Micky Beisenherz on the dichotomy between a happy spring mood, a pandemic and war. He wonders if it’s appropriate to joke in the current world situation.
At the loveliest place in Hamburg, the open ice skating disco in Planten un Blomen, gliding over the cold ground with your daughter laughing in the sun – lived ignorance? Brief happiness, a moment of deep humility in the face of peace, which, like an inherited fortune, we took for granted as a secure asset.
Recently, while walking through Berlin, I noticed a phenomenon so unusual that one would like to put it in the X-Files: Several strangers whom I met: SMILED. They smiled at me. Not far from Alexanderplatz. There, where human affection usually means being driven to the Charité with stab wounds. The smile is somewhat remarkable in Germany, or its capital, where the careworn, despondent face is a bourgeois factory setting. And evidence of a deep need for understanding.
Where a smile is as rare as a sidewalk without dog poo, the introverted city dweller capitulates and shows an open face in the helpless longing for friendly correspondence. We’ve come that far. The chirping of the birds. The warm spring sun that really hasn’t come a day too soon. “The sun laughs so maliciously on days like these,” remarked one of the less stupid German rap combos a few years ago.
These days remind me of March two years ago, when a still completely unpredictable disease called Corona shook us in our invincibility nimbus and buried many a regular café and relationships alive. Two years of pandemic didn’t wear me out like two weeks of war.
Total helplessness
Sure, staying at home against Covid helps. If the crazy tsar presses the red button in the Kremlin, vaccinations are no longer used. And this insanely tasteless being doomed to watch. Now I’m sitting here again. On this bench by the Rhine, stuff me with superfood and read. trivial literature. Substantial slips from my Teflon brain, since large parts are corrupted by the news situation. push notification phobia. As a hard-working buddy in the entertainment mine, I try to be as light-hearted as possible while acknowledging the facts.
What was right in March 2020 applies: anyone who doesn’t try to be cheerful now hasn’t understood the seriousness of the situation. The meme generation produces more or less funny pictures as a humorous vent to counteract one’s own helplessness. Ukrainian peasants towing Russian tanks with tractors, haha. Too soon? Counter-question: When exactly is humor about war appropriate?
Are the dead and injured worth less in, say, two years, so a few punch lines based on the now familiar horrors are okay? Twitter feed. A Russian helicopter is shot down. milliseconds of triumph. Did we just clench the winning fist? There are people right now who got into this war just as innocently.
“Wait a minute. In a few weeks, we won’t have to wear masks for the city center, we will have to wear helmets,” scoffs a young guy on the sidelines of our soccer game together. Chuckle and shrug. These really absurd dynamics that define these days. Christian Lindner from the FDP (!) praises renewable energy as “liberation energy”, the Greens applaud the increase in the defense budget in the Bundestag – and Putin unites the West. While we also meet this crazy Trump’s demand with the 2% NATO target on the side. The normative power of the factual.
Meuthen or Schwesig, as they squirm in the rhetorical shell game, to shake the tyrannical mustiness of the war criminal out of their clothes. Well, that’s kind of hilarious, isn’t it. “When the snow has melted, you can see where the shit is,” the great philosopher Rudi Assauer once said. He was never more correct than now.
Gerhard Schröder has an appointment with the boss and his wife is praying bent over Instagram, the Kremlin behind her. Why are we so mad at them anyway? Isn’t she a lot like us in this Mount Everest of narcissism, in her clumsy, desperate attempt to find the most postural pose possible in the face of all the madness online. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Saarland is standing in front of Saarland’s only gas station and complaining that the state is robbing the citizens, and you think to yourself: “The poor guy. He’s not only at war, but also in state elections.”
Luckily, before you make a complete fool of yourself, Julian Reichelt usually jumps to your side as a lightning arrestor and falls down even harder on some Shell gas station. It is comforting that NATO does not react immediately when Reichelt’s ex-boss Döpfner calls for immediate intervention in the conflict in a kind of government statement. Incidentally, this impressively proves that the now legendary “GDR authoritarian state” SMS at Stuckrad-Barre was probably more than an ironic text message between former friends. Anyone who postulates something like this obviously considers himself a kind of state leader.
Everyone wants to drain Putin, nobody wants expensive gas
Just as the disasters do not string together like a string of pearls, but form a layered salad of terror, we too are able to feel things parallel. Not even ranked by relevance. The pig in the Kremlin should suffer, by any means – but does the commute have to be so fucking expensive? Demos in all major cities. On the news, they say there were significantly fewer people than the week before. Putin’s plus is our habit.
My six-year-old daughter asks surprisingly soberly from the couch: “Daddy, at school someone says that there will soon be a war here too.” I weigh it down, explain that it’s not like that. And share with her the helpless longing for an answer. For someone who can assure us that everything will be fine. I hope that Prof. Carlo Masala at Lanz will please answer these questions, because I don’t have the answer either. Carlo Masala. The Lauterbach of War. Outside. That ignorant spring sun shining on the tread. And we’re all laughing on thin ice.