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Pool party in Wuhan in August: The Chinese of all people are celebrating again, enjoying a feeling of freedom
Photo: REUTERS
How much the world has changed this year was evident in October, for example, when pictures of dancing Chinese appeared in German newspapers.
In China the clubs had reopened, in Germany they were still closed.
Before the pandemic, Berlin was seen as one of the dance and celebration capitals of the world, and Berghain as the ballroom for anything goes, as a temple of freedom.
"Let us lose the day when there wasn't even a dance," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in "Also sprach Zarathustra".
We have seen more than 250 of these lost days.
In any case, the clubs have been closed since mid-March.
The Berghain tries to survive as a gallery.
But the Chinese are dancing again, enjoying a feeling of freedom that we are denied.
The Chinese, of all people, who live in a system that normally does not grant as many freedoms as our democracy.
So is the authoritarian system an advantage in the pandemic?
The currently far lower number of cases in China could speak for this, as well as the rapid recovery of the economy after the shutdown.
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