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What will you remember when you look back at the German corona policy?
Where were the accents set?
Not when planning the vaccination campaign, that's for sure.
Not even with the protection of old people's homes, as the death statistics show.
And unfortunately not in the implementation of rapid tests, which would immediately enable more freedom and security at the same time.
The government had other priorities: of all things, the Chancellor made the closure of schools, although education in Germany is a state affair, a top priority - through persistent demands, through massive internal pressure on the prime ministers, and even, as the "Bild" reports, through hastily Expert opinion ordered from the Leopoldina in autumn.
Helge Braun, Angela Merkel's Chancellery Minister, plays a key role in this.
In no talk show does he fail to emphasize the dangers of children, if necessary with unclean arguments about the virus mutation: a man with a mission.
After all, the children's campaign - unlike the rest of the German Corona policy - was successful: the schools are closed, for the second time within a year.
Millions of children have not seen the inside of a school building for almost two months, some even, if they are not well connected in lockdown, no other child.
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The Chancellor has already left a political fingerprint here that will still be deciphered in years.
Because the school closings are engraved in educational biographies, the isolation leaves scars in young psyches.
Children from socially disadvantaged families are particularly affected.
But don't fool yourself: The lack of exchange, three-dimensionality, socialization affects the development of every child, more every week.
Now there is a strong argument in favor of closing schools: It prevents infection - no matter how small or large the controversial share of children in the "infection process" is.
If you want "No Covid", like the virologist Melanie Brinkmann courted in the Chancellery, then the schools have to stay closed.
The lockdown in the no-covid model city of Melbourne lasted 112 days.
But such a policy, the aim of which is to prevent any infection, causes irreparable damage - especially for elementary school children who are learning the ABCs of life and for whom digital lessons bring little or nothing.
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Is it worth it?
Only fanatics doubt that children under the age of twelve are less contagious than adults.
Even the highest warner Karl Lauterbach - one has to give the Social Democrat this sense of proportion - advocates alternate teaching in elementary schools.
Prime ministers from Manuela Schwesig to Volker Bouffier to Michael Kretschmer are no longer willing to bow to a Chancellery that shoots at the youngest but does not do its own homework.
But Merkel and Braun - fired on by a bubble of no-covid advocates and teachers' associations, whose inglorious role in protecting those entrusted to them has yet to be worked through - are demanding that we continue like this first.
For two weeks?
And then, two more?
After the No-Covid victory, are children the disabled who receive a medal of bravery as a consolation?
Not only is there nothing to be said against it, no, it is imperative to give the abandoned children a little finger - and to enable alternate classes at the primary schools with halved classes and spacing.
Otherwise, today's politics will have to be ashamed of the future.