Group ‘surprised’ when their song was used to disrupt an interview with Alice Weidel – but now they face a backlash
Group ‘surprised’ when their song was used to disrupt an interview with Alice Weidel – but now they face a backlash
It was while Alice Weidel was being interviewed on the terrace of a parliament building overlooking the River Spree in Berlin that members of the Corner Chor’s mobile phones began to ping with alerts as their song in protest at her far-right party, Scheiß AfD Jodler (Shit AfD Yodellers), blasted out from a 100,000-watt sound system on the other bank.
“We were hugely surprised and truly happy to hear at that moment that our song was receiving such a public airing,” one choir member told the Guardian.
The choir had not known of the carefully orchestrated plans by the Centre for Political Beauty an association of action artists led by the philosopher Philipp Ruch – to use their song to disrupt the so-called summer interview, a regular annual TV fixture in which leaders of the main political parties are questioned in turn, typically in a relaxed setting.
Neither had the authorities, nor the public broadcaster ARD. And disrupt it certainly did. The sweet-sounding 19th-century Styrian Christmas yodel, which Corner Chor had rewritten as a three-voice protest song against the far right, managed to drown out much of the hour-long exchange, prompting Weidel to lean into the interviewer Markus Preiß and tell him: “I have problems understanding you against this noise.”
She insisted on continuing with the interview, however, at the same time as accusing the choir of being state-funded, an erroneous slur increasingly used by the party to attack its opponents. The party’s leaders later said they had been victimised and insisted on a rerun, which the broadcaster has so far refused to entertain.
