What Germany needs
Next year there will be a federal election, which in times of crisis has dire implications. The demagogues are sharpening their knives, the established parties are bathing in the juice of their own morals, the climate is getting harsher, it is serious. We are now at a crucial point in determining the future of our country. But what does Germany need?
By Bent Erik Scholz
By Bent Erik Scholz
Germany has not had it easy in the last hundred years. In 1924, hyperinflation had just been overcome, just nine years later the Weimar Republic was transformed into a dictatorial terror state that brought war and misery to the world again and claimed millions of lives. After the end of the World War, Germany was a pile of rubble, most of the larger cities had been bombed, and the helm was now in the hands of the regimes that had until recently been hostile. This was followed by a long period of division under the aegis of the victorious powers, during which two cultures developed that were in parts the same but largely very different - a capitalist-democratic one and a socialist-dictatorial one. Both countries developed completely different attitudes towards their institutions, the processes of world history, but also towards each other. Divided Germany is an example of the silent great power conflict, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the NATO countries, which repeatedly threatened to tip over. Imagine if the Cuban missile crisis had actually led to another direct war between the Soviets and the USA. Would German soldiers have fought other German soldiers?
The so-called reunification, a nice theorem, turned out to be in practice the imposition of a culture on a completely different civilization. With the new freedoms came risks, with the strong hand of the state came security. The Treuhand opened up many wounds, contracts were no longer valid, and at the same time life became more colorful, richer in imagery, and more liberal. Two civilizations collided, sometimes merging, but they have never really become friends. The end of history, it was said, had been reached, democratic capitalism had triumphed. A time of carelessness began that continued throughout the 1990s, accompanied the turn of the millennium, and ended on September 11, 2001 - barely two weeks after I was born.
The world situation became more complicated. But where there was no longer any clearly defined good and evil, this people, who had until recently been divided, was called upon to take a stand. Old great power conflicts broke out again, and the threats became more extensive: in addition to the brutal clarity of the military conflicts all around us, of which we are directly or indirectly a part, there were also diffuse threats from diseases or refugee flows, rapid changes in norms and technical developments whose potential we were just as unable to assess as their risks. When Jack Dorsey launched Twitter in 2006, he probably never imagined that his platform would soon function as a battlefield itself. What began as short messages is now a hurricane of insults, live reporting, doxxing, war images, investigative journalism, Holocaust trivialization, liberal-elitist tone policing, extremism, scientific treatises, fake news, aphorisms and pornography.
What we have believed in up to now is being called into question. Three television channels that reported what was apparently the state of affairs became an interconnected system of different media, each with its own political values and economic interests, and individuals or anonymous collectives, some of whom are just as loud or prominent, but are just as self-interested. This storm is almost impossible to control - because every attempt at state regulation carries the risk of abuse to shut down dissenting views, if not by this government, then perhaps by another.
Our communication channels are subject to the dictates of very rich private individuals who often use this enormous responsibility in a harmful way - by either muting the President of the United States or arbitrarily determining what is to be understood as discrimination: anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or the N-word are left standing, "cis man" leads to the account being blocked. The idea of a public social network has been circulating for some time, but there is a lack of technical know-how and the public's trust that freedom of opinion and freedom of the media would be handled better there. Until then, we are exposed to a flood of images and anger, algorithmically designed for the purpose of maximizing profits, precisely to keep us on board and encourage us to post - traffic generatestake advantage of the quality of the content, or even its accuracy.
On the leash of these mechanisms, which supply us with media fast food and digital stimulants, we dig ourselves ever deeper into our own trenches, which can also become trenches as needed. They satisfy our urges and give us a false sense of community when they sedate us with the confirmation of apparently like-minded people and at the same time present us with an apparently common enemy. We fight the battles with images and characters. Only sometimes do they bleed into reality, but all the more violently. Two neighbors who are arguing can avoid each other to some extent. However, if an international audience witnesses an argument, this weighs much more heavily. Events by public figures who have fallen out of favor are regularly canceled due to death threats. Anyone who behaves too unpleasantly towards a person with a platform can soon run the risk of reading their own address or telephone number on the Internet.
