Apr 17

Apr 17 The Wind of Change

If change was easy, there wouldn’t be so many authors making money from writing about it. Change, whether personal or as a group is incredibly difficult, even when you’re doing something you or others have always asked for. Imagine then, what happens when an entire country attempts to make rapid changes to the lives of its citizens . Well, we don’t need to imagine it, we’ve been living it for over a year now. In thousands of little ways, we’ve all changed. The mask rules, lockdowns and curfews may well have been quite negative, but there’s been some positives since March 2020. For instance, how many people would have imagined that by the middle of 2020, a person could go into a shop in Bavaria (and I’m sure many other German states) and pay for something using Apple Pay? If the question had been posed to me as I completed my Christmas shopping in 2019, I’d have confidently told you that Apple Pay was the kind of witchcraft that could get a person tarred and feathered.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash — Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Take another example: British and American citizens in Germany have bemoaned the fact that almost no supermarkets here allowed customers to order their groceries online, to be delivered at a later date. A year ago I couldn’t get my shopping delivered because few if any companies provided the service, now I can’t get it delivered because the service is so popular, it’s booked up until June 2023. 2020 may also be known as the year that Germany finally discovered the internet.

Millions of us have had to become our own IT departments as we work from home, learning things about the technology we’ve used for years but never really bothered to think about too much. Colleagues across the country have learned to work online, no easy feat, but it’s certainly pushed many in global teams further forward than they were pre-pandemic. Change has happened out of necessity, not without complaint, but with a resolve that only comes from having no other options.

The pandemic has been one of the greatest agents of change in German history, millions of us live drastically different lives. However, that process has been horrendous and at a cost that no sane person would have been willing to pay. Change has also had a wider impact, beyond the ease of online purchasing or quickly paying for things on a credit card. Perhaps the biggest change, the one that may well have a lasting impact, is the shattering of the veneer of what Germany actually is.

Photo by Alexas Fotos from Pexels — Photo by **Alexas Fotos** from **Pexels**

The image Germans had of their country was never on particularly stable ground to begin with, but the pandemic has been a series of body blows to our perception of the land of efficiency and order. Both these descriptions seem fanciful now, given the failures of the vaccine rollout and the unseemly bickering of state legislatures and national government over which rules to enforce and when exactly they should be implemented. Federalism, often seen as a net benefit seems to have hobbled the country and prevented sensible measures being taken.

Germany’s love of privacy, enshrined in the strict data protection laws (Datenschutz) has been blamed for slowing the rollout of the vaccine. German faith in balanced budgets has been rocked by the realisation that the actual cost of the Schuldenbremse (debt brake), heralded by German governments since 2007 as sensible budgeting, has actually left massive holes in essential infrastructure and education at exactly the time we needed those things to work.

We’ve seen the idea of rational thought and collective responsibility evaporate as the largest anti-lockdown protests in Europe dance through the streets, intimidating bystanders, attacking journalists and storming the Reichstag. The idea of Germany as a fair society has also exited stage left as we see those on lower incomes forced to endanger their health for less than the living wage.

It’s impossible to know how many Germans actually believed all these things to be true of their country, but I’m sure at least some combination of the points I’ve listed were assumed. No we know they aren’t, what do we do about it. We’ve seen behind the curtain, all of us, and what we found is not pretty but can it be changed? Do we even want to change it?

As I watched the footage of British people returning to the pubs this week and polls released suggesting that some UK voters believe, despite the the largest Covid death toll in Europe, that the current government has made a success of the pandemic, I can’t help but wonder if Germany will do the same. If the vaccine roll out picks up, if some of us begin to return to normality, will we remember the broken parts of Germany we’ve seen? Will we still demand change or will we prefer instead to avoid it and complain that what we really want is for things to go back to the way they were?