After Corona and a year of war, our columnist feels like all of us: angry and tired. Time for some honest words.
By Mickey Beisenherz
So the four of us are sitting in my friend Alexander’s kitchen in Munich. The beer, wine and very good food feels like a death knell. Putin just sent his troops out. Is this actually the last time that we would sit here together like this? It wasn’t just a Russian-Ukrainian thing like in Crimea, no, this ignorance is over: “Now there is war in Europe.”
Annalena Baerbock states that we “woke up in a different world today”. Which sounds good, but is actually total nonsense. Sure, we woke up. But the world was like this before.
That’s the problem. That we didn’t necessarily want to have this assertive brown bear jockey with the nudist fetish as a neighbor, but to be honest: the protests against a World Cup in Russia in 2018 looked comparatively modest. Sure, Tiergarten, Navalny and Crimea. But we had enough problems of our own: We had Gauland, fine dust and a bad “crime scene” again and again.
The often insane, but then again and again ingenious beer stand Hegel Franz-Josef Wagner writes: “We Germans were spoiled, wrapped in peace wool. We thought we were happy.”
Just like when Trump was elected, my wife wakes me up early in the morning with a text message: “Missiles on Kiev.” Fuck. It’s like 9/11 back then. Is it possibly even worse? What will become of it?
An exhausted round at Anne Will’s on Sunday evening. Pale, empty faces. A clueless Karl Schlögel. My unshakable optimism gives way to deep exhaustion. I turn off the talk show. First time ever. The news fatigue of so many. I can understand you.
Omicron had just pulled through – don’t we deserve a little break, damn it!? It was already two years like a never-ending neck tension. Crises don’t just follow one another as if drawn on a string. Rather, they are a layered salad of terror. And all that just because this Russian giant asshole in the twilight of manhood doesn’t buy a motorcycle for his seventieth birthday like everyone else, but instead invades the Ukraine.
Afterwards, of course, everyone knew it beforehand
Merkel is being historically repositioned and trying to reinterpret her policy on Putin’s drip into something clever. It doesn’t quite catch on, and the chancellor’s always strangely hot Madonna worship is entering its cooling phase. “Mutti” lived on credit and we didn’t want to admit it.
Our life was cheap but damn expensive. People’s sport of backwards slyness. Afterwards, of course, everyone knew it beforehand. Schröder prefers to take over the dismantling himself and is gastronomically castrated in front of the disappointed public at least with a rigorous oat milk diet.
Selenskyj, just a failed anti-corruption fighter in his own country and “Let’s Dance” dance noodle, becomes an unnatural hero whose alleged weakness becomes a superpower: the actor knows how to communicate precisely and how to keep up the pressure of support in this oh-so-high-speed attention economy.
UN, Oscars, Berlinale. An unprecedented masterly performance, which is why it would not have been surprising if he had also been included in the political Ash Wednesday in Passau. He’s really everywhere. And he has to. The olive-colored T-shirt becomes a manifestation of postmodern resilience and is often worn by the likes of Elon Musk to camouflage their own hotness.
For weeks I almost stoically absorb the news. bombs. Destruction. Pay. facts. Then it breaks out of me while scrolling through my cell phone on the train. On Instagram then the sight of a shot girl named Polina. In the photo, the ten-year-old girl is smiling at the camera, holding a couple of colored stones in her hands.
Uncontrollable sobs. This futility. What the fuck is all this. And we’re not even in the middle of it. We only stand on the sidelines and deliver just enough for the territorial glutton to please give up on its plans to invade our doormat at some point.
Some things are almost comical: The Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania beams blue and yellow at the state parliament in solidarity, while the employees are trying in panic to patch the holes in Nord Stream 2. Symbolism we can. Maybe at some point it will work again with Russia.
Military experts are the virologists of the turning point
The brave Warner Karl Lauterbach sat on every talk show for two and a half years and sometimes had more presence than the Apple logo. Just when he has a new book to promote and needs publicity, war breaks out and suddenly he’s carted out of the studio for former NATO generals. What else should he tell us? That the fourth vaccination against the atomic bomb helps?
Military experts are the virologists of the turning point, Masala is the new Drosten, and if we keep our distance today, then at most to the Russians. Anyone who used to be able to list all the corona variants is now praying down the tank types like a Kama Sutra, and the way in which some in political Berlin abcult tanks – #freetheleopard – is strongly reminiscent of the vaccination euphoria of late 2020. War is the new pandemic. When does war become a military superspreading event?
What is too much to die for and too little to live for Ukrainians. When will the thin ice of non-participation in the war break? The Chancellor. A procrastinator. Or maybe just impressively resilient to the waves of anger and demands from the digital public.
Isn’t it good for fights now? What about negotiations? Is the war another marathon, a last effort? Everyone is stuck in the old tribalisms again, this hard to bear camp thinking. Old discourse templates, newly created: Those who didn’t think it was too stupid to divide the pandemic into Team Drosten or Team Streeck during Corona seamlessly continue this sound when it comes to “lumpen pacifists” and “warmongers”.
Open letters offensive like open pants
We haven’t learned anything. New gains boulevard theater every week. Stegner against Strack-Zimmermann. Wagenknecht against Major. Chrupalla versus Goering-Eckhart. New alliances and old certainties falling. Good Lula doesn’t like Ukraine at all. The evil fascist Meloni, on the other hand, does. And Reinhard Mey calls for a demo that the AfD would like to come to. Open letters offensive like open pants. After manifest comes off. Anxiety disguised as peace love.
If the concrete pacifists would just say frankly that they are scared, one would understand it. And truly, when has there ever been more cause for concern than in the face of nuclear threats? Pathos. Values. moralists. scruples. turnaround necks. We are engaged, angry, sad, tired and jaded. All at the same time.
Breaking Noise. push notification phobia. Nuclear threat nonchalance. escapism.
And the fact that I am suddenly interested in Iris Klein instead of Iris-T can safely be described as a symptom of a crisis.
A year. Only a year. On Saturday we will be sitting in this kitchen again. Maybe a little less depressed, exhausted, worried. That’s not a good sign.