Category: Uncategorized (Page 6 of 20)

Does John McPhee not have an editor? I, too, have spent afternoons agonizing over how I could possibly start or continue or finish a piece. Luckily, I’ve editors who I can consult and who sometimes know the inside of my brain better than I do. Or maybe this is a consequence of McPhee’s antipathy towards a nutgraf — something that I have always found to be a useful exercise, even if it does not remain in the final form of the piece.

I, for one, found his description of structure totally incomprehensible. Clearly, he has found a consistent way to do things, but I think Ceci is correct to say that this is more a look inside his head than applicable advice for us other human beings. I felt similarly with Rosenthal’s napkin drawings. Are the lines meant to indicate rising tension, or the story “coming back,” or something else?

In my experience, structure is intimately tied to the content of the reporting. I feel that McPhee and Rosenthal really gloss over this (Stewart feels slightly better). Sometimes, the narrative is obvious: X happened and then Y happened which shows Z. A scene might be so arresting and strongly reported that it can stand entirely on its own, the connections to the rest of the story so obvious they don’t need to be drawn out. Others might require popping in and out of the narrative to explain to the reader what exactly is happening. You don’t know what the story requires until you get down to the ground-level details.

I take the position, then, that the reporting comes first, and then the structure. Following a story requires chasing threads and conducting interviews that might end up being dead ends; naturally, those do not go in the piece. I think reporters generally have an instinct that, for their story, they need a central character or anecdote, some contextual information, and a thesis, and they will keep reporting until they have found all of those components. That’s not structure, which is much more intimate. I see that as much closer to gathering the basic ingredients for a story. I suppose the process of structuring can reveal deficiencies in reporting: you really need another scene, or don’t quite have the correct contextual quote, or some other crucial building block. But I guess I still don’t see that as structure guiding the reporting. Yes, you know that you need something specific to plug the hole; but you only know that specific thing exists and is sourceable because you’ve spent all that time reporting in the first place.

I am surprised that McPhee seems to skip over another essential component of the structuring process: deciding what doesn’t go in. “When I was through studying, separating, defining, and coding the whole body of notes, I had thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with two or three code words representing a component of the story. All I had to do was put them in order,” he writes. The presumption at the beginning of the writing process that it will all fit is astonishing. I have never once found that to be the case in my writing.

Central Question: How does education continue to define and transform the lives of Afghan women as they move from restriction to exile?

Overview: This piece would be a three-part story that follows the role education plays for Afghan women at different points throughout the integration process (in Afghanistan and abroad). Each section will connect to the next, tracing how Afghans adapt at every stage. I would be looking at what education looks like now after the shut down, those who still want to leave, and those who are integrating to a new education system and life abroad. The article would explore not just what was lost, but how people are continuing to learn, teach, and integrate in different ways. 

• Part One: This section would focus on the first wave of disruption. What does one do when you’ve built your identity around being an educated young woman, and suddenly it’s taken away? This section would look at what education means within the community and what this means for women trying to get an education abroad.
  • Interviews:
    • Female and male Bard Berlin students (3).
    • Mustafa Mayer — who completed his master’s and now works at the Brennan Center. 
    • A number of former teachers and journalists (who also have kids).

• Part Two: The second section would look at people who still want to get out, or who continue their studies in secret either through underground networks, VPNs, or private lessons. This part explores how education survives, and what drives people to keep studying. 
  • Interviews:
    • An organization working in Afghanistan right now to help get people to Germany. 
    • The executive director of another organization that works on the ground in 19/34 Afghan provinces. They primarily implement programs in the country that center around youth leadership.
    • A man whose sister is still in Afghanistan learning from home.

• Part Three: The final section explores what happens next: how do people rebuild their educational lives after leaving Afghanistan? How do they integrate into new academic systems, navigate language barriers, and redefine their sense of self as students and people in a foreign context? This part will tie the story together by also addressing the careers Afghans, especially Afghan women, are able to have.
  • Interviews:
    • 2 Afghan business owners who started off in very different places, but now own very successful companies.
    • Afghan Cultural Center that employees and helps integrate countless Afghans in the United States.
    • Afghan scholars that can speak to this integration process.

