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It is a working principle of the authority that errors are not expected at all. This principle is justified by the excellent organization of the whole, and it is necessary if the utmost speed of execution is to be achieved
, wrote the Austrian writer Franz Kafka in 1922 about the German Ministry of Health in particular and about the reign of Angela Merkel in general, in his novel "Das Schloss", in which every connoisseur nothing less than the blueprint and the future draft for the Berlin Republic sees.
Of course - I beg you, I'm a journalist - I haven't the slightest idea why Kafka was able to do that 98 years ago, but at least: This is the last day of a year in which I can still start the article, because in someone else will presumably be Chancellor for exactly one year.
Everything changes, just as there were other, not exactly pleasant, castles in front of Kafka Castle for me.
Source: Don Alphonso
You know, people on the internet sometimes ask what the first phone would have been - that says something about how old you are.
The Deutsche Bundespost rented the devices when I was young.
They were all very similar and equipped with a dial;
that would make it difficult to give a more precise date here.
I am therefore saying that I do not come from the time of the rotary dial, but from the time of the lock on the rotary dial.
Today, Wikipedia lies that local calls were "cheap" at 20 pfennigs until the 1980s - 20 pfennigs were definitely worth it back then, and the lock on the rotary dial ensured that no one would be safe for a couple, even in better families Words on the phone spent that quickly added up and regularly put blame on the monthly bill.
It would have seemed completely absurd to call a friend who lived 300 meters away: Back then, you rode your bike at the permitted times, rang the bell and asked if you - please!
- should speak to the friend.
At the friend's, the phone had a green velvet cover in addition to the lock.
With a light green border so that it matched the color of the interior.
That's how it was back then.
Source: Don Alphonso
And even with that I was in a certain way privileged, as I had to realize three years ago.
At that time I was cycling in beautiful Italy with a friend who came from East Germany.
At the time, he was unlucky enough to be one of the last cohorts to be drafted into the NVA, and at the same time was lucky enough to get a telecommunications unit.
There, he told me, he was privileged because the lowly officers wanted to call their friends outside on Friday.
Of course, they did not have their own telephone, because the new person in the GDR did not need any private luxury, but they did need a phone booth nearby.
The friend came to her at the previously agreed time.
And calls to this phone booth from the barracks were only made through my acquaintance, who - as a trained GDR citizen - operated a kind of privilege trade in order to establish the right connection with the officers: Calls to the girls in return for preferential treatment for food Example.
Source: Don Alphonso
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If I remember correctly, our rotary lock went away when I was about 12.
For many in the GDR, there wasn't even a rotary dial that could be locked, which is why you risked your career in the NVA for a phone call.
This story is as far away for the youth of today as the anecdotes from Stalingrad were for the youth of yesteryear, and I assume that a life with the telecommunication possibilities of my youth is as unacceptable for the youngsters as living in a frozen shell hole under fire the Red Army appears: one is simply used to something different and considerably more privileges.
This goes so far that a call with an unknown number is no longer accepted and the landline network is considered superfluous.
Source: Don Alphonso
I think this change is not bad at all, because 1. One could perhaps explain to the boys that under socialism they have to be robbed of their human rights by NVA grinders, only so that the officers can then call the girls while they assemble instead of Tetris playing the Kalashnikov.
Wall murders are a long time ago, but the lack of cell phones in socialism should convince the boys of the need to move Stalin's remaining henchmen to the uranium mines ... where was I ... oh, and 2nd: After I got my first posts for American media on I wrote on my typewriter and then sent it by post, had films developed and learned how to edit interviews on the tape machine, which was already antiquated at the time, I am also glad that my life was made easier.
You are reading a text at noon today that I wrote that night at 1:31 a.m., and in the morning it went from Bavaria to Berlin with all the pictures.
That's great.
And I also know how great it is because I was there when it wasn't.
The sure expectation that the future holds many great things in store is one of the privileges that unites us all, poor and rich.
Some are looking forward to the new full-frame camera with GPS and WLAN, and as a child of the economical dial lock, I am happy that new buyers are squandering their old Panasonic G3 and G5 and Olympus Pen E-P3 for less than 100 euros.
Source: Don Alphonso
In my youth, pay TV was still considered too expensive, today you have to have Netflix, Prime, Spotify and a lot more to be able to join in with what soup.
It was the first time I sat in a jet after graduating from high school, and the flight was so expensive that it took me three weeks to work in the factory.
