Marie Sophie Hingst

Marie Sophie Hingst (20 October 1987 – 17 July 2019) was a German historian and blogger living in Ireland who falsely claimed to be descended from Holocaust survivors. Born in Wittenberg to a Protestant family, she fabricated a Jewish background and sent documentation for 22 misrepresented or non-existent relatives, who she claimed had died in the Holocaust, to the official memorial Yad Vashem. Hingst maintained the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, where she wrote about her supposed Jewish background and identity, along with her experiences as a German expatriate in Ireland; the blog received hundreds of thousands of views, and she was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by the Die Goldenen Blogger [de] (Golden Bloggers) association.

Throughout her life, Hingst falsified much of her background, connections, and achievements. She claimed to have a background in sex education, having purportedly founded a hospital in New Delhi and worked as a sexologist to refugees in Germany. Hingst used her fraudulent credentials to receive awards and recognition; alongside her "Blogger of the Year" recognition, she wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit, was awarded one of the winners of the 2017 Financial Times Future of Europe project, and held positions of prestige in Jewish communities across Europe. In June 2019, the Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry [de] exposed Hingst's claims as false with the assistance of a team of historians and archivists. She was castigated in the German media and stripped of her reputation.

Hingst committed suicide on 17 July 2019 at the age of 31. Her fraud and death attracted attention across Europe. German and Irish coverage of Hingst differed, with German coverage focusing on the extreme sensitivity of the subject she had lied about and how she should have been stopped earlier, while Irish coverage focused on her mental health and accused Doerry of ignoring her vulnerability. She was compared to other women who had been uncovered as misrepresenting their backgrounds, such as Anna Sorokin and Rachel Dolezal; the particular similarity between Hingst and Dolezal, as people who claimed to have faced ethnic discrimination, sparked discussion of the role of identity politics.

Marie Sophie Hingst was born 20 October 1987^[1] in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany.^{[2][note 1]} She grew up in a college-educated family from a Protestant Christian background; her grandfather was a pastor. Hingst attended high school in Dessau and studied history in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin, where she moved in 2013.^[4] She attended Trinity College Dublin, where she completed a PhD in history; from 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.^[5] In 2013, she founded the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, where she wrote about her life as a German expatriate in Ireland and her purported Jewish background and identity.^[6][7] Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that it had 240,000 "regular readers", and Hingst was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by the Die Goldenen Blogger [de] (Golden Bloggers) association.^[7]

Hingst had no Jewish ancestry on either side of her family. She claimed her mother was a French-Israeli Médecins Sans Frontières worker who committed suicide when Hingst was 16, and that her Gentile birth mother was her stepmother. She additionally constructed a Jewish background for her paternal grandparents, describing them as Holocaust survivors whose parents perished in the genocide.^[4][6] Hingst reported 22 alleged Holocaust victim relatives to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial; most of these people were later determined to have never existed, and the remainder to not have been persecuted or killed in the Holocaust. According to later reports, she constructed this backstory shortly after her move to Dublin.^[4]

As well as constructing a backstory of descent from Holocaust survivors, Hingst fabricated several life accomplishments. She stated on her blog that in 2007, at the age of 19, she had founded a hospital in New Delhi that treated patients and provided sex education. This purported accomplishment led to her writing for Die Zeit about her experiences under the pseudonym Sophie Roznblatt.^[4][8] Her purported experiences providing sex education included working as a consultant at a doctor's office in Wittenberg, where she specialized in responding to anonymous sexual education questions from refugees. These claims were repeated uncritically by sources such at the feminist theory book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal, published in 2019 by Verso Books.^[9]

In addition to her "Blogger of the Year" award and Die Zeit publication, Hingst was awarded a winner of the Financial Times Future of Europe project in 2017. Her winning essay, "Europeans should not abandon a collective identity", was published on the website.^[5][10] In her acceptance speech, she referred to her Jewish family.^[6] She was a panel moderator for meetings of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a member of Trinity College's Jewish Society, and prior to 2019, an employee at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg [de].^[4] In 2018, Hingst started a viral Twitter hashtag called #KunstGeschichteAlsBrotbelag ("art history on a sandwich"), based around replicating famous artworks and historical photographs with food.^[11][12] Following the hashtag's popularity, she published a photo-book on the subject in March 2019.^[2][13][14] At the time of the Der Spiegel publication in June 2019, she was working at Intel in Dublin as a self-described "disruptor", a role she ascribed to her success on social media.^[6][15]

Suspicions were first raised about Hingst's claims in 2018 by the historian Gabriele Bergner [Wikidata]. Working alongside a lawyer, an archivist, and a genealogist, she created a mailing list examining the details of Hingst's blog posts with other researchers. That December, Bergner contacted Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry [de] with her impression that Hingst was misrepresenting her background. Throughout the first half of 2019, research by Bergner, Doerry, and archivists from the Stadtarchiv Stralsund led to the conclusion Hingst's claims of descent from Holocaust survivors were fraudulent.^[4]

In June 2019, Doerry published The Historian Who Invented 22 Holocaust Victims, an exposé of Hingst's claims, on Der Spiegel in German and English. The story chronicled the research on Hingst that found she had falsified her Jewish background, her claims of providing medical treatment in India, and her supposed sex education outreach to refugees in Germany.^[4] The Der Spiegel piece was picked up by other news outlets across the DACH countries; Der Tagesspiegel compared her to Russian-American con artist Anna Sorokin,^[2] while Neue Zürcher Zeitung discussed the implications of the case for editorial reliability, noting her publication in Die Zeit and referencing that Der Spiegel had themselves been taken in by the fraudulent journalist Claas Relotius the preceding year.^[16]