In Gummersbach, I met a dozen young Ukrainians who had come to evangelical Christianity after fleeing the war. They spoke at length about how the teachings of Baptism had helped them think through the trauma of losing family and the uncertainty of navigating refugee life — and how they felt the Orthodox church couldn’t provide those answers. My piece seeks to answer how faith became transmitted to these young people. Are they entirely reliant on evangelical communities already present in the places where they fled? Are there particularly prominent online influencers? And how prominent is this movement? Is it powerful enough to ruffle feathers with the Orthodox Church? My day in Gummersbach will be one scene in this.

I’ll be speaking to:
– Friends of the young Ukrainian churches I met in Gummersbach, who represented multiple churches in western Germany, including in Essen and Dusseldorf
– Ukrainian church leaders and their young congregants in the United States

I am presently considering any evangelical movement, not just Ukrainian Baptists; I am interested, for instance, in talking to Sunday Adelaja, a Nigerian-born Pentacostal preacher who ran a megachurch in Kyiv before the war. I am also keeping an eye for influences from American evangelicalism; there is not a single obvious Ukrainian who has emerged as a particularly prominent voice for conversion.

Upstairs, four American college students from Tennessee rifle through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery wallpaper, occasionally landing on a dusty roll of film or movie poster. One girl has been collecting trinkets for the past two days and has amassed a collection of coins and floral tiles to bring home with her. Downstairs are more Americans and around twenty Ukrainians diligently drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers. All are intent on turning this dusty, cavernous theatre – which still shows signs for Indiana Jones 4 – into a new church and community space for the upwards of 1000 Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, Germany. 

Among them is Pastor Nickolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. He grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who did not believe in God. At 18, feeling young and aimless, he stumbled across a few American evangelicals on the street distributing brochures about Christianity. “I took it because we didn’t have literature about Christianity. It was impossible to have the Bible, or New Testament,” Skopych explained. These brochures changed the trajectory of his life, infusing it with new meaning. “I take this brochure, and read it, and think about life. I understand that the very high meaning of life, I can only find with God,” he said. “It helped me.”

Decades later, Skopych — having become a Pastor of the Almaz church in Ukraine — visited Gummersbach just before the start of the war. After Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of his congregants and friends followed, bringing their friends and family members with them. Skopych had spent the past year praying for a larger church space. Last year, Skopych met the senior pastor of First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville Tennessee, who was visiting Germany. This pastor had been seeking a “native, German-speaking” church to collaborate with, but was so moved by Skopych’s story that he changed course. A few months later, he returned with the head of church missions, who was similarly compelled. Skopych found the theatre space. FBC paid for it. All of this culminated in 10 FBC members flying to Gummersbach on a mission to convert the theatre into a church. 

Since the start of the war in 2022, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe, 64 of which are in Germany. When I spoke with the head of missions at FBC, he expressed a desire for the mission to extend beyond Almaz church in Gummersbach. “This will be a central training hub,” he said. “It will be an opportunity, not only for Ukrainian churches to be expanded, but also, I feel that this is the beginning of a revival of Christianity in Europe.” 

My piece will thus explore the growing connection between American evangelicals and Ukrainian refugees, with a focus on Germany, but possibly expanding to Ukrainian experiences in Tennessee as well. Why are these American evangelicals so interested in assisting Ukrainian refugees in particular? How have these 64 new Ukrainian churches across Germany been shaped by American missionaries and ideals? How do these newfound connections through Christianity impact the politics of evangelical Americans back home when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war? Is this actually reviving German/European Christianity on a larger scale? 

My reporting from Gummersbach will play a central role, supported by scenes described to me from Tennessee. I have already spoken with most members of the American mission, the head of FBC missions, as well as Pastor Nickolas, his children, and his friends. I have also spoken with one of the Ukrainian women whom a member of the American mission, Mike Bible, sponsored to come to America through U4U. I plan to support these with interviews from a few more new Ukrainian churches in Germany (contacts I can access through Pastor Nickolas), and academics who study church planting. 

I’ll contextualize my piece in reporting on how American evangelicals have lobbied to support Ukraine in the U.S. and the history of evangelical church planting. I find it an interesting connection that evangelical Christianity was disseminated to Ukraine through American missionaries in the first place, and now these Ukrainians – persecuted for their Christianity by Russians – must turn to these same American evangelicals to support their religious and communal lives in the diaspora. There has been no reporting on this topic outside of Church blogs and Christian media, so I’m hoping to get this piece published in a Tennessee news outlet or some more mainstream American media (likely combined with Miriam’s reporting on the related topic of how and why young Ukrainians have been turning to Christianity to process the war). 

