Have you noticed? In Germany, the candles are running out. Because of the fear of the power failure. “Candle fever strikes as blackout-fearing Germans revive festive flames,” it said recently in the British newspaper Guardians. Here is the award-winning first sentence of the article: “Germans seek comfort in the warm yellow glow of flames at Christmas, while the revival of festive traditions combined with the fear of power outages are making candles the new object of hoarding.” That’s roughly the German translation. The text was written by an author with a pronounced German name. So what he writes could be true.
On the other hand, we immediately thought of Winnie the Pooh again. Because in AA Milne’s children’s book he goes in search of a Woozle, even though the Woozle doesn’t even exist. But as the bear Winnie trudges through the snow, he soon encounters his own tracks. “It has to be a Woozle,” he thinks, giving him proof that the Woozle exists.
After this Guardians many others then went in search of the topic with the candles. And, what can I say, they found what they were looking for. “Power failure: what should I definitely have at home?” she asked Worms newspaper. In the Neuss-Grevenbroich newspaper a hardware store manager reported that he was now buying hamsters for flashlights and batteries. And in the FAZ, the Frankfurt FDP city councilor Peter Thoma recommended: “Buy candles and schnapps and hope it doesn’t get that bad.”
If you say something enough times, it will be taken to be true
The journalist Norman Mailer once said that you only have to say something often enough for it to be considered true, and he even had his own word for it: factoid. The world is now full of such factoids, such as when – in the New York Times – people rave about the new favorite Italian dish: “Smoky Tomato Carbonara” or the word “Freudenfreude”, which is said to be well-known in Germany. It’s true that nobody in Germany speaks that way, and nobody in Italy would think of pouring tomatoes into their carbonara either, but who knows? It can still come.
There is a site on the Internet that has been dealing with modern myths, fairy tales and legends since 1994. It’s called Snopes.com, the team led by the American David Mikkelson is meticulously examining, for example, whether the custom of “crucifying Santa Claus” is actually maintained in Japan, as claimed on the Internet, or whether it is still practiced in China there are restaurants with dog meat on the menu on every street corner. (Answer: No, there isn’t.) “The nonsense comes faster than you can pump,” said David Mikkelson in an interview.
At the same time, such stories are of course an important cement for society. “If that Guardians reports that there is a shortage of candles in Germany, this follows a classic motive,” says the Regensburg cultural scientist Gunther Hirschfelder. “On the one hand there is the fear of losing control: winter and cold feed on primal human fears. On the other hand, it is emphasized: Look, the Germans aren’t doing any better than we, who left the EU and have quite a few problems. But: The Germans just know how to help themselves!” Already two years ago, the Guardians with an article that dealt with the (allegedly) “German” way of airing, achieved considerable success on the Internet.
As the “New York Times” declared the “Fraunhofer Schoppenstube” a top restaurant
The novelty value is important. That’s what they reported New York Times in 2010 that Munich’s “Fraunhofer Schoppenstube” is one of Germany’s top restaurants. One had never heard of this before, even in Munich. In 2019, it was then claimed in the same place that the whole of Germany was crazy about the fabric bag of a chain of bookstores, on which medieval characters formed a kind of secret code: “In Berlin, the bag is everywhere,” the American newspaper knew. “Anyone who has something completely new to tell,” says Hirschfelder, “increases their social capital.”
It is completely normal to have doubts at one point or another. For example, when the US-based Austro-German comedy duo Calvin and Habs recently claimed in a Tiktok video that there was a children’s book in Germany in which a tailor cut off a boy’s thumb with scissors (yes, there is! ), at least nobody wanted to believe that at first.
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico once said that “metaphysical truth” is enough to perceive a story as true. Facts are not that important. So don’t think about it too long, about carbonara with tomatoes, power failure and joy. In the long term, something really big could come of it. And now excuse us, please. We still have to go buy candles. Featuring our incredibly iconic tote bag.