"My personal review of the year" by Klaus Schlagheck

When we saw the first terrible pictures a year ago, the Covid dead and the rigid lockdowns in China, hardly anyone could imagine that something like this would even be possible in Europe. A few months later the pictures from northern Italy taught us otherwise. Many dead who had to be carried away in military vehicles, and cities sealed off completely. Shortly afterwards, unlimited freedom of travel within the Schengen area was over. Borders became borders again, and the much-invoked European solidarity turned out to be more limited than before. Governments were busy securing the necessary quantity of masks on the world market for their own voters. Trump-style egotism had suddenly arrived in Germany too. It is reassuring that this attitude did not fully prevail when it came to the vaccines. In early summer we looked towards Italy, Spain and other regions that had been hit harder. I did so myself, in the mistaken belief that we would limit the spread of the virus better than other countries, through the responsible action of our politicians, through protective measures that made sense, and of course through the famous German discipline.

In summer the virus suddenly seemed to have disappeared, at least from people's minds. The most important question now seemed to be: where to go on holiday? The more the politicians invoked the goal of a single approach across all federal states, the more inconsistent it became. Every state premier had meanwhile mutated into a Covid expert who knew exactly the right path for "his" state. Ignoring the fact that not even oceans had stopped the virus from spreading, travel restrictions within Germany were suddenly supposed to help. With that, a nasty whiff of the GDR had returned. Within a few months, a piece of cloth became a symbol of oppression and unfreedom for a few thousand Germans. So-called Querdenker did their level best to help the virus along. Even when it had long been clear that people who demonstrate against protective measures will consequently be happy to ignore them too, the right to freedom of assembly and to stupidity was rated more highly than the right to consideration and health. By now we are several tens of thousands of fights for survival in our excellently equipped intensive care units and several thousand Covid deaths further on. Of course nobody made a mistake, not a single state premier and no education minister either. Still, it is good that our politicians are back on a more or less common course and now rate the right to health more highly than the right to go shopping.

Covid has demanded a lot from all of us over the past year and will probably continue to do so. But it has also shown many of us that it is not always about higher, faster, further. After a year like this one it does you good to pause, to think about what really matters, and to remind yourself how privileged we are by international standards. For all the annoyance about individual Covid measures that made no sense, about our often self-satisfied politicians, about the stupidity and ignorance of so-called Querdenker and about the recklessness you see so often in everyday life, I am glad that I am living through this pandemic in Germany, a free country with a well-functioning public sphere, an excellent health system, very good social protection and many other things we take for granted that are anything but.

Merry Christmas and a good start to the new year!