Marie Sophie Hingst (20 October 1987 – 17 July 2019) was a German historian and blogger 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 were Holocaust victims, to the official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.
Hingst maintained the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, writing about her supposed Jewish background and identity, along with her experiences as a German expatriate in Ireland, where she moved in 2013. The blog received hundreds of thousands of views, and she was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by Die Goldenen Blogger (The Golden Bloggers).
Throughout her life, Hingst falsified much of her background, connections, and achievements. She claimed a background in sex education, having purportedly founded a hospital in New Delhi and worked in sex education outreach to refugees in Germany. Hingst used her fraudulent credentials to gain awards and recognition; alongside her "Blogger of the Year" recognition, she wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit, and was one of the winners of the 2017 Financial Times Future of Europe project. In June 2019, Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry exposed Hingst's claims as false with the assistance of a team of historians and archivists. She was castigated in the German media, leading to the destruction of her reputation.
A month after Doerry exposed her, 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: the former focused on the extreme sensitivity of the subject she had lied about and how she should have been stopped earlier, while Irish media lamented 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 Delvey 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 in such claims.
Early life, blogging, and career
Marie Sophie Hingst was born on 20 October 1987 in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony-Anhalt in what was then the German Democratic Republic (present-day eastern Germany). She grew up in a university-educated family from a Protestant Christian background; her grandfather was a pastor. After graduating from the Liborius-Gymnasium in Dessau, Hingst studied history at university in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin, where she moved in 2013. She attended Trinity College Dublin, where she completed a Ph.D.; from 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. 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. Hingst was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by Die Goldenen Blogger (The Golden Bloggers), and Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that Read On, My Dear, Read On had 240,000 "regular readers".
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 non-Jewish 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. Hingst reported 22 relatives who had allegedly died in the Holocaust 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 from a Jewish background or not to be Holocaust victims. According to later reports, she constructed this backstory shortly after her move to Dublin.
The contents of Read On, My Dear, Read On detail this supposed family history. Hingst claimed that her paternal grandparents were each the sole survivors of their families; her grandfather was purportedly the youngest of five sons, and her grandmother the youngest of five daughters, both of whom lost their parents and older siblings in the Auschwitz concentration camp. She gave specifics of when many of her relatives had been murdered that contradicted historical dates, such as reporting the deportation of her great-grandfather and his family as occurring in February 1940, when deportations of Jews to Auschwitz only began in March 1942. Hingst's statements were at times inconsistent with each other; her claims about how many relatives were murdered differed between her blog and her Yad Vashem statements. A focus of the blog was her grandmother, whom she presented as a strong-willed woman who rejected "the constraints of Jewish tradition". Hingst's grandmother reportedly ran yearly summer tea parties for fellow Auschwitz survivors in Germany; Hingst, as a child, was said to have arranged invitations for such events and sat in on them to listen to the narratives of the guests.
This backstory was not the only focus of the blog. When the Turkish-German journalist Deniz Yücel was imprisoned in Turkey in 2017, Hingst sent him daily postcards expressing her support. She posted scans of each postcard on Read On, My Dear, Read On, and kept copies for herself, which she gave to Yücel after his release. Hingst also wrote to Meşale Tolu, another German journalist imprisoned in Turkey along with her young son.
Hingst additionally 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 provided sex education. This purported accomplishment led to her writing for Die Zeit about her experiences, under the pseudonym Sophie Roznblatt. Her purported experiences providing sex education included working at a doctor's office in Wittenberg, where she specialized in responding to anonymous sexual education questions from refugees.
In addition to her "Blogger of the Year" award and Die Zeit publication, Hingst was 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 their website. In her acceptance speech, she referred to her Jewish family. At various points, 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 an employee at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. 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. Following the hashtag's popularity, she published a photo-book on the subject with DuMont Buchverlag in March 2019. The book was commercially successful. 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.
Suspicions were raised about Hingst's blog posts by readers, who noticed "inconsistencies" in her claims. In 2018, the historian Gabriele Bergner, working alongside a lawyer, an archivist, and a genealogist, examined the details of Hingst's blog posts with other researchers. That December, Bergner contacted Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry with her impression that Hingst was misrepresenting her background. Doerry, whose grandmother Lilli Jahn had herself been murdered at Auschwitz, was sought for his experience in this area; he had helped expose Wolfgang Seibert, a leader in Pinneberg's local Jewish community, as the perpetrator of a similar fraud the year before. Research by Bergner, Doerry, and archivists from the Stadtarchiv Stralsund throughout the first half of 2019 led to the conclusion that Hingst's claims of descent from Holocaust survivors were fraudulent.