My final piece will be about Germany’s adherence to the legal principle of ‘universality’ and the Syrian community’s changing climate of faith in German legal institutions after the fall of Assad in Syria. I want to cover the Trial on the Siege of Yarmouk, which was what I was writing about initially and is a centerpiece to the discussion on an ongoing universal jurisdiction case, but I want to write more generally about the history of universal jurisdiction in Germany, how it has impacted the Syrian migrant community, what German justice systems mean to Syrians after repatriation efforts enacted by the government, etc.

What does a system like universal jurisdiction mean to Syrians in a nation increasingly plagued by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment? What does it mean when so many of them, after countless years of living in German society, still haven’t obtained their German citizenship? What does it mean when both universal jurisdiction and asylum are both rooted in a legal philosophy of universality that Germany claims to stand for, but only the former is being actively embraced? I would like to weave the stories of Syrian-Germans, lawyers, and experts in universal jurisdiction to craft my final piece. I would ideally like to extend/incorporate the profile of Hesham Moamadani in the final feature — Moamadani was a Syrian refugee, but recently gained his German citizenship and can enjoy its benefits. How has his experience differed from his friends, who are Syrian but have not yet obtained citizenship? I also want to incorporate my interview with Syrian lawyer Anwar Bunni, who, even after experiencing the horrors of Assad’s government, remained robustly faithful to the German legal system, as well as my interview with Berit, who spoke with me about anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany and EU law.

Reading John McPhee’s piece on structure then Cece’s response affirmed my initial reaction to McPhee’s piece. As someone who writes frequently and and in great volume, structure has always been my best friend. But I think that journalistic writing specifically often benefits from a lack of structure, or at the very least, the lack of an anticipation for structure. A story should build itself based on the evidence provided — one shouldn’t ‘decide’ on a story before seeking out the sources to support it. This is difficult, because by the time I’m interviewing my subjects, I usually have a vague idea on what my final story will look like, and therefore seek out subjects knowing that they would play a certain role in my story. Which isn’t to say that many of the interviews I conduct go exactly as anticipated — it’s often quite the opposite. But I wonder if McPhee’s understanding of effective structure, like Cece outlined, is only achievable when structure is already presumed before the reporting process begins and merely becomes more visible after the writing process starts. I also disagree with McPhee in that ‘good structure’ is something that you can learn by reading about structure. I think it’s a muscle you train that gets better at recognizing more effective structures over others — the best way to learn good structure, I think, is to read pieces with good structure, not read about good structure itself. Also, while I was not a huge fan of McPhee’s prose (which consisted mostly of random, abrupt anecdotes in his time as a writer,) I did appreciate how much emphasis he placed on the importance of the visual. While the bigger question of whether structure is anticipated/planned afterwards remains unanswered for me, I do believe that organizing your story visually is significantly more helpful than, say, organizing it through text. Flashcards, doodles, and drawings have served me very well in organizing some of my longer works. I enjoyed Rosenthal’s piece for this reason: it visually summarizes some common formats that great writers have used to format their stories. I especially liked the radiolab drawing, which I think is how a lot of great investigative podcasts are structured: starting small then expanding into something much bigger than itself. I thought the New York Times piece we read on Skalnik embodied this structure well — starting off with a smaller case that initially did not seem related to the key character of the piece, we eventually expand into the subject himself, and the different cases he influenced the rulings for. Of course, knowing these drawings to heart alone will not produce a good story — the core needs to support the flesh. But once you’ve developed a moderately strong writerly muscle, I think they can be more than helpful.

The readings this week provided information on a less talked-about aspect of storytelling, structure. Journalists must all eventually decide how to best shape their story for their readership, yet structure is rarely discussed. Rob Rosenthal, John McPhee, and James Stewart all suggest that structure is a crucial and overwhelmingly important aspect of the storytelling process. Reading their reflections, suggestions, and advice was extremely helpful in educating me on what my own journey could look like as I decide what the structure of my piece will look like. Likewise, reading Pamela Colloff’s New York Times investigation into how a con man’s testimony sent dozens to jail made it clear that structure is what allows the audience to best comprehend information, especially when the story has a lot of characters.

What connected all of these readings for me was the fact that structure seems to be a deliberate decision that each journalist makes when writing a story. Each author approaches this process differently, yet their lessons overlap in many ways.

