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This packaging is currently causing a stir.
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Cheese packaging with a variety of motifs is causing discussions online. Why the term "woke" has become a political controversy - and what's behind it.
"The absurdity of the debate can hardly be surpassed." This comes from a company that has had to deal with massive headwinds and threats in recent days - not because of faulty products, but simply because of the design of a limited-edition packaging that will disappear from the market in a few weeks' time.
The Bremen-based DMK Group had a special edition designed for its Milram cheese brand and, instead of the usual cow-and-pasture look, chose comics by three artists depicting people of different skin colors. Just as it looks in large parts of Germany.
Right-wing extremists quickly got down to business. The accusation: the pictures are "woke", they don't show society in this country. At least not the one they wanted. "It was what is traditionally known as a shitstorm," says Josef Holnburger, Managing Director of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (Cemas), which investigates radicalization tendencies and conspiracy narratives online.
Once again, a word that can apparently generate a lot of excitement plays a role: "woke". According to Holnburger, it has "already become a kind of fighting term".
The term (also as the noun "wokeness") can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century - at that time with a clearly positive meaning. In the culture of black Americans and later in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, being woke meant being vigilant against racism. In the context of the "Black Lives Matter" movement from the 2010s onwards, the term became relevant once again.
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At the same time, "woke" became very generalized by the right in the USA and later in other countries in the early 2020s. "Woke became a kind of general code for everything that these right-wingers think is wrong in society," says political scientist Floris Biskamp. He is leading a project at the University of Tübingen on the limits of what can be said in political discourse.
"Almost everyone who uses the term agrees that it describes something bad," says Biskamp. On the one hand, wokeness is used as a cipher for exaggerations in anti-racism, language considerations and identity politics, but on the other hand it is also used for relatively harmless things such as current cheese packaging. "The label "woke" is used for moderate left-wing or left-liberal politics in the mainstream as well as for some fringe craziness."
The accusation of too much diversity is not new. Companies have often wanted to use colorful advertising and people of different skin colors to make their brand appear modern and young.
Germany's Jonathan Tah wears the Adidas jersey with the number 4 on the back.
Christian Charisius/dpa
When Deutsche Bahn depicted travelers with a migration background in an advertising campaign in 2019, for example, the mayor of Tübingen and former Green Party member Boris Palmer caused a shake of the head with the question "Which society is this supposed to represent?".
A similar stir was caused last year with the German national team's jersey in pink and purple. Some people disliked the choice of color for the male-dominated sport. The design blurred gender boundaries and was "woke". But this obviously didn't catch on: the kit became a bestseller for outfitter Adidas.
As a rule, such a debate arises from the far right. One of the strategic goals is to generate excitement in order to supposedly remain relevant. Protagonists who were quick to accuse the Milram packs of "anti-white propaganda", for example, thrive on attracting a lot of attention. "That is their political and economic lifeblood," says political scientist Biskamp.
The Milram manufacturer locates the shitstorm "almost exclusively on platform X": this is "amplified by fake accounts and bots and clearly fed by the right-wing spectrum - including AfD support".
Political scientist Holnburger speaks of a right-wing scene on X, "which has played up the topic very strongly". According to him, the extreme right-wingers want to make everything "that somehow does not correspond to what they define as the normal image" invisible. "In addition to heterosexuality and whiteness, the aim is to push back all other social manifestations", such as queer or non-white people.
When a shitstorm of this kind erupts, "a company can and must put up with it, because a particularly active and loud group is stirring up a mood against minorities online", says Holnburger. Companies should continue to do what is right: reflect society in all its diversity.
This is also how the Milram manufacturer's statement reads: "What is defamed as "woke" in certain circles is simply a reflection of our society."
Researchers Biskamp and Holnburger believe that the behavior of the democratic parties is the decisive factor in whether such debates gain traction. For example, do conservatives and liberals embrace the outrage from the far right about alleged wokeness - and if so, how? Or do they simply say: "No, I don't have an opinion on this cheese."
In the end, the question remains: how many people actually get upset when they come across this pack in the supermarket? In any case, Milram is still seeing stable demand two weeks after the launch of the special edition: "Initial feedback from retailers confirms this: The edition is running unimpressed by the digital noise."
