The poll by the ARD public broadcaster said 21% of respondents agreed with the proposition.

“It is racist. I feel we need to wake up. Many people in Europe had to flee… searching for a safe country,” Nagelsmann said on Sunday.

The 36-year-old said he agreed with Germany midfielder Joshua Kimmich, who described the questionnaire as “racist” a day earlier.

“Josh [Kimmich] responded really well, with a very clear and thought-out statement,” Nagelsmann said at a briefing at his team’s training base.

“I see this in exactly the same way. This question is insane.”

“There are people in Europe who’ve had to flee because of war, economic factors, environmental disasters, people who simply want to be taken in," he went on.

“We have to ask what are we doing at the moment? We in Germany are doing very, very well, and when we say something like that, I think it’s crazy how we turn a blind eye and simply block out such things.”

ARD - the German public broadcaster - said it had commissioned the survey to have measurable data, after a reporter working on a documentary on football and diversity was repeatedly asked about the make-up of the national team.

The poll was conducted among 1,304 randomly selected respondents.

Karl Valks, sports director with the ARD station who commissioned the poll, said the company was “dismayed that the results are what they are, but they are also an expression of the social situation in Germany today”.

“Sport plays an important role in our society, the national team is a strong example of integration,” German media cited him as saying.

The current national squad has a number of players with mixed heritage, including captain Ilkay Gündogan and winger Leroy Sané.

Germany is hosting the Euro 2024 tournament later this month, and Nagelsmann said his team would be playing “for everyone in the country”. They will kick-off the competition with a clash against Scotland at Munich’s Allianz Arena on 14 June.

The controversy comes just weeks after the team’s kit manufacturer, Adidas, was forced to ban fans from buying German football kits customised with the number 44, after media raised their resemblance to the symbol used by World War Two-era Nazi SS units.

The SS was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis. Members of the SS ranged from Gestapo agents to concentration camp guards. SS duties included administering death camps where millions of Jews and others were put to death.

  • klisklas@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    Not a football fan, but good answer to a stupid racist question. Journalism needs to reflect on how their reporting is enabling the far right and legitimising racist talking points in society. At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

      You are suggesting incompetence where there is malicious intent. The capital in this country owns the mass media, and as they did in the past, they would rather sacrifice democracy than their wealth and power. Our conservatives are right wingers when push comes to shove, believe me.

      • neeeeDanke@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        This is about a poll conducted by a piblic brodcaster, your comment makes no sense in this context.

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          I was responding specifically to this:

          At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

          I suppose I should quote that in the above comment, my bad

          • neeeeDanke@feddit.de
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            5 months ago

            Fair, but I don’t see how that quote implies this role to be unintentional, which seems to be the main poit in your original comment to me.

        • trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          The public broadcasters are trying very hard to imitate the private media and keep quoting even the worst examples of them (the “Bild” tabloid for example) as a source. So the situation of commercial media has very well something to do with the situation of the public broadcasters.

      • klisklas@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        Please don’t excuse shitty journalism. These people earn good wages and have a standing in German media. They can speak (relatively) freely, but decide to do differently.

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          I’m not at all excusing it, I’m fact I am pointing out that the media is owned by our capital and will thus work to maintain their interests. And their interests are to not lose their wealth and power, more than maintaining democracy or anything else really.

          So they, and by extension their media, are complicit in the rise of far right ideology, because fascism is better than a revolution for them, rich people tend to lose their wealth, power and occasionally their heads during revolutions.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      5 months ago

      I don’t think a survey question can be racist. An answer can, and I’m not sure that not knowing the answer is better than knowing it.

      Edit: No wrongthink on feddit.de, got it.

      • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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        5 months ago

        I get what you are saying but I disagree. Such a question comes with an implication that whoever posed the question thinks both answers are valid, unless the context implies otherwise.

        Edit: No wrongthink on feddit.de, got it.

        Oh come on now, people disliking your opinion is not the same thing as you being silenced, get over yourself.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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          5 months ago

          The downvote button is not the “I disagree” button. It’s a “this is irrelevant or destructive to the conversation” button. “I get what you’re saying but I disagree” to me indicates you don’t think my comment was either.

          If the question was phrased as “Is the German national team diverse enough?” - which asks for the same opinion - would that be somehow better?

          This type of finger-in-ear nonsense is the type of behaviour that leads to Germans supporting a genocide in 2024 and AfD’s success being a surprise.

            • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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              5 months ago

              Outright stating that you are trying to destroy conversation- congrats, you have provided a great example of a real reason to downvote.

              • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 months ago

                My pleasure. Idownvoted this one as well, because I disagree with your take.

                Example:
                A user posts a brain dead take on a topic = I downvote because it’s not worth the effort to correct

                A user posts an incorrect statement about a topic I can meaningfully contribute = I’ll not vote. I’ll instead conribute my stance.

                A user posts a neutral post and maybe I even agree with it = Upvote and maybe a comment.

                This any anything inbetween. Sometimes the example user is myself ;)

          • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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            5 months ago

            This isn’t reddit, there’s not a rule for what the downvote means. Further, there’s no consequences for downvotes, so I don’t see how it stifles conversation.

            • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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              5 months ago

              This attitude towards the downvote button came from reddit, because Reddit started hiding responses with an arbitrary number of downvotes, which most Lemmy clients emulate. That’s how it stifles conversation.

              • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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                5 months ago

                Reddit also has karma barriers for posting in various places, which literally stifles conversation, in that you will not be able to respond if you have enough downvotes. I don’t think it’s really comparable.

      • mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        Asking people if something is “white enough” is extremely racist, reproduces stereotypes and normalizes this bullshit. Nationality isn’t a matter of skin color.

      • pepperonisalami@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Sorry to see you downvoted, but hear me out. If I create a survey, for example, asking: “do we need to carry out a ethnic cleaning on a certain ethnicity of this country?” It implies that:

        1. The survey creator and people who approve of it think that there is a substantial chunk of people who will say yes.

        2. That the idea is a valid one and if you don’t agree with it, it is valid for others to think that it is reasonable.

        The idea of killing/kicking-out of people based on their race, is a part of what defines racism. The survey which validates such an idea, is racist.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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          5 months ago

          I don’t know how you got from point 1 (which is valid - but do you think there aren’t Germans who will say yes?) to point 2?

          How does an something being an answer on a survey make it a reasonable answer? If surveys should be limited to reasonable answers, how do we ever quantify how many unreasonable people exist?

          • pepperonisalami@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            The problem here is that it’s a yes or no question. It’s not “how do we solve problem x” but “should we just deal with x by doing y?” - which is a call for action in that exact line of thinking.

            This survey is not objective, it’s subjective, with racism as part of the subjectivity.

      • jwt@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        A question can be wrong (Have you stopped beating your wife?). Especially in a questionnaire, you need to be careful when formulating a question, so to not skew the results. A question can also be ‘wrong’ when the outcome is useless no matter what results you get (in scientific research you actually try to achieve the exact opposite, so that even if a hypothesis is invalidated, you’d gain some useful knowledge)

          • jwt@programming.dev
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            5 months ago

            I (think I) see what you’re getting at. Wrong isn’t necessarily the same as racist (although I would assume racist questions to be a subset of wrong questions). I think you’re bright enough to think of a racist question that mimics the ‘wrong question’ example I gave.

      • klisklas@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        It can be. Great question from German media would have been if they asked the audience something to reflect on the treatment of Mesut Oezil in the past for example. It was a complete racist shitshow at that time and nobody was bothered.