Podcast “Nymphe & Söhne”: Beyond left-wing moralism

The podcast “Nymphe und Söhne” provides clever and left-wing analyzes of everyday life. The program stands out positively from the crowd of new entertainment podcasts.

Abdul Chahin and Jean-Philippe Kindler, “Nymphe” keeps a low profile Photo: Nymph & Sons

Abdul Kader Chahin, Jean-Phillipe Kindler and “Nymphe” are the creators of the podcast “Nymphe and Sons”. It is described as “1 trash podcast” on the associated Instagram page.

Abdul is a poetry slammer and has written a book about German culture of remembrance. Jean-Phillipe, also a stage artist, has won numerous poetry slam and cabaret awards and is currently on tour with his program “Deutschland umtopfen”. Both regularly publish short videos on their respective Instagram pages in which they satirically dissect political topics.

“Nymphe”, whose real name is not mentioned in the podcast, runs the meme page “hinterhaltnymphe2” with more than twenty-five thousand followers. Once a week the three talk about pop culture, sexuality, depression, strikes and other things and observations from their everyday life. It’s fun to listen and let the stories wash over you.

However, the anecdotal stories about the tram ride or the last date always lead to sharp and theoretically trained analyzes of capitalism, patriarchy and the culture industry. With its critical content and lots of – sometimes more, sometimes less clever – jokes, the show stands out from the mass of entertainment podcasts that have literally flooded streaming portals like Spotify in recent years.

At the same time, the format breaks with the usual expectations of politically correct language and left-wing moralism. It is rightly criticized again and again that the social left is far too little represented in social media, while new-right influencers have been successfully serving this field for a long time. With their podcast and their social media appearances, the three of them close this gap a bit, without conforming to the cliché of lifeless academic links.