After some readers felt just as unaffected in their intellectuality by our interview with the TV presenter Sophia Thomalla as the French intellectual nobility did now by the street language of Emmanuel Macron, we would like to say today, according to an old goalkeeper wisdom - "sometimes you have to step a meter step left in order to be able to dive spectacularly three to the right” – screwing up to the highest heights of the philosophy of history.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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Anyone who has studied knows, of course, that different explanations for the passage of time compete with each other. There is, for example, the unshakable optimism about progress, ideally embodied by the FDP. Although Dirk Niebel came after Karl-Hermann Flach and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Free Democrats have not been dissuaded from believing that everything is getting better and better and that there is no need for bans to protect the climate, for example, because people will soon be inventing something anyway or will discover what makes it superfluous.

The extended arm of the FDP overseas has long been the United States, which decades ago saw itself at the better end of history – only to be suddenly confronted with Donald Trump.

This gave other historical-philosophical schools the upper hand, such as the dialectical one, which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Merz supposedly also adheres to.

Accordingly, 16 years of Merkel darkness and the AKK and Laschet twilights were necessary for the CDU to finally see the light and realize that only the Sauerland could lead them to the sun, to freedom.

But Merz' comeback has also brought other interpretations onto the scene: history repeats itself.

Man does not learn from history.

Everything was better before.

Markus Söder greets the marmot

The most influential philosophy of history of our time is of course represented by the CSU. She thinks she is in an "endless loop", as her chairman Markus Söder has repeatedly complained. To illustrate this, he referred to the film "Groundhog Day", in which a character-complex Bill Murray like Söder does everything to get people to change their behavior, but also repeatedly bites his teeth out of them. The current reason for Söder's impression is the corona pandemic. However, the CSU has been stuck in an endless loop for a long time. This was shown again in their annual review magazine, in which Secretary General Markus Blume did not conduct an interview with a perspective politician like Andreas Scheuer, but with the dead Franz Josef Strauss.

The Greens are not faring much differently. After the decision to phase out nuclear power in 2011, they considered themselves to be the ultimate winners in history and are now having to experience that terms such as "sustainability", which they once and for all considered clarified in their mind, are being debated in a completely new way, so that - watch out, educated citizen! – would be déjà vu even for Thucydides. After the EU wants to classify nuclear power as sustainable, the armaments companies are demanding the same for their product portfolio. Heckler & Koch pointed out: "It's our pistols that our police officers use on the street every day, it's our assault rifles that the Bundeswehr soldiers used to save people from the Taliban in Kabul in the summer."that bio-weapons should be given special tax privileges - after all, they are bio.

Incidentally, an endless loop does not have to be a bad thing, not even for Markus Söder.

In any case, Bill Murray uses them in the film to gradually develop more empathy.

In the end, however, it probably doesn't matter whether life, to use Nietzsche's language, resembles the return of the eternally same or whether, as Hansi Hinterseer believes, "every day is like a new life".

In any case, Sophia Thomalla correctly stated in the FAZ interview: at some point everything becomes routine.