The parents say to their four children: We want to have our big family party again.

But that is only possible if you are all nice and good and tidy up your rooms.

Three of the children go to work without a murmur, sort the books, put the stuffed animals to bed.

Child four dumps his toy box in the living room, floods the bathroom, pulls the siblings by the hair and crows: “Freedom!” When grandma slips on a toy car and breaks her thigh, the parents can’t help each other than to take tough action: The celebration is canceled, there is room arrest.

For all children.

From child four's room there is howling all night long: "You are dividing this family!"

Jörg Thomann

Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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If there is anything else that we can agree on in this country, it would be that we no longer agree.

There is a rift through Germany, society is divided, polarization everywhere.

This can be seen most clearly at the end of 2021 on the subject of Corona.

On the one hand the "oaths", the "empty thinkers", the "Covidiots" - on the other the "sleeping sheep" or, halfway new to the offer, the "red dot fraction" (with a red puncture point because of the vaccination).

The latter are clearly in the majority, people are talking about the former: To stay in the picture, they are the child who absorbs all the attention, to the chagrin of the others.

Riddled with cracks

Now, as the sociology student learns in the introductory week, a society is not homogeneous, but an amalgamation of the most diverse groups. It is only so riddled with cracks, which does not matter as long as there is enough putty, for example: trust in the state institutions. Unfortunately, that has only decreased. And interpersonal relationships have also been strained in the pandemic. When the otherwise nice friend with the homeopathy craze suddenly sends links to texts about hidden masses of vaccine deaths: Should one ignore it? To discuss? Or break off contact?

In his new book “Am I that?” The historian Valentin Groebner also deals with how a we is constituted. “What gives a group the idea of ​​coherence and togetherness is the agreement of who they are

not

are ", he writes, referring to the anthropologist Fredrik Barth:" To say 'we' means to create a common enemy. "Such a we then function as a" community of fear ", also in the face of the coronavirus. In fact, as studies by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the German Institute for Economic Research show, cohesion within our society initially grew stronger at the beginning of the pandemic. Possible reasons: the experience of neighborly solidarity, the feeling of being in the same boat, and that at first, as the DIW study says, one was “satisfied with the state's crisis management”. But this phase is over - and the community of fear is gone. How should it last when for some the virus is not the greatest enemy, but the government, the system,the pharmaceutical industry or the fellow citizen in the mask?