Suddenly it’s very fast. After Berlin and Brandenburg, the last federal states in particular, abolished the obligation to isolate people infected with corona, March 1 will see the nationwide end of the obligation to wear masks and tests for employees in medical facilities – before the few remaining restrictions will come into effect on April 7 at the latest leak.
Is it all over now, can we leave Corona behind? Well, hopefully not – even if it hurts, we have to take a closer look at the recent past. In order not to run the risk of making the same mistakes next time.
The Minister of Health is doing it in his own way. Mask requirement outdoors: “Nonsense”. School and daycare closures: wrong, harmful, downright fatal from today’s perspective. Panic communication with the threatening Corona killer variant: oh, “let’s leave the K word”.
For some critics of excessive corona measures, especially hasty decisions at the expense of young people and children, Karl Lauterbach’s recent admissions may be a blessing. For those with a healthy aversion to self-centeredness and political glorification, they continue to be heavy fare.
Because it is abundantly clear which narrative Lauterbach – and with him many others – have been trying to establish in recent weeks: that corona policy was always driven by the current state of science from the start. They didn’t know any better and therefore made the wrong decisions. It’s a shame not to change it, you’re always wiser afterwards. Alone: not true. Many were just smart-ass before.
Because there was no lack of clearly audible voices, at the latest in the second half of the first Corona year, which warned in all urgency and from today’s perspective with great forecasting accuracy, for example of the probable psychological consequences of school and daycare closures.
Not only did a lot of people come up with the idea that an obligation to wear a mask when jogging or the ban on sitting alone on a bench in the park could be “nonsense”, they also articulated it unequivocally.
The collateral damage of the pandemic must therefore now be discussed intensively – also within the framework of a parliamentary committee, namely the lasting shock to the culture of political debate.
Those who were wrong at the peak of the pandemic are also wrong now
If you strip the measures of the first two years of Corona today of those that are now considered to be outright wrong or whose benefits are now considered to be extremely uncertain at best, then many of the supposed certainties collapse like a corona virus in the fresh air. Mention should be made here of the 2G regulations or almost cynical regulations for relatives of nursing home residents and at funerals.
If authoritative voices from politics, the media, and science were wrong from today’s perspective, then they were wrong then, too. And then logic dictates a concession to many of the critics of the time: that they must have been right on some points.
Regarding the debates about school closures, Karl Lauterbach said an almost revealing sentence in the Spiegel interview: “The voices that recognized the risk of infection from children and still spoke out against school closures were not loud enough.” Well, they were very well.
However, to this day they are accused of being propagandists of an irresponsible “analysis strategy” that endangers the lives of children and their relatives. This is just one example of many of the completely unsuccessful political communication during the corona pandemic.
Of course, it is not a question of dealing with the situation in any way whatsoever, of subsequently legitimizing the enemies of democracy who stormed the Reichstag; about right-wing esoteric cranks who already saw an affront in the Infection Protection Act as such; or those who saw the “corona dictatorship” flash up as soon as they were asked to wash their hands.
But it is precisely with reference to that very special sociotope that the problem begins. Because the poisoned bad habit, the short circuit that shaped everything at the height of the pandemic, was always to exaggerate the extreme edges, the most bizarre excesses, to represent all skeptics, critics and opponents of certain corona measures.
It is almost irrelevant who was right the most in hindsight
This affected parents and parent initiatives who campaigned for open schools. Scientists who were respected in their field and who were previously completely unsuspected, such as pediatricians and child and adolescent psychotherapists, got caught up in the whirlpool.
The same thing happened to politicians who advocated a pandemic policy that emphasized fundamental rights and avoided restrictions on fundamental rights at an early stage. How this blossomed was ironically shown in the fact that even Lauterbach and Christian Drosten were accused of “lateral thinking” by apparently radicalized parts of their own fans.
It is almost irrelevant who was right the most in hindsight, who was wrong the most. What is important is that the attributions that some critics of the measures made during the pandemic because they contradicted a sometimes hysterically driven social mood are not perpetuated afterwards. Because then criticism that has proved to be correct in hindsight would become critics who were right, but still wrong.
The message that in a crisis situation like the one that just happened, the best way is to put one’s own convictions aside for fear of finding oneself on the fringes of social discourse would be one of the worst socio-political consequences that the pandemic would have.
Germany can learn a lot from Corona. Some things do not require science, but above all a liberal openness to the demands of a lively culture of debate, which enables a broad exchange – and does not restrict it as much as possible through discursive hardening. This workup will not be an easy process, but it is necessary. With a view to the past few years, nobody, really nobody, should go with the claim to absolute sovereignty of interpretation.
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