Die gute Kolumne – The Times They Are A Changin’

“The memory is the only paradise that we cannot be driven out of,” is a well -known sentence by the German poet Jean Paul (1763–1825). The quote is popular with journalists and other professional squadrons due to its indestructibility and calendar. And yet it is true: Escapism succeeds best when we stand up in that realm of nostalgia in which the world was still okay. For many, this is the time of childhood or youth.

What his oldie show in the telly or his model railroad, which has been saved into the grown-up, is the other Christmas smell when baking cookies or the barbie doll stored in the attic. (Or if you have achieved a very blessed age: the beautiful excursions with the Hitler Youth or the Wehrmacht.)

This is how my generation, which is now slowly but surely preparing for the senior citizens, is with the era in which Helmut Kohl was Chancellor: So close to us with her cute “capital Bonn”, her moss -green voting telephones, her shoulder pads, her old Nazis in the Bundestag (Dregger, pieces, carpenters, etc.) and their Holocaust survivors who were also television entertainers (Lembke, Rosenthal). This time was 30, 40 years ago. A time when everyone knew what a telephone booth was and nobody was bothered by a word waste dump called “Twitter”.

From today’s perspective, the fact that the colossus Kohl solved every crisis through so -called sitting out, that is, by waiting and relaxing doing nothing, from today’s perspective. At that time it was protested almost every day against anything-against nuclear power, recovery, the census and the “intellectual-moral turn”, with which the ideas of the sixties were to be thrown on the so-called garbage heaps of history. But came the time of tapen-unmachment, provincial and sluggish-looking chancellor, whom the spotted name “pear” had been given, at the turn of the millennium when the new government duo Schröder/Fischer in his Brioni and Armani suits humiliated and Yugoslavia bombed, like the lost paradise.

Another example: When, of all years ago, Olaf Scholz, perceived by many as “somehow fighting dog” (“Süddeutsche Zeitung”), became Chancellor – that “speech machine” (“Tagesspiegel”), who in the Schröder era for years left the briefcase for years , without exception, every red-green cruelty nodded and over which one of his SPD colleagues once made the nice remark that he was “highly diligent, highly efficient. The problem is: he is not a person, ”you immediately got a burning longing for the leading time in which the” eternal chancellor “Angela Merkel had ruled sluggishly.

Before she moved to the Chancellery in 2005, she once said the sentence that is almost like warm -heartedness from the present perspective: “Some also think that two weeks without reform idea would be nice again.” Sure: As her predecessor in the Federal Chancellery executed, of course You too are condensed with the political program of the capital faction, as the supreme employee of which she acted. And yet the phase of their reign appears- compared to the ignorant mass raving and penalty administration policy of the »Ampel« chancellor Scholz- almost as if it had a microscopic remaining human-friendliness itself.

Which of course wasn’t that, haha. I’m talking about nostalgia here.

In any case, I have developed the following irrefutable thesis from these observations: the only Federal Chancellor since Helmut Kohl, according to which – always from the point of view of the following election period, in which the respective successor rules – is not back, Gerhard Schröder is. Why may that be? His still, reserved nature and its modest way may play a role.

But we, equipped with this knowledge, quickly turn to the near future. Even if this seems completely unimaginable to us at the moment: two weeks after the Scholzomat has been replaced by Fritze Merz, the time of the so-called traffic light government will be in retrospect like the golden age. Or, in order to say it with the words of the cultural mediator and author Holm Friebe: that of the cold and empathetic technocrat Olaf Scholz “often creeped up credo” Whoever has emotions should go to the doctor “will appear to us as beneficial and healing when only what it looks like now is an impulse and affect-controlled lubricant actor at the helm and executes his irrational politics guided by emotions and perceived truths «.

I am not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, one or the other official of the CDU/CSU should go within a quiet hour and wonder whether memory could not be important than nostalgia for other reasons. In any case, it is certain that there are no more in the Bundestag today. But several new ones.