Every Monday, International mail invites you to discover an influencer. This week: Eva zu Beck. The Polish globetrotter is portrayed by the DOES. For the German daily, its adventures in dictatorships and conflict zones obscure the problems inherent in war tourism.
Every now and then I wonder what Eva is doing right now, especially on days like this when I’m sitting at my desk while the cold and Covid are outside. Last winter Eva was in Pakistan. The 2020 confinement, she spent on the island of Socotra, Yemen.
Eva is an ordinary girl, no more beautiful, intelligent, boring or genuine than any other, as she likes to recall. Describes herself as a bookworm, says she studied languages at Oxford [elle est originaire de Pologne, les vidéos sur sa chaîne sont en anglais], then worked in the European Parliament and in London.
Even if she lacked nothing, Eva was unhappy, and therefore decided – as always in this kind of story – to resign to devote herself to the journey. Today, the young woman is followed by more than 668,000 subscribers on Instagram and 1.33 million on YouTube, and leads her own team.
Its revenue comes from YouTube revenue and partnerships. Eva is an influencer. She also produces videos for the travel section of the German wave and for Turkish media TRT World, acquired from Erdogan. Eva laughs a lot in front of the camera, she poses in front of pretty landscapes and goes to meet the inhabitants of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and even Syria.
“As if the war had fallen from the sky”
In his video Syria Through the Eye of a Female Traveller [“La Syrie vue par une femme voyageuse”], we see Eva drinking tamarind juice in a market and marveling at the Syrian hospitality. We see her tasting an ice cream and being surprised to discover a Damascus “Full of life and colors”, so different from what usually show “The international media”.
She strolls through the streets, through the destroyed old town of Aleppo and the souk, to an ambient musical background. On the verge of tears, she makes a few comments: “I am in shock” Where “It does not matter our political affinities”. Then the speech gets deep: “We live and we build, and life goes on, and we rebuild.” Eva is enthusiastic as soon as she sees something beautiful, like this craftsman in the middle of the ruins that “Keep smiling despite everything”.
It evokes in a sibylline way the crisis, the tragedy, the war, using the same expressions as the regime of Bashar
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Ronya Othmann
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Founded in 1949 and led by a team of five directors, the DOES, a large conservative and liberal daily, is a reference tool in German business and intellectual circles. Over 300 editors and 40 correspondents at
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