She looks straight into the camera, her hair tied back in a loose ponytail, her chin slightly raised. The photo is black and white. The young woman looks confident, determined, assertive. And no one seems to know who she is.
But it is clear who she is for: Lena Berger, as her profile on X is called, writes on the platform repeatedly for the liberation of Ukraine, criticizes arguments that she sees as pro-Putin or pro-Russian, and shares reports and podcasts. She repeatedly clashes with accounts with different positions. But she particularly often takes aim at one man: Johannes Varwick.
500 euros for proof that it exists
He is a professor of international relations and European politics at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and advocates on X, for example, not to “defame” the BSW as being close to Putin, to turn to “attempts at political solutions in Ukraine beyond simple-minded militarization,” or to look for an end to the war that “also protects Russia’s core interests.”
The dispute between the two has been simmering for some time. It became even more explosive due to an action by Varwick, which apparently led to him being reported. On Monday, he accused Berger of “constantly and inappropriately” defaming and delegitimizing other opinions about the war in Ukraine. One could do that, but it was not clear from her profile “that ‘Lena Berger’ is a real person.”
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Because bot profiles are a fundamental problem in so-called social media, he wants to donate 500 euros to a good cause and apologize if Lena Berger’s existence as a real person can be proven. “If not, there is a problem here and one could take the case pars pro toto to characterize the functional logic of social networks,” on which there are numerous troll profiles, Varwick wrote.
Other users quickly accused him of doxxing (i.e. publishing personal data online), and thousands expressed their solidarity with the profile criticized by Varwick, especially via the hashtag #IchbinLenaBerger. Among the supporters was CDU foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter, who thanked Berger for “his clear stance, his tremendous support for Ukraine and his clever posts.”
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Some users even interpreted the announced reward of 500 euros as a call to commit a crime. Berger herself said she filed a complaint shortly after Varwick’s post. “I will not accept that my personal safety is put at risk by offering a ‘bounty’,” she wrote.
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This dispute was preceded by a ten-part thread in which Lena Berger accused the publisher of the weekly newspaper “Der Freitag”, Jakob Augstein, of giving pro-Russian authors, including Varwick, too much space in the newspaper and on the website Freitag.de. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Varwick had published ten articles in “Freitag”, in which he called, among other things, for the war to be frozen.
Augstein himself has also repeatedly called for a ceasefire in Ukraine, saying in a discussion with RTL political editor Nikolaus Blome that the Ukrainian soldiers killed were ultimately “our dead” because we supported them with weapons. “They would not be killed to the same extent if we did not supply the weapons.” Blome was visibly trying to keep his composure at times. “Augstein, it is really hard to listen to you. You are Moscow’s fifth column,” he said. The Ukrainians cannot be expected, said Blome, to hand over a fifth of their territory to a regime that fires rockets at children’s playgrounds. If anyone can end the war, it is Putin.
