10:01 a.m.: Writer warns of social long Covid
The writer Volker Demuth (60) observes a “cultural and social long-covid”. This deep structure of the pandemic is being neglected, said Demuth on Monday on Deutschlandfunk. In the medical sense, Long-Covid means the long-term consequences of a corona infection, some of which last for months and massively restrict physical and mental health.
The author explained that life during the pandemic will primarily be treated as a biological reality. There is a lack of knowledge “that these deaths require a social gesture”. Death has been made “a purely private matter”: “No large, collective experience is permitted,” but it would have to be shaped through the media or government initiatives. He considers it an important task “that we find collective mourning rituals that make it possible to experience that private pain is embedded or surrounded by a society that perceives personal grief and expresses it in the form of empathy”. In view of more than 100,000 corona deaths, it is a matter of “millions of suffering,” warned Demuth. At the same time, a “new inability to mourn” appears. One reason for this is that politics is “trapped” in a “glorious modern story of progress”. There is no place for grief – pausing, dysfunctional, melancholy -. “A society that stubbornly stubbornly follows the formula ‘we have to look ahead now, we have to move on’ ‘doesn’t need that.” He called on art, philosophy and cultural studies to make a contribution and to think in directions “which lead us away from the dominance of the biological-medical interpretation of our situation”.