After a year and a half of the pandemic, we have now learned what Corona is.

We could have known what climate change is since the Kyoto Protocol.

But what exactly is a crisis?

The word crisis has spread in an inflationary manner.

We are talking about the corona crisis and the climate crisis.

Before that we had the refugee crisis, the euro crisis and the financial crises.

One is not over yet, the next one is already peeking around the corner.

Normality without a crisis no longer seems to be envisaged.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The “Handbook of Crisis Research” edited by the political scientist Nicole Deitelhoff explains: A crisis is an exceptional situation that has the potential for good or bad. From ancient times to the 17th century, crisis referred to the medical decision of life and death. Doctor and patient are empowered to act and can manage crises on their own initiative. This shows the core of the everyday saying of the "crisis as an opportunity". Since the 18th century the concept of crisis has spread imperially, extends from medicine and the art of warfare to economy, society and politics and penetrates everyday language: “I think I'll get the crisis.” Anyone who sees a crisis believes not a simple, linear history of progress, names historical periods of transition, uncertainty,of the decision, writes the historian Rüdiger Graf in the aforementioned manual.

The "Founding Crisis" of 1873 marked a temporary end to the liberal belief in progress and growth, comparable to the dot-com crisis at the turn of the millennium in 2000. The 1973 oil crisis suddenly made it clear to the world population that energy and resources are limited and that we should do well to use them efficiently to deal with.

Fortunately, the fact that there are absolute “limits to growth”, as the Club of Rome claimed at the time, has fortunately proven to be wrong.

Human ingenuity has defeated fatalism.

A distinction should be made between short-term catastrophes such as floods, bank rushes, refugee treks and long-term crises such as global warming, debt and migration, which can be traced back to rather long-term developments.

We are currently experiencing that long-term crises can lead to terrible catastrophes.

It is striking how people's attitudes towards crises changed in the 20th century. In the twenties, people saw the crises as a “necessary, cathartic transition stage on the way to a better future” (Rüdiger Graf), a positive signal of departure. Such progressive historical thinking has been turned into its opposite since the late 20th century. Today the crisis is experienced primarily as a deterioration. The belief that something can be made out of a crisis, true to Winston Churchill's motto “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, got itself into the credibility crisis. The crisis is no longer an appeal to the development of creative adaptive powers. It is now the signal for the impending apocalypse. We are on the verge of doomDepending on the crisis, it is the downfall of capitalism or the whole of humanity through unstoppable flows of refugees or climate collapse.