Rosenthal, for example, describes story structure as a visual process. His napkin drawings illustrate how a narrative can unfold. What intrigued me most about this approach was that he seems to emphasize that the drawings he makes help shape the motion of the narrative, and aren’t necessarily meant to be inflexible. I thought the pictures were likewise really helpful when it came to showing structure as a rhythm rather than a strict outline. His examples, probably deeply influenced by his past in radio storytelling, show how structure helps determine the pacing of the piece. This was not something I had previously thought applied to the written word.

John McPhee takes a different approach to structure. What stood out to me most early in the article was how he used note cards to make sense of an overwhelming amount of information. His method seems more structured and methodical than Rosenthal’s, but just as useful. I especially appreciated his thoughts on how crucial order is in storytelling. McPhee, for example, has his beginning and ending planned out before he writes a story. I wonder, however, how he knows when the piece should end before he even starts writing. Finally, his honesty about the paralysis that comes with trying to condense so much reporting into a limited number of sentences really resonated with me.

Pamela Colloff’s story about the serial jailhouse informant is a perfect example of how the principles discussed by Rosenthal and McPhee can be brought to life in practice. Her investigation could have easily unraveled when she started to explain decades’ worth of legal records, yet she constructs a structure that guides readers effortlessly. Colloff begins with a single, vivid case that grounds the narrative in reality, then gradually introduces characters, scenes, and details that reveal more about the con man, Paul Skalnik. By switching from the micro to the macro throughout her piece, Colloff shows how to create an emotionally gripping story.

Seeing how Colloff’s structure holds such a complex story together made me think about how I might apply similar principles in my own writing. That’s where James Stewart’s perspective felt particularly useful. His advice that “using chronology as your paramount organizing principle doesn’t mean simply telling a story in strict chronological order” was eye-opening. Even chronology, something seemingly self-explanatory, can be used to make a story more interesting.

John McPhee is known as a master of story structure. He emphasizes that a set structure eases the process of writing a story–and reading it. To me, his process for organizing a story is less intelligible than this principle. McPhee describes writing out scenes on index cards, shuffling them around, and designating points for transitions, digressions, and section breaks. I read this more as an artefact of one writer’s brain than a guide for organizing structure, which, for me, only emerges after some writing is done. 

Based on McPhee’s description, structuring a piece is a demanding but methodical task. With practice, it seems, McPhee developed a consistent approach to organize stories. But how does one organize a story with only partial reporting done? McPhee structures stories only after gathering copious notes, recordings, documents, and memos, but does the projected structure not guide his reporting? I am stuck on this point of tension: to plan a structure, the writer must have already reported, but the writer’s idea for her structure guides the information she seeks. 

Stewart, like McPhee, sidesteps this question. Still, his chapter on structure offers practices I can and will implement in my own process. He instructs writers to get comfortable with chronology. To organize a story in a straightforward way, a writer might start by listing scenes in chronological order and associating them with settings and characters present. Stewart recommends that writers minimize shifts in chronology, setting, and POV. 

The napkin drawings of structure pair well with the principles Stewart describes. I particularly liked the organization of This American Life stories, which link scenes chronologically, interrupting them at times with a moment of reflection or realization. A balance between interiority and plot forms the skeleton of this structure. 

I suspect that structure is never as simple as these models make it out to be. If structuring stories were easy, there wouldn’t be so many guides for structure. In my experience, the process of structuring stories is always messy. My first structure has never stuck. That said, writing a lede first has always helped me guide the sequence of scenes. 

I was struck by Stewart’s note that “the enemy of chronology is analysis.” I wonder how chronology functions as an organizing principle, if at all, in analysis pieces that include narrative elements, or vice versa. Sometimes, writing guides simplify different forms of writing, as if genres didn’t often intersect.

In Jennifer Senior’s piece about the McIlvane family, I felt like she had taken me by the hand and was gently forcing me to walk through the lives of these grieving people, to unpack their grief alongside them, to watch as they descended from or clung to their mountains of grief, so that I would come away knowing the story of this one individual – Bobby – of so many individual 9/11 stories which have not been told. Throughout the beginning of the piece, Senior frequently signposted to remind the reader why the piece was important, providing us with a “why now”: “A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences,” she writes. “Every mourner has a very different story to tell.” A few pages later, she reminds us again of the significance of recording individual experiences: “In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we’ve watched, we still know practically nothing about the last movements of the individual dead. It’s strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery.” 

