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We live in post-heroic times.
This is the only way to explain the flood of rhetorical imperatives, the tendency towards hysterical exaggeration and the whining tearfulness that many compatriots display in the pandemic.
Anger and excess are in the air.
The cloudy mixture is reinforced by social media, this great invention, with the help of which it has been possible for the first time since the dawn of the bourgeois era to flush the unconscious, in Freud's sense of the ES, into the public without censoring: sometimes as brown soup, sometimes as a violent fantasy, always bad-tempered, always sneaky and ready to exaggerate.
When school and health experts debate the possibility of making a mask compulsory for primary school students in class, none of the indignant weighs sober reasons and counter-reasons.
It is better to remember in a pathetic tone of human dignity, which is once again desecrated in the freezing Federal Republic.
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If students have to be in quarantine for several weeks, which is neither a walk in the park for parents nor for children, it is immediately said that the little one's life is now playful.
This is where their chances are, apart from the psychological consequences which the “trauma generation” will accompany for a lifetime like the guard does the prisoner.
If a new Infection Protection Act enables - however imperfect it may be - a temporary state of emergency that is appropriate for a democracy, the vaccination dictatorship is painted on the cloudy sky over Berlin and reminded of the Enabling Act of March 24, 1933.
“In Germany there is a bad habit of putting any moral and political delegitimization to the test of anti-fascist sentiments,” wrote the philosopher Hermann Lübbe decades ago.
That still applies today.
There is also an eerily beautiful feeling.
It always occurs when the Nazi era can be conjured up to counter it with a courageous "Never again!"
Obviously one is inclined to offer the resistance, which there was not in this people of followers and perpetrators during the “Third Reich”, at least in retrospect.
Nobody who can think knows what else the comparison is supposed to bring.
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It is strange: On the one hand, Germans wander through their past again and again, on the other hand, under the burden of the Corona days, they show severe gaps in their memories.
Has the virus tarnished memory?
So far it has been said: Even those born later, who have not been through any more catastrophic years themselves, have a kind of memory, a pre-natal trauma that encourages them to be more skeptical and reason than excessive.
Nothing there!
The past has become a foreign land.
If it were otherwise, the majority of compatriots would remember the situation in schools in 1944/45, the freezing children, the bed bugs and fleas in the bunks in the air raid shelters, the hail of bombs on the cities and the piles of dead on the streets.
At that time there was no government that paid people 75 percent of their last gross sales in peacetime after all of the Kladderadatsch.
Were the children of that time - our parents and grandparents - a lost generation?
After all, something has become of them and this country - and by no means a nation of poor, mentally disturbed street sweepers.
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“Don't you have Numma kleena?” One is inclined to ask like a Berliner, would it be useful and the atmosphere would not be so charged.
No, it probably doesn't get a size smaller.
The reason for this can be explained with the help of Sigmund Freud.
"Man has become a kind of prosthetic god, really great when he puts on all his auxiliary organs, but they are not fused with him and occasionally still cause him a lot of trouble," said the father of psychoanalysis in his book "The Uneasiness in Culture " firmly.
In the 70 years of peace in the Federal Republic of Germany, when society became more and more prosperous and the technical possibilities steadily failed, we forgot what false gods we are.
Until shortly before the outbreak of the corona pandemic, most felt as if they were riding the crest of a wave of the future.
Diseases were suppressed.
More and more, death before the 100th birthday was seen as an embarrassing malpractice in medicine.
And if modern humans do have to die, then if so, behind closed doors!
Corona shook the country awake
And now?
Every day one hears new bad news from the Robert Koch Institute, takes note of constantly higher death rates, sees new TV pictures from intensive care units;
plus a look behind the closed glass doors of the old people's and nursing homes.
There is a line of tired, brooding heads marked by life, skulls like desert areas, covered by brown age spots, angular and bald - behind FFP2 masks the lost faces of our relatives.
Corona shook the country awake and showed what we had displaced in the previous comfort, in peace, in the happiness of the beetle of a narrow horizon: the vulnerability of society, the vulnerability of people in the 21st century, these gods who forgot that they wore prostheses - From iPods to cheap flights around the world to electric cars.
It is the memory of one's own powerlessness, the knowledge of the sadness and the powerlessness of all human things through a justament-also-knowledge of their ridiculousness and insignificance, which spreads in the pandemic like a creeping sepsis.
An offended narcissism is rampant.
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It leads to more and more people becoming brutal.
In this feeling of woundedness, every molehill becomes Mount Everest, the silly mask requirement becomes a crime, and a minister of health as hard-working as it is harmless becomes the prince of darkness.
If the pandemic continues like this, if we stagger from one lockdown light to the next, Germany will increasingly turn into a hearth of nervous excesses.
Corona also shows that there is no swarm intelligence!
Unfortunately.