Wieduwilts week: Yikes, my trust in Germany is gone !?

Everything used to be better: We were the land of order, technology and good humor! Well, never the latter, but the administration worked, we built the best cars. But we are no longer top. We are losers.

Germany is still climbing some records today, unfortunately sad ones: 100,000 corona deaths and the highest number of new infections since the beginning of the pandemic: 76,414 cases in one day. The intensive care units are almost full. Until spring, please postpone a heart attack and so on!

We failed. Why?

Angela Merkel’s otherwise taciturn husband Joachim Sauer explained this refreshingly bluntly last week: The Germans’ indolence in vaccination is partly due “in a certain laziness and laziness of the Germans”. The professor should know, after all, his wife owes 16 years of chancellorship to these people’s characteristics.

With Rudolf Steiner in the black sack

Refusing to be vaccinated actually seems to be a particularly German-speaking sport. There are of course more intelligent explanations for this than laziness and laziness. Above all, there are many explanations: In Baden-Württemberg, for example, a particularly large number of anthroposophists cluster around the clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. Every illness has its purpose in this crooked and stupid thought structure. For anthroposophists, it seems to be good and right if, by refusing to inject, forcing a few additional people to the artificial lungs or straight into a black sack.

Another factor is the Stasi experience in the East, a growing state mistrust, some see vaccination doctors actually as henchmen of modern Nazis. There is always a reason, also in Germany, by the way over a hundred years ago: In the German Empire it was a defiant reaction against the suddenly authoritarian science, even then the conspiracy theorists got together. There was no Telegram channel of an anti-Semitic vegan, but a magazine called “Der Impfgegner”, the principle was the same: a great self-fertilization of lies. Tenor: You can’t tell anything about the snuggly white coats! This sound is well known from Facebook comment sections.

Irrationalism, anti-modernity and a penchant for mysticism have an inglorious tradition in Germany. There are qualities that led us directly into the darkness of the Third Reich. When reading some letters to the editor from the anti-vaccination scene, Germany still feels like a cranky Druid nation that compulsively has to boil the fruits of the Enlightenment into a brown broth. Low body fat, a good immune system, anything helps better than a vaccine, at least it felt like it.

With the vaccination against God

If you look at the whole globe, the thing is more complicated than just German, like that FAZ illuminated: Superstition and belief can be closely related and this explains low vaccination rates among Orthodox, for example. “With the vaccination you mess up God in the trade”, the historian Heinrich August Winkler sums up the thinking – here, too, a bit like esotericists: The tube in the throat, people will somehow deserve it.

Whatever the case, the majority of Germans are pretty disappointed in their compatriots, but on the other hand: Anyone who has ever been to a gym or a subway cannot have had great expectations in terms of consideration, care and caution. Man cannot choose the society into which he is thrown.

But the shaking of confidence in Germany extends beyond fellow human beings into the economic sphere. What good times those were when you used to come back from vacation in some dirty country and enjoy the cleanliness, order, the coolest cars and the best hospitals in Germany!

Germany is a digital developing country

The disillusionment crept in. That was when, about 13 years ago in Kuala Lumpur, I realized that everyone on the monorail was staring at devices, not paper. At home, a conservative and also a little anti-modern fellow man wrinkled his nose at this travelogue. Typically uneducated Asians, that’s what he sounded like.

Today the situation has developed a little further, in the wrong direction: Germany is a digital developing country. Everything happens faster than you think, and that doesn’t just apply to pandemics. The hottest cars will be built in Brandenburg in the future, but the brand is American. American corporations also offer everything that makes up digital life, Chinese too – well, with dictatorial side effects. In Germany and the EU, the largest, most beautiful and filigree paragraphs are carved for this!

If the order were at least still at the core of the German brand! We Germans love to make rules. Because that is less work than real work. We’re not that good at keeping it. We are runner-up in tax evasion. Joachim Sauer’s reserved wife said In a recent interview this: “16 ethics councils and 16 data protection officers can be a hurdle in transnational research projects that at least makes the approval of research projects very tedious.”

The crematorium pauses for maintenance

The pandemic shows that in Germany every pot-hitting is more tightly organized than the pandemic. To this day, my vaccination certificate has never been properly checked and, as a rule, not at all. A shouted “Vaccinated, right?” is just not an exam. The result: these days you want to be everywhere, just not in a German emergency room. Crematoria work overtime, that’s German problem-solving – unless nobody is allowed to die right now, because the software has to be maintained in the crematorium. How do you maintain this software, in overalls and with a wrench?

Those who fly around abroad have significantly different experiences: They are checked, people wear masks, even over their noses, as if they were in a pandemic or something. Especially where you had to call the army to transport corpses. Bergamo was the ultimate mental inoculation to reason – one with national trauma as a side effect.

With the approaching change of government, the question arises: Can the traffic light repair the damaged trust in Germany? She wrote “Dare to make more progress” on the contract, after all. That is more than a bold Willy Brandt quote. It is the reference to the social liberal awakening from the “leaden Adenauer years”.

With Willy Brandt to identity

Back then it was certainly a distinctly different kind of lead feeling – and yet: The heaviness and slowness of the grand coalition on its last meters robs many citizens of their already fluttering nerves. Health Minister Jens Spahn, for example, encouraged the Germans on the way to the exit as if he were the terminator: Every German would be soon “vaccinated, recovered or died”. There are handkerchiefs in the toilet, you crybugs! Spahn is also – was? – against a compulsory vaccination.

With the Brandt quote, the traffic light has found its most urgent piece of the puzzle: an identity-creating story. This is more than marketing, such a narrative can hold red and green and yellow together, even if the content is bang – and it will. The traffic light now wants to set up a corona crisis team, finally. Even experts praise the fact that the coalition agreement is filled to the brim with lines on the subject of digitization and the German relationship to data. Socially, too, one dares to step out of the conservative embrace: The advertising ban on abortion is to be dropped and dual citizenship is to become possible.

Quiet doubts germinate in the German loser soul: At the moment, the government alliance wants to give itself a full ten days to examine further pandemic measures. It is not known whether the new virus variant, which is peeking boldly from the top of the continent in South Africa, has so much patience.

No 100 days grace period

Ten days is an eternity in a heated pandemic. And with the coalition agreement, the traffic light did not shine with digital alphabetism either: the name of the DGB chairman was found in the document data, which is usually neatly deleted. And the Greens tore themselves apart in a power struggle as if they were the CDU.

This alliance cannot hope for a 100-day grace period. She has to dare to progress faster.

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