Graduation gifts were as unusual back then as the completely normal graduation balls today.
If you wanted to travel when you were young, you should first take a bike or Interrail.
My memories of the skiing holidays at that time are fantastic, because back then they just put a blue helmet with gold stars on me and gave me a good push on the Plose at the top - then downstairs, I carachioedly mowed down the line at the lift where you could Racing driver Biberl laughed at me.
Nobody bothered when you drove through forest aisles, from time to time there were avalanche deaths and many skis were no longer found after jumping from huts after severe overestimation of themselves.
In a ski hut near Fieberbrunn there was the custom of throwing the used, damp teabag on the ceiling in the expectation that it would stick.
If he didn't, he would fall down and onto others, for whom it was part of it.
Straw rum was a staple food back then, ski passes were cheap, the slopes hardly worked, and most of the accommodations were so rustic and natural that today's people would have run away screaming.
At least in Bavaria it was mass fun and national sport.
Ski gymnastics came on television, Franz Klammer moderated and Max Greger played.
Today they do finger gymnastics on the mobile phone and give others a guilty conscience.
Which brings us to the actual topic after just 7400 characters of lengthy introduction.
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Because we are currently experiencing a violent spiral of intervention in this Kafka Festival, which is of course caused by a virus from China and, in its implementation, turns some basic securities into a ban-crushed pulp of new impossibilities.
The new Bond film cannot be shown due to a lack of cinemas.
You can't just escape the cold and short days by plane.
For an indefinite period of time, children will not be cared for by government agencies as usual and educated.
Lots of unproductive bullshit jobs are currently not needed, reading trips by young authors are wasted, and until we older ones have been vaccinated - with not even bombproof results - I'll probably write the year-end article for 2021. So far, wishes and dreams, expectations and goals had a future as an object that did not defend itself against exaggerated fantasies.
The future somehow came with a present that one might like: Maybe there was only 28 square meters of living space instead of 228, but the course of time provided the iPhone X and 5G and constantly new opportunities in the service sector.
Skiing in St. Anton has become a bit mundane when you can also be in Hong Kong, Sharm al-Sheikh or Kuala Lumpur.
Anyone who recognizes the aircraft models by the vibrations of the engines from childhood will perceive tobogganers running up the mountain in the Bavarian Prealps as questionable forest rascals until 2019.
With Airbnb you got apartments all over the world, and you didn't have to rely on an obscure local area, whose retarded residents were rejected for lack of space and a sense for new times.
Source: Don Alphonso
The world of German children has evolved: from a pre-announced overseas call to a global all and that immediately and for dirt cheap money.
You come from the middle class and move to a flexible existence with little disruptive luggage - what is important is already stored on the computer, which you simply carry on to the next opportunities.
Ownership no longer matters.
On the contrary: It burdens and complicates life.
Before you mess around with installing a replacement tube on your bike, it's better to quickly take a rented e-scooter.
Anyone who gets their food in a styrofoam box by courier doesn't need aunt Gerda’s slowly bought WMF cutlery or gold-rimmed crockery.
In the world of these people everything will soon be as outdated and superfluous as the rotary lock.
If the update is available, it will be loaded.
It guarantees the user to be ahead.
The fact that no better update could ever come was one of the possible errors that the global progress authority hadn't expected at all.
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Well, and as it turns out, the latest version is being installed for all of us, which, in modern terms, lacks many previously known functionalities, without it being possible to purchase a different product or change the platform.
The current version Lockdown Merkel 2.1.
is also full of bugs.
Worse still, it may well be that other functions are lost and, at the same time, the options for securing a livelihood are drastically restricted because the economic complex is also significantly damaged.
And the vain hopes of young people that a hard lockdown will force politics to pave the way to an unconditional basic income, property tax and paid parenting are also a little unrealistic.
One likes to present oneself as a loyal supporter of government constraints, even screams for tightening up and, because of this complicity, is hardly in a position to blame the problem with those who bear political responsibility.
Instead, together with politicians, they hold the skiers and day-trippers responsible, just as if one were more endangered sliding down slopes in the German low mountain range than in a Berlin bus.
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Well, if you read the column here often, you also know that hardly anyone treats the harmful Munich people who invade my Tegernsee valley as ungraciously as the author of those lines.
In principle, it could be all right with me if now tough action is taken and the will of the outraged net mob is enforced by the executive.
