Brushing your teeth, showering and checking war news – that’s the new morning ritual for many. Archaic terms such as “siege”, “battle”, “howitzers” and “encirclement” appear on the mobile phone display.
In a way, this is reminiscent of World War I, when a map of Belgium and northern France hung in countless German homes. There the current course of the trench warfare was depicted with small flags. The morning newspapers provided the necessary information.
War, inflation and maybe even cold apartments in the near future – the clocks seem to be going backwards at the moment. “All the horrors we thought were behind us are now coming back,” writes Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (“A Brief History of Mankind”).
Indeed, in the fight against hunger and poverty, the Russian war of aggression set the world community back by years. Instead of spending on education, health and social systems, billions are now being spent on armaments. It’s the “perfect storm” that’s brewing. “Our world is in great danger,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned at the opening of the UN General Assembly in autumn. Up to 1.7 billion people – more than a fifth of humanity – are threatened by hunger and poverty.
Has humanity boarded a time machine bound for yesterday?
For a long time one could persuade oneself that history knew only one direction – towards more civilisation, progress and peaceful coexistence. But that seems to have been a mistake. Has humanity now boarded a time machine bound for yesterday? The question goes to Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the most important historians of the present: “You have to be very careful with these historical parallels,” replies the 79-year-old Brit to the German Press Agency. “Of course we live in times of crisis, but the crises are completely different. It’s not a repetition. That’s a fallacy from history.”
Dominik Geppert, historian at the University of Potsdam, takes a similar view. “It is not that we are thrown back to an earlier age, but that we must recognize that we have misjudged the time in which we ourselves live.” The notion that Europe has permanently put military conflicts behind is obviously wrong. “For us in Western and Central Europe, this is particularly surprising and disturbing. But if you live in the Balkans, in an African country or in South Asia, then you would say: there was war in our region in the recent past too. “
In Geppert’s opinion, the ultimately too rosy picture is due to the fact that the Germans in particular have a long phase of prosperity, stability and social balance behind them. “That led us to expect that this will always continue and that the rest of the world will also develop in this direction. We have forgotten how to recognize the beginnings of danger and to think in emergency categories.”
“We have always assumed the best possible”
Anyone who is 50 or 60 years old today will often confirm that their grandparents had a completely different attitude towards life. The first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, born in 1876, was a deeply pessimistic person. “He was called the “statesman of concern” because, based on his biographical experience of two world wars and especially the Nazi dictatorship, he always thought the worst was possible,” says Geppert. “In the past few decades, the opposite has been the case for us: we have always assumed the best possible.”
An exception to this is certainly the Fridays-for-Future generation, which is strongly characterized by a feeling of being threatened. However, so far this has referred almost exclusively to climate change. Geppert tells how he took part in one of the first demonstrations in Berlin against the Russian attack on the Ukraine: “It was gratifying that there were a lot of young people out and about. At the same time, however, a conflict of goals was recognizable on many of their posters when they said: “Against the war, for the climate”.
According to Geppert, it only gradually occurred to some of the young demonstrators that this could possibly come into conflict, for example when it comes to nuclear energy as a substitute for Russian gas.
Many people are worried about the future
Germany is closer to the horrors of the Ukraine war than most would like to admit: the flight time from Berlin to Kyiv is shorter than that to Mallorca. It is not surprising that in this depressing overall situation, many people are concerned about the future. Futurologist Horst Opaschowski, who regularly commissions representative surveys with 1,000 to 2,000 respondents from the opinion research institute Ipsos, even states that Germans have never had such fears about the future as they do at the moment.
The fear of inflation is particularly great in the Federal Republic because half of the people here do not own anything but rent. In other countries, on the other hand, ownership rates range from 70 to 90 percent. “In a crisis like the current one, you can retreat to your ‘Castle’,” says Opaschowski. In addition, the historical experience of the hyperinflation of 1923 is still present: At that time, the assets of the German middle class were destroyed in one fell swoop due to currency devaluation.
In deep psychological interviews, Stephan Grünewald, head of the Rheingold market research institute and author of the book (“Deutschland auf der Couch”), noted fears as well as a gradual change in consciousness since the beginning of the war. “In the beginning we experienced a great deal of solidarity from society as a whole, but now a lone fighter mentality predominates. You concentrate on how you can get through the crisis yourself.”
Since May, the depth psychological interviews have shown that the consumption of war news has decreased significantly. “The main thing is the monstrosity of the images of war. These images of destruction really pull the rug out from under people’s feet.” For self-protection, they prefer to limit themselves to short formats such as the “Tagesschau in 100 Seconds” or even to the good old teletext, which does not contain any images. But there always remains a “war tinnitus” as an irritating background noise.
“Everyone saves for themselves”
While the Germans tried in the summer to put the problems on hold and to experience lightness and carefreeness on vacation, the specters of war and deprivation returned in the autumn. “But we’re less concerned with Ukraine than with our own problems and fears. Everyone saves for themselves.”
Contradictory signals are coming from politicians – on the one hand warnings of a very harsh winter, on the other hand the assurance that the state will avert the worst with a “double boom”. “The result is a ghostly vagueness, a diffuse room of fear,” explains the psychologist. “Images come up of a blackout – we’re sitting in the cold and dark. This mobilizes primal fears.”
The reaction of many people is repression. For the beginning of winter, Grünewald predicts that the Germans will collectively fall into a “Netflix hibernation”. “We humans will also grow the thick skin that animals grow for the winter – in the form of denial of reality. In our private snail shell we withdraw into a fictitious alternative world: the characters of our personal favorite series are familiar to us and are almost part of the family. And in contrast to the real outside world, everything follows well-known dramaturgical patterns, so that we are protected from nasty surprises.”
