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Mr. Rödder, many people say: All the bad things in the world – it’s too much for me. Do you know this feeling? Of course I know it from conversations, but I honestly don’t know this feeling personally.
That sounds enviable. As a historian, I am hardened and know that people always have this feeling: the people in 1912 as well as us in 2023. This is a basic feeling of the modern world, since the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Nevertheless, the impression remains that the crises are intensifying: first the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine, the energy and gas crisis, now the Hamas attack on Israel. You have looked intensively into the history of crises and how we deal with them – is the impression correct? Yes, of course we are experiencing an enormous intensification of crises. By the way, for two reasons: Because we have much more direct and immediate access to information, our experience is also much more immediate. And then, of course, there are the crises themselves: the fact that two out of three global hotspots are currently ablaze, and right on our doorstep, is something historically unusual.
Andreas Rödder is a professor of modern history at the University of Mainz and a conservative thinker. In 2021, Rödder, 56, founded the civil think tank Republik 21, and until September 2023 he was also chairman of the CDU Basic Values Commission.
Of course you ask yourself: Is there a connection? Or why are these things all happening now?
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