While the global structures are becoming more and more interconnected, people are becoming more and more primitive. 60% of readers will never get to this point in this blog entry. A large proportion of those who are still reading it are doing so to have their views confirmed. Those who have contradicted me from the beginning will not find it worth their precious time and will not be interested in my arguments. The mental drawer in which this text ends up for each individual reader will have long since been closed for the majority. And so for one person I am authentic and reflective, for the next a pompous idiot - for some a friend of Russia and conspiracy theorist, for others a left-wing do-gooder and systemist. All of these different attributes were attached to me on the basis of a single podcast episode.
What becomes obvious from this is that we are up to our necks in a collective identity crisis. Because those who categorize others based on superficial perception cannot protect themselves from finding and keeping their own peer group through gestures of self-assertion. Anyone who sees the other person as a representative of one camp of opinion can only define their own self-image through the confirmation of others - and so they seek this confirmation from others by using the same formulations, following the same accounts, and putting the same flag symbols in their profile picture.
We no longer look for what defines us - but for what adorns us. When was the last time there was a clearly defined youth culture that was politically independent and at the same time more than just a fashion trend? Punk is dead, gothic and metal are stagnating, hip hop has arrived in the mainstream. Die Ärzte write a song in which they call on listeners to vote, Eminem appears alongside Barack Obama at a Democratic campaign event. The insignia of the scene today are fashionable accessories and badges of hedonism, often hijacked by luxury brands or branded as drivers of value appreciation. The LGBTQ scene today capitalizes on and stylizes the necessary sexual openness and anonymity from the time of its ostracism and illegality. Almost all subcultures in the western world have been gentrified; they are now an expensive hobby that the well-off can afford to make themselves interesting.
Today we define ourselves by numbers. By the numbers in our bank account, the numbers on the scales, the number of our followers, our sexual partners, the price tags on our clothes. We define our market value, and in order to increase it, we torture ourselves in the quiet hope that we will succeed in moving up. We work for a small piece of the cake of the large corporations whose names are emblazoned on our insignia of prosperity. We vie for the favor of those in whose shadow we want to bask. People who are not interested in us encourage us to wall ourselves in emotionally so that we protect ourselves from people who might never have been a threat. We make ourselves dependent on entities that see us as a means to an end, that believe that productivity does not increase through efficiency, but through longer working hours. They believe that limitless growth is an ideal, and that this ideal would be possible even without innovation.
In addition, we deny and wear ourselves out, become weak and dull. We stuff ourselves with cheap food from billion-dollar franchise companies. We neglect our social lives, degrade other people to pastimes, communicate with them purely for their own sake, forget empathy until we ourselves break down. Society is becoming increasingly sick, and health is becoming a luxury. But the system provides us with enough medication, narcotics and stimulants.ulants. The rate of sickness is higher than ever, as is the cocaine content in wastewater, and per capita alcohol consumption is also increasing. We are breeding a country of lonely, speechless and drug addicts.
The USA is showing us where this will lead in the long term with the opium crisis and the alarmingly high death toll from fentanyl. As people get used to it, escapism becomes existential. In German techno clubs, people regularly faint because they have taken knockout drops. They numb themselves because otherwise they cannot look the world and the people around them in the eye.
How do we escape the spirals that the world we live in seduces us into? Do we still have a chance of escaping the mechanisms that reward overestimation of ourselves, greed and the overexploitation of our own bodies and minds? Or are they too deeply anchored in our heads? Social Darwinism, the illusion of unlimited growth in a limited world? Are we predators in the sense that we are willing to continue to accept the suffering of others for our own good? Or can we remember our herd instincts, which teach us that every chain is only as strong as its weakest link? Can we appeal to our reason and ability to exercise restraint when we are convinced that it serves a higher purpose - namely the peaceful and equal community of people? At the moment, it seems that the signs are pointing towards destructive expansion by individuals who are empowered by money and influence.
In 1949, Germany gave itself a new constitution, and thus a country gave itself the rules for its future progress. The great constitutions of history, be it the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of Human Rights, are triumphs of humanity precisely because they do not follow the often misquoted natural law of the "right of the strongest". The purpose of basic rights is to grant every person what cannot be taken away from them, even if they themselves do not have the means to defend it. Dignity, freedom of speech and opinion, freedom of movement - these rights are inalienable even for the poorest of the poor, or at least that is the theory. We have given ourselves the system in which we live. Parliament did not fall from the sky any more than Deutsche Bank or Lufthansa. The judiciary and executive are the offspring of the deeply human approach that everyone who is wronged deserves to be able to defend themselves against it. The state exists first and foremost for the purpose of protecting its citizens - from external threats, but also from the arbitrariness of the market.
