Ken Early: Toni Kroos castigated after tackling tough subject carefully. That’s social media for you

Sitting on a train from Düsseldorf to Munich on Sunday afternoon, I was idly counting up the number of hours I have spent on intercity trains over the last four weeks – I reckoned this journey was going to take me through the 60-hour mark – when I started to get messages about Toni Kroos.

“I hear Toni Kroos is a racist now”. “Big AfD Toni”. Oh God, what’s this about… People are circulating the same screengrab from a football aggregator Twitter account with several hundred thousand followers.

The tweet quotes Kroos as saying: “Germany is no longer the country it was 10 years ago due to mass migration. The issue of mass migration has become too ‘uncontrolled’. There are problems everywhere, it’s too crowded, there’s too much”. It cites as source a right-wing provocateur who is better known for his anti-immigration rhetoric than for his straight-down-the-line reporting.

It turns out that Kroos has done an interview on the ZDF podcast Lanz und Precht, presented by Markus Lanz, a journalist, and Richard David Precht, a philosopher and author. It was recorded last week and released on Friday morning, the day of the Germany-Spain quarter-final that turned out to be Kroos’ last-ever appearance in professional football. Two days later, alleged quotes from the interview are blowing up on Twitter.

I listen to the podcast as best as Deutsche Bahn’s wifi will allow. It turns out that Kroos has not really said these things. The line “there are problems everywhere, it’s too crowded, there’s too much” was not said by Kroos at all, but by Lanz, who at the time was enlarging upon a general sense of “loss of control” or “overwhelmedness” that the conversation had identified as having taken root in Germany over the last decade.

Neither did Kroos say that “Germany is no longer the country it was 10 years ago due to mass migration”. What he actually said was more nuanced.

Earlier in the conversation he had told the hosts that he and his family plan to keep living in Madrid, where he’s opening a Toni Kroos academy. Now he tells them, “My whole family is still in Germany, I think it’s a great country, I love being there, but it is, at least, no longer quite the Germany that it was perhaps 10 years ago when we left [to join Real Madrid].”

Lanz asks what’s changed. Kroos tries to put his finger on it: “Well, a feeling has definitely changed, a feeling, because I can’t even contribute much more than a feeling… a feeling of… how can one best express it without being put in a corner [laughs] a feeling of… if I were to compare it with Spain…”

He then explains that he has a seven-year-old daughter, and if she were 14 or 15, he would feel more comfortable allowing her out at 11pm on the streets of a Spanish rather than a German major city.

Lanz says: “Wow. The most common thing we hear about in this context is loss of control, the fear of losing control.”

Precht observes that in his opinion, “Spain really isn’t an aggressive society at all. And I think that in the last 10 years we [in Germany] have become much more aggressive, especially during the pandemic, but there are also other factors. You get the feeling of latent threat and subtle or visible aggression. I don’t have that feeling in Spain… In Spain, I have the feeling that this country has a lot of problems too, objectively no less than the problems in Germany, but that the general way they get along is much more positive than here.”

Kroos agrees that maybe people in Spain have a generally more positive attitude, while saying he doesn’t want to suggest Germany is a negative country. “I think you used a really good term earlier, I think this control over certain issues has just slipped away a little over the years…”

Lanz: “There’s a reason for that. In my opinion the reason is that people have been overwhelmed, they have been systematically overwhelmed on so many levels in the last few years. On all levels. I speak with district administrators, with mayors, with head teachers, even with students, you speak to people who are responsible for housing, there is a problem everywhere, it is too full, there is too much, it is too much, and I always feel so incredibly sorry about that, when someone then voices criticism, then you are very quick to say “oh oh oh, but that is racist”, and I have a huge problem with that because I still say this loudly and clearly and to anyone who doesn’t want to listen because of me, this country is not a racist country at heart, it is a good country.”

It’s Lanz who has now made the conversation specifically about the question of migration, which Kroos proceeds to address in his final answer.

“Of many, that’s my feeling, of many problems, I’d say this big issue of migration is also a – how should I put it – that one has the feeling that ‘it’s full’. I think it’s a clear theme. I think… we’ve actually already shown, whether back in 2006, or again today, the open arms with which this country actually welcomes people. And I think that’s sensational, I think it’s really great. Only I think it was – it was just too uncontrolled. I don’t think we managed to achieve this fundamentally very positive approach or idea, which I support 1,000%, because I think it’s sensational that people from outside come to us and are happy. But I think it was simply underestimated, and then in the end it was just too uncontrolled.”

“Of course, when a lot of people come there is always a percentage – and the Germans are the same, among the Germans there is also a percentage who are not good for us and are not good for themselves. And that is exactly the case with a lot of people who come. If you can’t distinguish between those who are not good for us, then in the end it becomes difficult. And then of course the attitude of the Germans is always becoming more and more divided on this topic. Although the basic idea that people are coming – who we obviously need! – that they are here is sensational, and good.”

Needless to say, the bits where Kroos says he’s 1,000% in favour of the idea of immigration and that Germany “obviously” needs immigrants didn’t make the superviral cut of his comments, which turned him into an overnight poster boy for the people who believe somebody like Antonio Rüdiger has no business playing for a country like Germany.

Others attacked Kroos on the grounds of hypocrisy – is he not an immigrant himself? But a typical privileged one, who imagines he has the right to stand in judgment of others. Whether Kroos had actually said the things everyone was now arguing about no longer mattered.

It was notable that the word used most often in the exchange was “Gefühl” – feeling. A feeling that has changed. You can trace a lot of reasons for the change, but the paranoid algorithmic ragebait probably isn’t helping.