These asides did the trick for me – I had been loath to read another 9/11 story as just one among so many which, especially we New Yorkers, have to record and understand that day and its aftermath. Senior must have predicted this, and she promises us that this piece is worth our time, that it is precisely that we have the story of the many, that the story of the one is significant, that there are still mysteries to be unravelled. And she was right. She won my trust in that moment and had it the whole way through, and it ended up being my favorite of this week’s stories, the one I could not put down. 

It was not until I read the structure pieces, particularly Stewart’s “Follow the Story” that I realized what kept me reading Senior’s piece was less the riveting content and more the highly effective structure, which was so good from the start that I completely trusted Jennifer to continue effectively telling this story. It struck me how, in both the piece about the McIlvay’s as well as the expose of Paul Skalnik and the corruption in prisoner testimony, the authors must have known every single piece of information in their stories before they started telling it. The beauty of their writing, particularly Senior’s, is her intentionality in deciding when we as readers discover each piece of information. She withholds that she knows and loves the McIlvays until a couple of pages in, but doesn’t wait so long to tell us that it feels untruthful. She introduces us to Bob McIlvane as a sympathetic person before telling us about the conspiracy theories in which he has come to believe. I want to try this more in my own writing. Often I’m so concerned with communicating the information I have that I forget to be intentional about the order in which I present it, leaning on chronology. McPhee recommends a chronological approach married with the tucking-in of themes for a stuck writer, which I agree with; a proficient reader can draw out themes on their own, but they cannot generate chronology, that’s why they need to. But I find I rely less on the chronology of events and more on the chronology in which I found things out. And when I find things out should have no bearing on when my reader finds things out. 

One thing that frustrates me a bit about McPhee’s “On Structure” is his reliance on instinct. I currently feel like I’m “on the table,” to use his metaphor, when it comes to my journalism capstone piece for the colloquium. I just have no clue where to start, and each first sentence is worse than the last. In the McPhee piece, he suddenly remembers Fred Brown and figures everything out. There he is, off the table, ready to write. My question is: what happens if you don’t have a “Fred Brown”? Or if you do, but you can’t figure out who that person is? It’s nice that McPhee got off the table, but why doesn’t he teach us how?

In Germany, football reputations carry political weight. BFC Dynamo is located specifically in East Berlin and like several East German clubs, Dynamo’s fan base has long been associated with right-leaning ideology. A stigma that has sharpened as the far-right AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland) has gained traction in recent years.

The AfD is known for anti-immigrant rhetoric; during last year’s European Championships, it criticized the German team for being “too woke, too diverse, not German enough.” Some clubs have publicly condemned the AfD, Dynamo however is not one of them.

“I see a change in the fan scenes,” Stenny said. “They are getting more conservative, more right-wing. There is a real influence of the AfD policy on the football fans.”

When I first mentioned to a German journalist that I planned to attend a BFC Dynamo match, he warned me not to go as a person of color, as it might not be safe.

Stenny Bamer, wearing a blue beanie and black tracksuit, tells me he wants to see this stigma change at a kickoff party for Gesellschaftsspiele, an NGO that promotes inclusion through sport. The organization is hosting young athletes from São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the western coast of Central Africa, for a two-week exchange.

“When I was a normal fan, I loved this reputation because everyone was like, ‘Oh, Dynamo is coming.’ But now, he pauses, “I would say that the reputation is far away from reality,” he said.

The event takes place at the Haus der Fußballkulturen, or House of Football Cultures, in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district where Stenny works as a social worker for the fan scene of BFC Dynamo through the Fanprojekt der Sportjugend Berlin.

Fanprojekt is an independent initiative created by the Berlin Sports Organization to engage football fans aged 14 to 27 whose home teams are either BFC Dynamo or Hertha BSC, another club based in Berlin. It hopes to foster inclusion, anti-discrimination, and a sense of community through football culture.

Prior to joining Fanprojekt, Stenny obtained a degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Potsdam and worked as a social worker at a refugee camp in Hamburg. He spoke critically on the camp’s conditions, citing cockroach infestations and how his supervisors would treat refugees.

“I said, bro, you cannot let people [live] in conditions like this, and what they said is, yeah, it’s our own fault. We were not clean.”

