Everything used to be.
Germany spins freely. And on the spot. So Germany is a drill.
But what is being drilled for?
A journey through time with Kai Blasberg and some questions.
But what is being drilled for?
A journey through time with Kai Blasberg and some questions.
I'm now slowly getting to the age where one glorifies the past, endures the present and negates the meaning of the future.
For as long as I could remember, my father annoyed me with his "experience is what counts."
I often contradicted him by pointing out that nothing is an experience.
The future competence of my namesake, who unfortunately died far too early, suffered a little when he prophesied at the beginning of the millennium: "The Internet has no future."
Nevertheless, I now know that experience is valuable, especially for one's own culture of calm.
Oops.
Excuse me.
Serenity is a bit unfashionable these days. years. decades.
Calmness doesn't look good on us.
We, the Germans, only know serenity from the stories of others.
To put it bluntly: our state of mind oscillates between Hambacher Fest and Auschwitz without a break.
OK. Pointing is part of the craft. Especially without a pencil.
And now I hear my wife saying again: Nobody understands that.
Strangely enough, the person who constantly tells me that I don't understand is the person who understands me best.
You are looking for meaning in these lines.
As a child I would have said, "Even in guilt."
Which brings us back to drilling:
We Germans are looking, digging for the bottom. The meaning. The mistake.
Just help me quickly explain my question this week:
What's going on here? What happened?
And let's go into 2014 holding hands together with Herbert Grönemeyer.
Let's admit it: it feels like yesterday.
Each of my readers, who are usually over 30 years old, was already an adult back then.
And yet: 2014 is a different era.
If we want to understand our discord, remembering 2014 will help us:
Yes, of course: the German footballers were the best in the world.
Angela Merkel was re-elected with the slogan "You know me".
Mercedes built good and beautiful cars.
The British didn't think about Brexit.
And everyone who said Donald Trump thought of ridiculous television shows and teased prostitute wives.
In 2014, our friend, the human butcher Vladimir, sent green men to Crimea.
And we have Frank-Walter, who was supposed to do something in Minsk.
But above all, save the pipeline.
We Germans would have threatened the Baltics, the Poles and the Ukrainians with a first strike if they had criticized Nordstream 2, as they did many years later.
In 2014 the AfD was eliminated because there were no refugees yet and in 2014 the socially relevant outrage highlights were men named Edathy and Tebarz van Elst. If such characters have a gender.
Ten years ago Uli Hoeneß went to prison and the more moral among us thought:
That was it for him now.
I was nominated for the Grimme Prize and drove a motorcycle and a yellow Porsche.
In 2014, Corona was called Ebola and was in Africa.
Latvia got the euro and Greece survived Schäuble.
Israel's president was Shimon Peres.
And Erdogan just became that in Turkey.
There was a movement that was crawling around in the East on Mondays. Pergola or something like that.
Somehow you want to be 2014 again.
Have our problems really gotten bigger or are our filters no longer useful? Are we sucking in too much information or is it really all worse? Worse? More expensive?
Or has what we always hoped for just never happened?
Are we being led to believe too much and are slow to figure it out?
Or does one half of the republic not move at all because it's lazy, fat, over-supplied, while the other half doesn't move too much because pedaling costs a lot of energy?
Are we just 10 years older and is what everyone says and said about getting older true?
Is the party over?
Or was it never one?
Or do we always just think parties are crap?
The most successful song of 2014 was "Happy".
The most successful cinema film, the empathetic story "Honey in the Head".
The best series was "Borgen", a political drama from Denmark that was about people in politics. Without monkey faces like the ones mentioned above.
Olaf Scholz was what he knows how to do: mayor.
OK. I know what you're about to say.
P.S.
Let's keep that feeling in 2014.
Because we won't last another 10 years like this.
But there is one thing we should definitely learn from 2014:
It was the first year without the FDP in the Bundestag.
That will come back soon.
03/14/24
*Kai Blasberg worked in the private media in Germany for 40 years
For as long as I could remember, my father annoyed me with his "experience is what counts."
I often contradicted him by pointing out that nothing is an experience.
The future competence of my namesake, who unfortunately died far too early, suffered a little when he prophesied at the beginning of the millennium: "The Internet has no future."
Nevertheless, I now know that experience is valuable, especially for one's own culture of calm.
Oops.
Excuse me.
Serenity is a bit unfashionable these days. years. decades.
Calmness doesn't look good on us.
We, the Germans, only know serenity from the stories of others.
To put it bluntly: our state of mind oscillates between Hambacher Fest and Auschwitz without a break.
OK. Pointing is part of the craft. Especially without a pencil.
And now I hear my wife saying again: Nobody understands that.
Strangely enough, the person who constantly tells me that I don't understand is the person who understands me best.
You are looking for meaning in these lines.
As a child I would have said, "Even in guilt."
Which brings us back to drilling:
We Germans are looking, digging for the bottom. The meaning. The mistake.
Just help me quickly explain my question this week:
What's going on here? What happened?
And let's go into 2014 holding hands together with Herbert Grönemeyer.
Let's admit it: it feels like yesterday.
Each of my readers, who are usually over 30 years old, was already an adult back then.
And yet: 2014 is a different era.
If we want to understand our discord, remembering 2014 will help us:
Yes, of course: the German footballers were the best in the world.
Angela Merkel was re-elected with the slogan "You know me".
Mercedes built good and beautiful cars.
The British didn't think about Brexit.
And everyone who said Donald Trump thought of ridiculous television shows and teased prostitute wives.
In 2014, our friend, the human butcher Vladimir, sent green men to Crimea.
And we have Frank-Walter, who was supposed to do something in Minsk.
But above all, save the pipeline.
We Germans would have threatened the Baltics, the Poles and the Ukrainians with a first strike if they had criticized Nordstream 2, as they did many years later.
In 2014 the AfD was eliminated because there were no refugees yet and in 2014 the socially relevant outrage highlights were men named Edathy and Tebarz van Elst. If such characters have a gender.
Ten years ago Uli Hoeneß went to prison and the more moral among us thought:
That was it for him now.
I was nominated for the Grimme Prize and drove a motorcycle and a yellow Porsche.
In 2014, Corona was called Ebola and was in Africa.
Latvia got the euro and Greece survived Schäuble.
Israel's president was Shimon Peres.
And Erdogan just became that in Turkey.
There was a movement that was crawling around in the East on Mondays. Pergola or something like that.
Somehow you want to be 2014 again.
Have our problems really gotten bigger or are our filters no longer useful? Are we sucking in too much information or is it really all worse? Worse? More expensive?
Or has what we always hoped for just never happened?
Are we being led to believe too much and are slow to figure it out?
Or does one half of the republic not move at all because it's lazy, fat, over-supplied, while the other half doesn't move too much because pedaling costs a lot of energy?
Are we just 10 years older and is what everyone says and said about getting older true?
Is the party over?
Or was it never one?
Or do we always just think parties are crap?
The most successful song of 2014 was "Happy".
The most successful cinema film, the empathetic story "Honey in the Head".
The best series was "Borgen", a political drama from Denmark that was about people in politics. Without monkey faces like the ones mentioned above.
Olaf Scholz was what he knows how to do: mayor.
OK. I know what you're about to say.
P.S.
Let's keep that feeling in 2014.
Because we won't last another 10 years like this.
But there is one thing we should definitely learn from 2014:
It was the first year without the FDP in the Bundestag.
That will come back soon.
03/14/24
*Kai Blasberg worked in the private media in Germany for 40 years
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