But this protection is faltering, because where there is power, there are also interests. And so the state, as sovereign as it should be in its idea, is dependent on rich private individuals to create infrastructure, housing or communication channels. Around half a million people are currently homeless in Germany. On Leipziger Strasse in Berlin, empty office buildings line up one after the other. The high electricity prices resulting from the gas supply stop have caused many everyday products to become noticeably more expensive over the last two years - and now that the price of electricity has returned to normal, they are not getting any cheaper. While a few years ago it was still possible to live relatively comfortably on a full-time salary, today prices and rents are rising faster than wages.
Large companies are paying taxes on the profits they make in Germany in other European countries, and the finance minister wants to save on the citizens' allowance. Anyone who receives citizens' allowance will be able to tell you what dehumanization this entails. The finance minister recently proposed "flat-rate accommodation costs". In effect, this means that anyone who is entitled to social assistance, and therefore needs it, is potentially at risk of losing their home and may be forced to move. What kind of state can no longer afford the poor?
If the rules we have given ourselves obviously have major shortcomings, then we are required to change these rules for the good of all. This process is not pleasant because it calls into question what we have believed in for decades, but it is necessary to guarantee our security for the future. There is no right life in the wrong. What Germany needs is a tabula rasa. The wrong paths we have taken are so obvious that eyewash will no longer help us. We must rethink the system and our position within it. To do this, it will be necessary to turn established structures on their head. It requires us to overcome our own ideological sluggishness in order to be on the winning side of history. Because a social model can becannot be maintained in the long term by reflecting on the one moment in recent history when it was the best option. It must assert itself again and again, and it must remain flexible.
The hope that the powerful will sort it out can safely be given up, after all, a system is never questioned by those who benefit from it. Instead, the broad masses need to realize: we have built a construct that is actively damaging us. It is damaging our health, our self-esteem, our social life. Things cannot continue as before. The dream is over. It is time to take stock. And it is time for us to develop the courage to stand up for one another even if this creates a deficit for us ourselves - because most of the deficits that threaten us only have a real effect on us if we believe in them.
Germany needs a revolution that is not carried out on the streets with torches and pitchforks, but is created by ideas and courage. The depravity of our dealings with each other, but also with ourselves, calls for a new age of enlightenment. The alternatives are war or disease. We must break free from the toxic relationship with the reality that we have created for ourselves. We must re-empower ourselves and regain control over our own destinies, instead of hoping that everything will regulate itself because it has always been that way. The truth is that it never has been that way. No system in the world has ever saved itself. We owe it to ourselves and to our fellow human beings to initiate a change in thinking and to open our arms to all those who are willing to participate in this change in thinking. It is up to us. Time is running out.
10/31/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
The so-called reunification, a nice theorem, turned out to be in practice the imposition of a culture on a completely different civilization. With the new freedoms came risks, with the strong hand of the state came security. The Treuhand opened up many wounds, contracts were no longer valid, and at the same time life became more colorful, richer in imagery, and more liberal. Two civilizations collided, sometimes merging, but they have never really become friends. The end of history, it was said, had been reached, democratic capitalism had triumphed. A time of carelessness began that continued throughout the 1990s, accompanied the turn of the millennium, and ended on September 11, 2001 - barely two weeks after I was born.
The world situation became more complicated. But where there was no longer any clearly defined good and evil, this people, who had until recently been divided, was called upon to take a stand. Old great power conflicts broke out again, and the threats became more extensive: in addition to the brutal clarity of the military conflicts all around us, of which we are directly or indirectly a part, there were also diffuse threats from diseases or refugee flows, rapid changes in norms and technical developments whose potential we were just as unable to assess as their risks. When Jack Dorsey launched Twitter in 2006, he probably never imagined that his platform would soon function as a battlefield itself. What began as short messages is now a hurricane of insults, live reporting, doxxing, war images, investigative journalism, Holocaust trivialization, liberal-elitist tone policing, extremism, scientific treatises, fake news, aphorisms and pornography.
What we have believed in up to now is being called into question. Three television channels that reported what was apparently the state of affairs became an interconnected system of different media, each with its own political values and economic interests, and individuals or anonymous collectives, some of whom are just as loud or prominent, but are just as self-interested. This storm is almost impossible to control - because every attempt at state regulation carries the risk of abuse to shut down dissenting views, if not by this government, then perhaps by another.