However, Stenny’s supervisors didn’t make any changes, and when he spoke out again on numerous instances, they would often ignore his comments. This experience impacted how Stenny sees his job as a social worker.

“Even if some ministry is paying for me, I’m not there for the ministry. I’m there for the people and I always had the feeling that, like the ministry in that area who was in response of the refugees, always saw it the other way around, “he said in semi-broken English.

“So as a social worker it’s my aim to be there for my clients, in this case the refugees,” he added.

This commitment to the people he’s assisting rather than the institution that employs him has led him to FanProjekt. However, the world of sports is not something new to him, as he shared, he’s been a devoted football fan since his late teens.

“I was interested in football violence,” he said with a smirk, fully aware of how crazy it sounds. “This is what Dynamo is famous for. For football violence and hooliganism, and when I was young, I was fascinated by this part of football.”

Stenny’s role is to guide the fan community toward inclusion and away from the racism, xenophobia, and right extremism that often plays a role in the stands.

In one match, spectators in the stands were heard shouting Juden-Schweine, meaning “Jewish pigs.” At another game, fans chanted Arbeit macht frei – Babelsberg 03, which translates to “work makes you free – Babelsberg 03.” Babelsberg 03 is a German football club located on the outskirts of Berlin, and the phrase is infamously associated with the entrance of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Although Stenny works with Dynamo, he points out key differences in how other Berlin-based football clubs, particularly Hertha BSC approach social issues.

“Hertha really has a straight line with racism, with anti-Semitism, with homophobia,” he said. “The management has a clear opinion, and this changes the fan culture. If the club is open-minded, the fans get more open-minded.”

At Dynamo, the shift has been slower. Anti-immigrant sentiment and nostalgia for old identities sometimes coexist with loyalty. He recalls how a Nigerian player was renamed by fans with a German nickname because they could not pronounce his last name. “Everybody loved him,” he said, “but I always had the feeling it was also a little bit of making a joke out of his name.”

“I would never say to an immigrant person, go to a BFC Dynamo game because there are a lot of far-right extremists,” he said. Germany has 84 million people, 25 million with immigrant backgrounds, yet many including AfD supporters resist diversity.

On the field, diversity is normal. “For players, migration is quite normal. If you want to play in a high-level club, you move from like Germany to England. Migration is part of the system,” he said.

In the stands, it’s different. “Nearly 100% of the fan blocs don’t reflect society. They are mainly heterosexual, white, male guys,” he said.

Berlin is composed of approximately 30% of immigrants but according to Stenny, that is not reflected at any of the clubs. “You will not find them [immigrants].  The stands don’t reflect the society and the migration part of society,” he said.

That disconnect between multicultural teams and homogenous fans is discouraging, yet Stenny hasn’t given up on the possibility of change.

He noticed a change in attendance following the pandemic, which excited him. “A lot of young people came to our stadium. With more people, for sure, more normal people also come to a game.” By “normal,” he means less aggressive than the traditional Dynamo supporters. Still, he admits hesitantly, “we are a club with a higher potential for making trouble.”

For Stenny, the problem isn’t always the fans, the club’s reputation follows them. “If we go for an away game, the police are always thinking, ‘Oh, Dynamo is coming. We must bring a lot of police.’ That makes away games more trouble than necessary. The image is also part of the problem,” he said.

That image, he adds, is difficult to change, though some clubs have shown it’s possible. “In some clubs, it comes from the top down. In others, like St. Pauli, it came from the fans themselves,” he said.  While Stenny is optimistic, he is also realistic about how deep tradition runs in the sport. “Football is a real heavy tradition in Germany. It’s hard to change something here in the football system.”

After the Syrian War in 2015, he claims that many clubs helped refugees, but momentum faded.

“If I watch the last five years,” he said, “not one of the big clubs is really taking care of this topic.”

Still, Stenny believes football still has the power to build acceptance, especially for immigrants. Once a fan of Dynamo’s chaotic culture, he now hopes that energy can fuel something more inclusive, a fandom that mirrors modern Germany rather than resists it. Whether that change begins from above or within the stands remains uncertain.

Regardless of what lies ahead, Stenny said he’s not going anywhere, determined to make diversity in the stands as visible as it already is on the field.

“Immigration will always be part of humanity. To accept this and show that it’s normal should also be one big value of the clubs.”