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Jan Josel Liefers
Photo: ZDF / Svea Pietschmann
Lucky that it will be over soon.
Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn announced yesterday afternoon that over a million people were vaccinated on Wednesday, more than one percent of the population in one day: the vaccination campaign finally seems to be going as it should.
Not only can you see light at the end of the long corona tunnel.
It also gets lighter.
You can hardly imagine it after this endless corona lockdown light winter - but the end is in sight.
Which will have many positive consequences: fewer deaths, fewer sick people, fewer fears, fewer restrictions in everyday life.
And less bullshit.
At last.
"Freedom, solidarity, contradiction - is Corona dividing the country?" Was the title of Maybrit Illner's talk show yesterday evening and of course the question was not whether the pandemic is dividing the country.
What it does, the social differences are worsening.
It was about the action #allesdichtmachen, with which some well-known German actors made fun of the German corona measures with a few video clips last week.
Liefers didn't cut a good figure
Of course, Jan Josef Liefers was one of the guests, one of the most prominent protagonists of this action - and one of the few who, even after the sharp criticism, did not distance himself from having participated.
Rather, it goes through the country and explains what it should actually be.
Or at least tried to.
Although at Maybrit Illner he didn't cut a particularly good figure.
"What message did you actually want to send out?" He was asked several times and couldn't really explain it.
The fact that he lost the thread several times and never found it didn't make it any better.
He sat there in the television studio a bit like the embodiment of that
"deformation professional"
that obviously comes with the job as a successful German television actor, namely that you think you have something to say about all sorts of things, simply because you are an actor and that's why people listen to you.
But without having to say anything.
Of course he's not alone in this.
A whole industry is attached to this idea.
Actors and actors sit on almost every talk show - because the makers of these programs also believe that they have something to say.
Which often turns out to be wrong even under normal conditions.
But in such heated times as the late phase of a pandemic, this turns completely into the absurd.
That there should be no false applause, Liefers at least managed to achieve this.
It could have been over there
When the science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, one of the most successful and best Corona explainers in the Federal Republic, said the nice sentence that "not every discussion is a good one" and that she actually doesn't feel like talking about the actor's action, because in the excitement about #allesdichtmachen, above all, she sees senselessly wasted attention - the show could actually have been over by then.
But now there were still the FDP politician Wolfgang Kubicki, the Mayor of Tübingen Boris Palmer from the Greens and Peter Tschentscher, the first mayor of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
Kubicki defended freedom of expression, Tschentscher warned the artists not to forget their responsibility to those who are currently fighting the pandemic in the hospitals - and Palmer talked about what it is like to be in a shitstorm.
"I'm not going to let myself be pushed away," he said. "People aren't stupid" and they "don't need masterminds."
Quarreling does not divide, but bring together, added Palmer, an interesting thought, which was then not pursued further.
Society in a nervous breakdown
There is no other way to put it: after more than a year of fighting the pandemic, this country is really at an end.
If the action #acquire everything and the reactions to it showed anything, it was that.
It is not good for politics to be the
"only game in town"
.
Of course, she always has an entertainment element - but the corona drama clearly overwhelms those involved.
It is also not good for the exhibiting industry if its protagonists no longer have a stage.
Without any attention, they get edgy and finally go where the action is: And a nonsense scandal like #allesdichtmachen.
We all urgently need to go out again instead of hanging in front of the computer or television day after day and evening after evening and having bitter arguments about absurd topics.
Donald Trump has already left, that was a start.
It is time for Corona to go too.
But it is foreseeable. In New York, the corona measures are to be largely lifted from July 1. It's hard to imagine. But life after Corona really seems to be in sight.