinning fast and heavy. So in this episode, HEIST founding editors Peter Matthews and Ruthie Weissmann join Ben Schuman-Stoler in breaking down what happened and how to make sense of the major storylines so far.

- Why did leaders from the CDU and...

How do the editors at HEIST choose what news and features we publish?

In this episode, founding editors Ruthie Weissmann and Peter Matthews talk to Ben Schuman-Stoler about how they run the editorial side of things at HEIST. They talk about some of their favorite Berlin animal stories, stories that went viral, and what happens on a very slow news day.

We recorded this extra episode also to promote our subscriber campaign which is going into its final weekend. We’ve already hit our first target of 200 paying subscribers and are approaching our main target: 500 paying subscribers to HEIST....

Our guest this episode is researcher, filmmaker, and strategist Alon Sahar, who recently published the report “The Campaign against UNRWA and the Palestinian Right of Return in Germany; Israel-aligned Actors, Narratives, and Policy Uptake” with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

HEIST founding editor Peter Matthews and Alon talk about the historical 20th century geopolitical context here, and then hone in on Germany’s role, the evolution of the term Staatsräson, and then finally bring it home to Berlin, where we see the implications of this campaign in local political scandals

“National narratives tell you what you must not say.”

In this episode, Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah joins HEIST founding editor Peter
Matthews.

Gurnah challenges history from a European perspective. To him, the idea of European centers is not just an oversight, but a kind of blindness.

His work, novels with interwoven histories based on complex and surprising historical narratives, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. The Swedish Academy cited his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee."