NAfter our interview with the television presenter Sophia Thomalla recently made some readers feel just as little upset in their intellectuality as the French intellectual nobility by Emmanuel Macron’s gutter language, today we would like, according to an old goalkeeper wisdom – “sometimes you have to walk a meter step left to be able to jump three spectacularly to the right ”- screw up to the highest heights of the philosophy of history.
Anyone who has studied knows, of course, that different explanations compete with one another for the passage of time. There is, for example, the unshakable optimism for progress, ideally embodied by the FDP. Although Dirk Niebel came after Karl-Hermann Flach and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Free Democrats did not allow themselves to be dissuaded from the belief that everything would get better and better and that there would be no need for bans, for example to protect the climate, because people will soon be inventing something anyway or discover what makes that superfluous.
The extended arm of the FDP overseas has long been the United States, which decades ago saw itself at the better end of history – only to be suddenly confronted with Donald Trump. This gave rise to other schools of the philosophy of history, such as the dialectical one that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Merz allegedly adheres to. According to this, 16 years of Merkel’s eclipse as well as the AKK and Laschet twilight were necessary for the CDU to finally see a light and to recognize that only the Sauerland could lead them to the sun, to freedom. Merz’s comeback has also called other interpretations on the scene: history repeats itself. Man does not learn from history. Everything was better before.
Markus Söder greets the marmot
The most powerful historical philosophy of our time is of course represented by the CSU. She thinks she is in an “endless loop”, as her chairman Markus Söder has complained about several times. To illustrate this, he referred to the film “And daily greetings to the marmot”, in which a character-complex Bill Murray like Söder gives everything to make people change their behavior, but also repeatedly grabs their teeth at them. The current reason for Söder’s impression is the corona pandemic. However, the CSU has been stuck in an endless loop for a long time. That was shown again in their annual review magazine, in which General Secretary Markus Blume did not conduct an interview with a perspective politician like Andreas Scheuer, but with the dead Franz Josef Strauss.
It is not much different for the Greens, however. After the nuclear phase-out decision in 2011, they considered themselves to be the final winners in history and now have to experience that terms such as “sustainability”, which they once and for all believed to have been clarified in their minds, are being debated anew, so – watch out, Educated citizens! – would be a déjà vu even for Thucydides. After the EU wants to classify nuclear power as sustainable, the defense companies are demanding the same for their product portfolio. Heckler & Koch pointed out: “It is our pistols that our police officers use on the street every day, it was our assault rifles that the Bundeswehr soldiers used to save people from the Taliban in Kabul in the summer.” that chemical weapons should be given special tax benefits – after all, they are organic.
By the way, an endless loop doesn’t have to be a bad thing, not even for Markus Söder. In any case, Bill Murray uses it in the film to gradually develop more empathy. In the end, however, it does not matter whether life, to speak with Nietzsche, is like the return of the same thing or whether, as Hansi Hinterseer says, “every day is like a new life”. In any case, Sophia Thomalla correctly stated in the FAZ interview: At some point everything will become routine.
Collected glosses. With a foreword by Greser & Lenz. Frankfurter Allgemeine Buch, Frankfurt a. M. 2021, 208 pp., Linen, hardcover 18, – €.
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