Our communication channels are subject to the dictates of very rich private individuals who often use this enormous responsibility in a harmful way - by either muting the President of the United States or arbitrarily determining what is to be understood as discrimination: anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or the N-word are left standing, "cis man" leads to the account being blocked. The idea of a public social network has been circulating for some time, but there is a lack of technical know-how and the public's trust that freedom of opinion and freedom of the media would be handled better there. Until then, we are exposed to a flood of images and anger, algorithmically designed for the purpose of maximizing profits, precisely to keep us on board and encourage us to post - traffic generatestake advantage of the quality of the content, or even its accuracy.
On the leash of these mechanisms, which supply us with media fast food and digital stimulants, we dig ourselves ever deeper into our own trenches, which can also become trenches as needed. They satisfy our urges and give us a false sense of community when they sedate us with the confirmation of apparently like-minded people and at the same time present us with an apparently common enemy. We fight the battles with images and characters. Only sometimes do they bleed into reality, but all the more violently. Two neighbors who are arguing can avoid each other to some extent. However, if an international audience witnesses an argument, this weighs much more heavily. Events by public figures who have fallen out of favor are regularly canceled due to death threats. Anyone who behaves too unpleasantly towards a person with a platform can soon run the risk of reading their own address or telephone number on the Internet.
While the global structures are becoming more and more interconnected, people are becoming more and more primitive. 60% of readers will never get to this point in this blog entry. A large proportion of those who are still reading it are doing so to have their views confirmed. Those who have contradicted me from the beginning will not find it worth their precious time and will not be interested in my arguments. The mental drawer in which this text ends up for each individual reader will have long since been closed for the majority. And so for one person I am authentic and reflective, for the next a pompous idiot - for some a friend of Russia and conspiracy theorist, for others a left-wing do-gooder and systemist. All of these different attributes were attached to me on the basis of a single podcast episode.
What becomes obvious from this is that we are up to our necks in a collective identity crisis. Because those who categorize others based on superficial perception cannot protect themselves from finding and keeping their own peer group through gestures of self-assertion. Anyone who sees the other person as a representative of one camp of opinion can only define their own self-image through the confirmation of others - and so they seek this confirmation from others by using the same formulations, following the same accounts, and putting the same flag symbols in their profile picture.
We no longer look for what defines us - but for what adorns us. When was the last time there was a clearly defined youth culture that was politically independent and at the same time more than just a fashion trend? Punk is dead, gothic and metal are stagnating, hip hop has arrived in the mainstream. Die Ärzte write a song in which they call on listeners to vote, Eminem appears alongside Barack Obama at a Democratic campaign event. The insignia of the scene today are fashionable accessories and badges of hedonism, often hijacked by luxury brands or branded as drivers of value appreciation. The LGBTQ scene today capitalizes on and stylizes the necessary sexual openness and anonymity from the time of its ostracism and illegality. Almost all subcultures in the western world have been gentrified; they are now an expensive hobby that the well-off can afford to make themselves interesting.
Today we define ourselves by numbers. By the numbers in our bank account, the numbers on the scales, the number of our followers, our sexual partners, the price tags on our clothes. We define our market value, and in order to increase it, we torture ourselves in the quiet hope that we will succeed in moving up. We work for a small piece of the cake of the large corporations whose names are emblazoned on our insignia of prosperity. We vie for the favor of those in whose shadow we want to bask. People who are not interested in us encourage us to wall ourselves in emotionally so that we protect ourselves from people who might never have been a threat. We make ourselves dependent on entities that see us as a means to an end, that believe that productivity does not increase through efficiency, but through longer working hours. They believe that limitless growth is an ideal, and that this ideal would be possible even without innovation.
In addition, we deny and wear ourselves out, become weak and dull. We stuff ourselves with cheap food from billion-dollar franchise companies. We neglect our social lives, degrade other people to pastimes, communicate with them purely for their own sake, forget empathy until we ourselves break down. Society is becoming increasingly sick, and health is becoming a luxury. But the system provides us with enough medication, narcotics and stimulants.ulants. The rate of sickness is higher than ever, as is the cocaine content in wastewater, and per capita alcohol consumption is also increasing. We are breeding a country of lonely, speechless and drug addicts.