Hingst took down her blog and retained legal counsel, who made a statement to the press that Read On, My Dear, Read On "claimed a significant degree of artistic freedom".^[17] In a statement to The University Times, she "strongly den[ied] all accusations" by Der Spiegel and said she had "never falsified anything".^[18] Die Zeit retracted her article; other organizations that had granted her platforms, such as Südwestrundfunk and Deutschlandfunk Nova, similarly retracted support of her.^[8] She was stripped of her Goldene Blogger prize.^[19] A German Wikipedia article was created, describing Hingst as a "blogger and fraudster."^[6]

Weeks after Doerry's piece was published in Der Spiegel, Derek Scally [Wikidata] of The Irish Times interviewed Hingst with a view towards publishing an article on her. Scally found Hingst emotionally distressed and struggling to handle the negative attention placed upon her by the international coverage of her fraud. He described her as "agitated and wounded, yet intelligent and even humorous"; she stated she had been "skinned alive" by Doerry's piece, painted as fraudulent by the media while continuing to hold to the background and accomplishments she had presented on her blog. Scally informed his employers and Doerry that he was uncomfortable writing about Hingst for The Irish Times; he feared further publications would jeopardize her mental health, and worried he might be the last person to see her alive.^[6]

Hingst was found dead in her Dublin apartment on 17 July 2019 at the age of 31.^[20] Her death was ruled a suicide.^[21]

Weeks after her death, Scally published an article for The Irish Times on his interview and interactions with her mother Cornelia leading up to her death. Cornelia described her daughter as possessing "many realities, and I only have access to one". Doerry spoke to The Irish Times under the promise his statements would not be published; he instead dictated a one-line statement that "Der Spiegel will not comment on the article and regrets the death".^[6] Doerry soon after published Why I Was Right to Report on Marie Sophie Hingst's Lies for Der Spiegel, where he analysed Hingst's death and the public reaction and concluded his reporting was necessary to prevent a "mockery" of Holocaust victims.^[22]

The difference between the Irish and German coverage of Hingst's fraud and death attracted media attention across Europe. Jennifer McShane, writing for the Irish IMAGE Magazine, criticised Der Spiegel for apparently failing to recognize Hingst's mental health issues while describing Scally's piece for The Irish Times as "compassionate and moving".^[23] Avner Ofrath of the Switzerland-based European Journalism Observatory highlighted the enormity of Hingst's fraud, criticising Anglophone writers who attacked the severity of the German coverage for not realizing how offensive her claims were in Germany. He particularly spoke against commentators who had ascribed Doerry's coverage of the case in part to having lost relatives of his own in the Holocaust, describing the attempts to draw such links as "reveal[ing] an astonishing lack of sensitivity".^[24] Annika Schneider of Deutschlandfunk summarized the different Irish and German perspectives on the case as the German media focusing on how Hingst should have been stopped from her fraud, while the Irish media focused on her as a person and the intensity of her psychological distress.^[25]

The coverage of Hingst's life and death raised questions of journalistic ethics. In response to Scally's determination to remain in contact with Hingst's mother after the interview, the German professor of journalism Klaus Meier [de] lauded his ethical commitment but deemed it a level of emotional labour that would not be possible for every case. He also discussed the significant concerns raised by reporting on a mentally vulnerable person. In Hingst's case, Meier and Schneider justified these reports in the public interest; Schneider noted that due to the extent of the fraud, it would not have been possible to anonymize the fraudster.^[25]

Other discussions of the case revolved around Der Spiegel's own history of fabrication. Claas Relotius had then-recently been fired from the publication for the falsification of at least fourteen articles; critics accused the focus on Hingst of being an attempt to launder the magazine's image. Doerry responded to these challenges by noting the prior researchers who had also uncovered her fraud, and said he specifically had been sought out for his previous work on similar cases.^[22][24] Relotius had himself been the subject of arguments that the perpetrators of such fraud cases are unable to withstand the criticism they receive when uncovered. Christian Vooren, writing for Der Tagesspiegel, compared their situations in his obituary for Hingst; he similarly felt that the nature of the situation made reporting necessary, but quoted Cornelia Hingst's accusation that Doerry had not "seen the person behind the facts" when writing his exposé.^[26]

In a column for the left-wing newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Carolin Emcke was critical of the German coverage while simultaneously recognizing the co-existing duty of care to Holocaust victims. She posited that the situation had no easy outcomes, being deeply regretful of Hingst's suicide, but also concerned about the harm her fraud had done to living Holocaust survivors and the memory of the victims.^[27] Scally and Emcke both attended Hingst's burial, hosted by Lea Rosh, the non-Jewish^[28] chairwoman of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, who wrote an obituary describing Hingst as a close friend who was unable to bear the media "shitstorm".^[1]

The identity politics element of Hingst's claims has been the subject of discussion. Writing for Die Welt, Anne Waak [de] compared Hingst to Rachel Dolezal, a former activist who falsely claimed to be of African-American descent. Waak posited that both womens' frauds were representative of an essentialist understanding of guilt and victimhood. By claiming to be members of marginalized groups, Hingst and Dolezal were able to present themselves as "authentic" experts on discrimination, and speak with a cultural cachet that under identity politics they would not have otherwise received.^[29] Ofrath too compared Hingst and Dolezal, but more cuttingly. He referred to Hingst's narrative as "wrought with clichés and basic inconsistencies", and stated it was a low-quality misrepresentation of the European Jewish experience. By contrast, he referred to Dolezal as having a strong commitment to her black identity. From Ofrath's perspective, Hingst was a superficial fraudster with little interest in or knowledge of Jewish life; he took offence at her claims most strongly because of her superficial understanding of European Jewry and lack of significant research into the subject.^[24]