The Gschleaf from the social networks is actually doing me a propaganda favor, because as a local resident I naturally benefit when others don't take my parking spaces and buy the chocolates away.
But it's not that simple after all, because honestly: what we are currently experiencing on day trippers has nothing to do with the earlier display of splendor.
Because my parents paid attention to the 20 pfennigs on the phone, a certain mentality has developed, to which I ultimately owe the purchase of my apartment by the lake 13 years ago.
At that time the Oberland was at the low point of its popularity, people drew to the Tegernsee to die, there were only old people in the mountains in plaid socks and shirts, and the apartments were bobbing for years in the real estate advertisements.
But in these 13 years people's attitudes towards the mountains have changed, and we have not only set new visitor records year after year.
The guests also got younger, the Oberland is now extremely popular as a residential area, and a completely new culture developed.
Max Greger used to play in the basement of the Hotel Bachmair am See, and Harald Juhnke got drunk at the bar.
Today we have a coworking facility for creative people and day-care centers who take into account any nutritional extravagance the parents may want.
Source: Don Alphonso
And of course a lot of the latest entertainment was also offered.
People from Munich could also go to the Ödberg in the afternoon, where the floodlights turned night into day, and then stop off at the Ostiner Stubn, whose saddle of venison was reported at home with shining eyes.
The platform on the Wallberg, which can be reached by cable car, is likely to be one of the places with the highest German fur coat quota.
Thanks to the environmental movement, the Alps are dead chic again, and of course there are also offers for combining eco and wealth.
Our restaurants have their own Christmas baubles made, there were splendid sleigh rides like under the tsar, and every few meters a restaurant where you could warm up or go to the toilet.
I know the news is full of streets and chaotic traffic.
But I live there, and I can tell you: The couple of Munich residents who are freezing in the cold wind, who eat their meatballs for 12 euros while standing and cannot stay in the quickly falling darkness until Francesco finally opens the door and sells pizza out the window: That is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the grandeur that we could offer our guests here.
And actually offer our guests when we invite them over to us privately.
Because the spiral of intervention has completely passed me and my family.
We don't have to explain to the police that we are on the way to the healing climate hiking trail.
My residential street is the Heilklimawanderweg.
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I am telling you this in extreme detail so that the enormous differences resulting from the interventions become clear: I also consider the epidemic to be dispensable, the virus would hit me like anyone else, and it can still bring harm to me and my family .
Otherwise I can go tobogganing as always, and I don't care if the community closes the parking spaces for hikers.
I can also go there by bike.
I miss the restaurant as such, the mood and the atmosphere, but I can get the dishes "to go" or have them delivered.
Otherwise I have a steady, traditional employer, a home office with a mountain view, and I assume that the stockholders didn't suffer in 2020 either.
Houses are more expensive than ever.
Although I and many of my class no longer own it, little has changed in our spacious premises and gardens, while the destruction of other people's livelihoods is extremely rapid.
To be honest, I find the hatred of the bitter people staying at home and friends of coercive measures for the few frozen figures in the slipstream of the town hall of Tegernsee, the indignation at the parents who want to give their children a change from the urban monotony for at least a few hours with the sledge .
Of course, there is a sad traffic jam when the sun goes down.
All alternatives are closed, on instructions from above.
For the poor and the afflicted in the traffic jams, this is not pure joy of life and not even normality, but only the best of all possible bad worlds.
Source: Don Alphonso
Activists, politicians and helping media form a very ugly coalition of exclusion: One might as well ask whether it should not be better to switch off dating platforms, because the epidemic is more easily transmitted when private people have sex in rooms than with people who are masked in the very large and empty mountain forests.
But day trippers are suitable, because they use a car, they can't avoid doing it in public, and their hustle and bustle in beautiful nature, for example when you're sitting in Berlin under the gray smog cover far away from all accessible mountains, generates considerable envy .
This privilege of a day trip is enjoyed by so many that it is by no means a marginal phenomenon.
The hatred hits a group that can afford a certain lifestyle.
And on top of that, it is easy for the unsuspecting to transfer the excesses of après-ski in Ischgl to the few dozen ski tourers who are currently climbing the Hirschberg.
This creates strong resentments without anyone having yet proven the infection-promoting effect of driving.
As I said, day tourists can be an abomination, but I am concerned with the question of which group will be ostracized and harassed next.
Simply because scapegoats are sought in times of epidemics, and while the so-called “lateral thinkers” hate Drosten, others hunt and character assassinate Hendrik Streeck.
