It began, says Katy Lee, as a post-Brexit attempt to make Europe “less intrinsically boring” and to challenge the UK media narrative of the EU as “lots of old men like Jean-Claude Juncker taking decisions that you know could affect your life, but not how or why.”
At the same time, says Lee’s co-host, Dominic Kraemer, it was about “trying to get our head round how the EU institutions really work – and also how the politics in the member states work. I mean, I didn’t know anything about Belgian politics.”
But above and beyond all that, continues Lee, was a real desire to show that Europe “is not just about politics and regulations, but culture and people and amazing stories … We wanted to celebrate Europe, really, as genuinely fascinating.”
They had no idea whether there would be an audience for it. “Were there actually people out there who wanted to feel more interconnected, to spend time each week feeling a little bit more European?” asked Lee. “It turns out there were.”
Five years on, The Europeans, Lee and Kraemer’s joyously eclectic, intimate, quirky and invariably informative podcast has passed the 1m downloads mark, won awards and secured grants from assorted grateful European bodies.
Plenty of people, it seems, not just in Britain but across the continent and beyond, had been waiting for two breezy pro-European 30-somethings to find interesting new angles on the big stories, unearth lots of cracking little ones, studiously avoid the least hint of jargon, and just generally put a human face on Europe.
Lee, 35, a former Agence France-Presse journalist who has reported from a multitude of European countries and now lives in Paris, and Kraemer, 34, an opera singer who performs across Europe from his base in Amsterdam, first met at university in the UK.
“We lived next door to each other for a while,” says Kraemer. “Katy used to have a lot of loud parties.” Their long friendship is certainly part of the podcast’s secret: shared humour, comfortable banter, an easy understanding: well-informed chums, chatting.
Listeners often say “it feels like we know you”, says Kraemer. “Or, ‘listening to you is like hanging out with two people we know’.”
That lightness of touch, though, does not mean The Europeans is amateur hour. Lee trained as a radio journalist and admits she is “a total control freak” when it comes to production; reviewers, including the Guardian, have praised a reliably slick, highly professional operation.
Perhaps inevitably, Brexit was its trigger. Lee, who acquired French nationality in 2021, and Kraemer, who as the descendant of a victim of wartime persecution now has German citizenship, were born and grew up in Britain.
By 2016, both had established their lives on the continent. “And like a lot of people who consider themselves progressive, we were shocked, shaken, by the referendum result” says Lee. “We had both felt very comfortable considering Britain as a part of Europe.”
And then, suddenly, it became “very clear that half the country really didn’t feel the same way. We spoke a lot about why that was, and thought one reason was that so many people saw Europe as just this distant, faceless, bureaucratic, impenetrable thing. And part of the reason for that was the way it was portrayed in the media.”
So the pair – both self-confessed podcast nuts – began swapping WhatsApp voice messages, and gradually the idea emerged of a show that would somehow treat Europe differently. “We knew Europe wasn’t boring,” says Lee. “We wanted to show that, but in way that made it really accessible – by the way we talked about it.”
Since their first episode in November 2017, Lee and Kraemer – now joined by two producers, Katz Laszlo in Amsterdam and Wojciech Oleksiak in Warsaw – have covered everything from phone hacking in Hungary to sourdough in Paris, rain in Gothenburg, Russian propaganda in Moldova, the housing crisis in the Netherlands and the untold history of the Eurovision song contest.
They have explored healthcare scandals in Romania, rap in Catalonia, a dysfunctional airport in Berlin, books in Bulgaria, the pseudo-English spoken by Brussels, forests in Lithuania, crime in Malta, overtourism in Venice, megaliths in Sweden, artificial intelligence in Finland and an unsolved murder in Norway.
Along the way, they have looked, in depth, at the big stories – corruption in Hungary, abortion in Poland, immigration all over, the climate crisis, Angela Merkel’s legacy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cliffhanger elections in France, Italy, Germany – albeit rarely through the eyes of politicians, policymakers or analysts.
“I guess we just want to give people something they haven’t heard already,” says Lee. “It’s not really any more complicated than that. Also, our audiences are quite young, so we quite like to hear from people who are young, and who have direct experience of what we’re talking about. Not thinktankers.”
The pair realised they had struck a chord when emails began arriving from enthusiastic listeners saying they had “missed this so much, without ever knowing it”, or that The Europeans was “the 40 minutes each week when I feel truly European”. BuzzFeed featured them in its best podcasts of 2018; iTunes added them soon after.
These days, each weekly episode is downloaded by up to 30,000 listeners, with more diving into the archive, sometimes from the beginning. Hundreds provide core funding via Patreon donations, while grant givers such as the Allianz Kulturstiftung and the European Culture Foundation have funded series and specials.
Favourite stories range from the light-hearted to the emotional to the deliberately – if entertainingly – educational. “The other day, we had a Polish guy on who had just stolen a tram and driven it around his city. Brilliantly silly” says Kraemer. “But I also really loved an episode we did all about halloumi, when it was getting its protected designated origin status – so we dug into European regulations, but also learned all about the history of Cyprus, told through this cheese.”
One of Lee’s favourites is Josh and Franco, in which a father and son in southern Italy, both gay, “just sit down and talk about what that’s like, for like the first time in their lives, and it’s just really beautiful. Just a really frank, moving conversation about masculinity in southern Europe.”
Both still enjoy a mini-series called Bursting the Bubble, in which they try to figure out how European institutions work. It was timed for the 2019 EU elections, the last, says Lee, in which she would be able to vote as a British national, “but also the first, because – and I’m not proud of this – I hadn’t before”.
So it was “important for me to go on this adventure, take listeners along, hopefully not put them to sleep, just try to explain – but in a non-boring way. We still get emails from teachers thanking us for that series: they use it in class. Because we may be pro-European, but we’re certainly not uncritical.”
The podcast’s critical and popular success has “kind of surprised us”, says Lee. “I mean, that we’re still here, five years later. But it’s also really warmed our hearts and made us feel more optimistic about the future of Europe. So many lives, so many differences, and so many similarities. Just so many amazing stories, really.”
