The mood was merry four years ago at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Donald Trump had just spoken about how successful his government was, and the assembled diplomats laughed heartily.

Trump continued to speak and warned Germany that it was becoming dependent on Russian gas.

Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas turned up the corners of his mouth and shook his head in disbelief.

Today we know that Trump wasn't wrong back then.

Patrick Bernau

Responsible editor for business and "Money & More" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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It has happened more often in recent years that Germany is wrong.

This time there is a new term for it, Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks of a "turning point in time": "The world after is no longer the same as the world before." But the fact that everything is suddenly different than before is not a new phenomenon.

It was rarely about war, but it cannot be denied: the history of the past 15 years is a history of crises.

Before the Ukraine crisis came Corona.

The pandemic, in turn, almost seamlessly replaced the great drought in the public debate, during which everyone remembered the climate crisis.

And behind the country at that time were already the Syrian refugee crisis, the euro crisis and of course the financial crisis.

Six major crises in 15 years.

The next crisis always attracted everyone's attention, because the country was always completely surprised by the new developments, it always concentrated on the new problems, corrected its course - and forgot to look at the next problems because of the sheer concentration.

Germany was never well prepared.

There were always warnings.

Not always many, but a few.

Before every crisis.

They just weren't heard.

"People rolled their eyes"

It was June 2015, in the middle of the euro crisis.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras refused the reforms that other euro countries wanted to see for their money.

Every few days, the heads of government met in night sessions.

It was still unclear whether the eurozone could be kept together.

In her press conference after an EU summit, Chancellor Merkel spoke about something completely different: the refugee issue.

Merkel called it "the biggest challenge that I have seen in my term of office with regard to the European Union" - i.e. bigger than the euro crisis.

Even remembering the episode, the exact quote is not easy to find today.

Nobody talked about it for long.

Nobody believed her.

The journalists thought the sentence was a red herring.

Also in 2015, Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, billionaire, stood before entrepreneurs and said: "If something kills over ten million people in the next few decades, then it will most likely be a highly contagious virus and not a war." scared world.

Even before the Corona outbreak, Bill Gates' "Ted" talk was viewed more than 2.5 million times on the Internet.

Despite this, no one was preparing for a new pandemic.

The German administration even slept through getting the supplies of medical material, as they had planned to do in their emergency plan.