The USA is showing us where this will lead in the long term with the opium crisis and the alarmingly high death toll from fentanyl. As people get used to it, escapism becomes existential. In German techno clubs, people regularly faint because they have taken knockout drops. They numb themselves because otherwise they cannot look the world and the people around them in the eye.
How do we escape the spirals that the world we live in seduces us into? Do we still have a chance of escaping the mechanisms that reward overestimation of ourselves, greed and the overexploitation of our own bodies and minds? Or are they too deeply anchored in our heads? Social Darwinism, the illusion of unlimited growth in a limited world? Are we predators in the sense that we are willing to continue to accept the suffering of others for our own good? Or can we remember our herd instincts, which teach us that every chain is only as strong as its weakest link? Can we appeal to our reason and ability to exercise restraint when we are convinced that it serves a higher purpose - namely the peaceful and equal community of people? At the moment, it seems that the signs are pointing towards destructive expansion by individuals who are empowered by money and influence.
In 1949, Germany gave itself a new constitution, and thus a country gave itself the rules for its future progress. The great constitutions of history, be it the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of Human Rights, are triumphs of humanity precisely because they do not follow the often misquoted natural law of the "right of the strongest". The purpose of basic rights is to grant every person what cannot be taken away from them, even if they themselves do not have the means to defend it. Dignity, freedom of speech and opinion, freedom of movement - these rights are inalienable even for the poorest of the poor, or at least that is the theory. We have given ourselves the system in which we live. Parliament did not fall from the sky any more than Deutsche Bank or Lufthansa. The judiciary and executive are the offspring of the deeply human approach that everyone who is wronged deserves to be able to defend themselves against it. The state exists first and foremost for the purpose of protecting its citizens - from external threats, but also from the arbitrariness of the market.
But this protection is faltering, because where there is power, there are also interests. And so the state, as sovereign as it should be in its idea, is dependent on rich private individuals to create infrastructure, housing or communication channels. Around half a million people are currently homeless in Germany. On Leipziger Strasse in Berlin, empty office buildings line up one after the other. The high electricity prices resulting from the gas supply stop have caused many everyday products to become noticeably more expensive over the last two years - and now that the price of electricity has returned to normal, they are not getting any cheaper. While a few years ago it was still possible to live relatively comfortably on a full-time salary, today prices and rents are rising faster than wages.
Large companies are paying taxes on the profits they make in Germany in other European countries, and the finance minister wants to save on the citizens' allowance. Anyone who receives citizens' allowance will be able to tell you what dehumanization this entails. The finance minister recently proposed "flat-rate accommodation costs". In effect, this means that anyone who is entitled to social assistance, and therefore needs it, is potentially at risk of losing their home and may be forced to move. What kind of state can no longer afford the poor?
If the rules we have given ourselves obviously have major shortcomings, then we are required to change these rules for the good of all. This process is not pleasant because it calls into question what we have believed in for decades, but it is necessary to guarantee our security for the future. There is no right life in the wrong. What Germany needs is a tabula rasa. The wrong paths we have taken are so obvious that eyewash will no longer help us. We must rethink the system and our position within it. To do this, it will be necessary to turn established structures on their head. It requires us to overcome our own ideological sluggishness in order to be on the winning side of history. Because a social model can becannot be maintained in the long term by reflecting on the one moment in recent history when it was the best option. It must assert itself again and again, and it must remain flexible.
The hope that the powerful will sort it out can safely be given up, after all, a system is never questioned by those who benefit from it. Instead, the broad masses need to realize: we have built a construct that is actively damaging us. It is damaging our health, our self-esteem, our social life. Things cannot continue as before. The dream is over. It is time to take stock. And it is time for us to develop the courage to stand up for one another even if this creates a deficit for us ourselves - because most of the deficits that threaten us only have a real effect on us if we believe in them.
Germany needs a revolution that is not carried out on the streets with torches and pitchforks, but is created by ideas and courage. The depravity of our dealings with each other, but also with ourselves, calls for a new age of enlightenment. The alternatives are war or disease. We must break free from the toxic relationship with the reality that we have created for ourselves. We must re-empower ourselves and regain control over our own destinies, instead of hoping that everything will regulate itself because it has always been that way. The truth is that it never has been that way. No system in the world has ever saved itself. We owe it to ourselves and to our fellow human beings to initiate a change in thinking and to open our arms to all those who are willing to participate in this change in thinking. It is up to us. Time is running out.
10/31/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
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