On the socio-political level, however, the class antagonisms will intensify, and it is only natural that circles with losses of privileges attack others who seem to be doing well.
Even something as banal as “pulling a sledge up a mountain” becomes a privilege when others no longer get on a plane and are carried over it by turbines and kerosene.
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It is a sad constant of human nature that one does the worst things to one's neighbor when one is only committed to a higher purpose and at the same time can ensure that the privileges of the other can be used for oneself.
And the worse things go, the more brutal the argument over tiny and banal advantages.
If a person is starving, they argue with others about a moldy bark instead of looking for reasons why only one bark is offered here.
The greater the need, the more short-term the thinking, and the more successful simple explanatory approaches are.
In the meantime, see above, the militant left is serving the state almost as a street thug against deviants, because they also see opportunities for their own goals in the coercive measures.
Losers in these Manichaean ways of thinking are tied to incidence, and so the Saxons are fair game for dark reporting.
Logically, the media of light likes to report in detail about the migration history of the founders of the company Biontech, but hardly about the investors whose money the company made possible in the first place: These include two brothers from Tegernsee who sell a generic company to billionaires and are now developing precisely those luxury hotels of the real upper class that do not fit in at all with the red-red-green Calvinist ideas of property taxes.
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I used to be friends with some of these activists, and I find it remarkable that even in this situation they clearly recognize the political and administrative deficits of their own dream coalition.
When districts in Berlin are unable to deliver their figures for days, when hair-raising stories are told about refused tests, consolation and completely inadequate information, this failure of an administration that is normally overwhelmed becomes abundantly clear.
And in contrast to the children who dash down the mountain pasture across from my terrace, this failure of government offices and politics really endangers their individual existence and their health.
On the one hand, politics announce significant cuts in basic rights, and on the other hand, it is not in a position to vaccinate even the people who are most at risk.
Nobody expects infallibility, but the interventions are enormous and will ruin many small businesses without having yet any proof of the effectiveness of the measures.
This is where the criticism should start, especially if it is “left” and “progressive” and wants to continue telling about projects in cafés.
The way the situation is, there will soon be many cafes and projects that will no longer exist.
Instead, the progressives care about a few people in the mountains.
And when the district administrators then block the parking lots so that they have done something senseless, they can rely on approval.
Source: Don Alphonso
“Stay at home” is a simple appeal, but nobody tells you how to do it in practice, in a typically small Munich apartment with children and possibly until Easter.
These are individually existential questions that have to be answered and ideally not until March.
How practical when activists then put other issues in the foreground, such as compulsory vaccination and privileges for vaccinated people.
Then comes a debate about the additional care work and the disadvantage of women, asset recovery and people who supposedly own too much: With these big issues and their enemy images - insecure people, questioners, allegedly unsocial men, rich, egoists, people who don't Express their deepest dismay every day and roll around whimpering about the misfortune and report about it - the powerful and their satraps get the weeks of unpleasant questions around.
And when there is no more snow at Easter, you can tackle the sporty cyclists who don't follow the wishes of the superiors.
As well as anyone else who does not want to let the innocent joys of existence be taken away for no reason.
Source: Don Alphonso
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"My own will lack nothing" was my motto for 2020, from buying a mask in January on Lake Garda to this last, free contribution of the year.
I have little hope for 2021, I think it will be an absolutely hideous year with the extreme speed of getting rid of many people.
It will be like in any pandemic: what the virus cannot do, the mindless and greedy will do, who are only satisfied when everyone is lacking in everything.
I think it's only natural that you try to make your own people's existence good and life safe: if you succeed, you may also have the means to help others.
You know ... of course I am exposing myself here, also in full knowledge of the attack threats of the past year against yours truly, because many think I am doing too well.
Of course, in 2021 I will also write with a lot of zest for life, although I could take a break for a year or two if it were only about my interests.
I'm not very young either - the rotary lock generation - and you should actually take what you can get before you get one or the other epidemic.
But others are also attached to what I do, everything is entangled, and so this pandemic has robbed me a little of the total independence with which I have written the pillars of society for 12 years.
The nice thing about it was always the knowledge that I could stop and live freely at any time - that's over for now, even if I still enjoy writing a lot.
The nice thing after the coming, ugly year will be to be able to say again that my people lacked nothing.
And hopefully not you, dear readers, either.
I am working towards that.
In any case, it should not have been due to my efforts.
Thank you very much for the attention and debates of the year.