To the author
John Schmidt
Born in Berlin in 1970, studied computer science, German and Romance languages.
In 1999 he was a co-founder of the Berlin reading stage »Chaussee der Enthusiasten«.
He works as a translator and author.
His works include "Müller knocks us out", "Triumph Vegetables", "Schmidt Reads Proust", "Snail Mill", "Sugar Sand" and "The Guardian of Pankow".
In March 2020, CH Beck published »Couple Talks« with scratchboard illustrations by Line Hoven, and in 2021 the book of stories »I still know how King Kong died«.
At the first lockdown two years ago, the writer Jochen Schmidt wrote about why he has always loved staying at home, now many corona measures have been taken, and at the same time the federal government is failing with compulsory vaccination. We asked Schmidt: How have you been with Corona since then, how are you today?
It's always enlightening to see how people react when I jog past them.
Two years ago, when it was still thought that the plague was breaking out, some people really jumped to the side, at the moment I have to run slalom again or dodge the street, my personal pop-up footpath, so to speak, which I do as a jogger feel justified, besides, electric scooters are now also driving on the sidewalk.
Early covid infections made you feel a little special, like you'd "been through something" and finally got a biography.
Back then you pulled your jacket sleeve over your hand for a while to open the front door handle, the children did that too, and you were afraid that they would develop a compulsion to wash because you wouldn’t have thought of it when you handed the children over to the drawing a heart on the breathy »kissing window« in kindergarten.
My family got Covid pretty soon anyway, fortunately very mild, but still felt a little special back then because of the worried looks you got when you talked about it, like you had “been through something” and finally a biography.
I was then in the last two winters much better than in previous years, I hardly ever had a cold, many have already noticed that, maybe it's because of the masks, maybe also because of the steel bath of kindergarten germs that we went through are.
I'm not afraid of Corona, nor do measures against it bother me.
I hope that wearing the mask will remain a socially acceptable way to protect yourself from cold waves in a future without Corona.
But maybe you'll feel like a bank robber again, taking the tram to work.
The mask doesn't bother me personally because I've been used to wearing a sleep mask at night for many years, along with earplugs, snoring cones, a bite splint to prevent teeth grinding and now also a hallux valgus splint on my left foot, it feels always feels like I'm preparing for a space flight when I go to bed.
When masks were still cloth and you could get a fun one, one that looked like Hannibal Lecter's mask, or like panties, I found it handy to always have a piece of cloth in my pocket to wipe my rain-soaked bike seat dry .
Of course with a slight guilty conscience, which I also have when my FFP2 mask is sometimes a bit very dirty, which created a whole new form of shame.
If you wear a dirty mask, what will your underwear look like?
(Maybe that's why some prefer black masks?)
more on the subject
Closed society: There is such a truant mood over the city A guest article by Jochen Schmidt
My mum once felt embarrassed during lockdown when she wanted to quickly buy a newspaper at the petrol station, which was not allowed, so she dragged her shopping trolley (»Retiree Volvo«) behind her as camouflage to make it appear like it was going her to Rewe, because that was allowed.
Once
Because I had forgotten my mask, I considered in front of the department store whether I should really go back and get it from home, or whether I should quickly and unnoticed pick up a discarded one from the sidewalk.
I'm actually quite neurotic when it comes to germs, for example I always flush with the toilet seat closed since I read that otherwise you throw bacteria around the room, in my circle of acquaintances I'm only surpassed by my father-in-law, who once had a sports friend had borrowed a towel from football and when he got it back he didn't want to use it anymore, but he didn't want to throw it away either, which is why he kept throwing it in the dirty laundry for years after washing it, without his wife noticing anything.
As for Corona, I think it could have been worse and we could have been hit by a virus that is harmless to old people and dangerous to children.
Of course that is a matter of opinion.
A virus that only kills idiots would be interesting, who would have dared to leave their home then?
You don't know if you're really an idiot.
You don't know each other that well.
In fact, only idiots think they're not idiots.
I trained diligently twice during the pandemic for a half marathon that was then canceled when I had just slipped into a new age group and would have been one of the youngest again.
My long runs, which you're supposed to do in preparation, have mostly taken me through East Berlin, along big streets in front of or behind endless prefab buildings, so you don't have to stop at traffic lights as often and you're not afraid of getting lost .
I loved the summer stillness in a block of prefabricated buildings, when there's a large paddling pool overgrown with weeds, DDR sculptures that have disappeared behind bushes, tree roots pushing up the asphalt, surprising passageways to the street.
Once I came out of a piece of city forest, slipped through a gap in the fence and stood in a huge, empty parking lot in front of the wall of a furniture store. You don't experience such intensive transitions in nature, which is why I like running in the city.
I eventually started to notice imprints in the asphalt that were left when it was fresh, when the neighborhoods were being built in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dog tracks, children's shoes, birds, even inscriptions can be found, how happy I was when I discovered a heart on the ground in Berlin-Lichtenberg that said "Udo L." It must have been 40 years old and still has survived, and Udo L. is still alive too, only that he is probably no longer the hero of the youth of Lichtenberg, but of course mine for many years.
Actually, such traces of vanished cultures should have been secured archaeologically long ago.
On the border between Lichtenberg and Marzahn I also found a completely lonely prefab building that was almost in its original condition, but which other people have noticed because, as I've read, you can rent it as a film set.
I could imagine moving in there and working as an Ossi during the day.
more on the subject
Study on fears and worries in the pandemic: This is how high the frustration incidence is by Johann Grolle
On the side, because I always go jogging with my camera, I collected bad puns from advertising (»Berlin electricity network: Here's watts for everyone«, »I want a beef from you: Lieferando«, a bowling alley was called »Bowlero's«, and at a barbecue stand was advertised for »festive MOMENTS«) or throwaway trends, e.g. cat scratching posts, while office chairs are an evergreen of the unofficial bulky waste that makes our streets more interesting.
Who can explain to me why so many old office chairs are being put out on the street?
You don't want yours anymore, but you think it's still good enough for less demanding people?
On the other hand, there are hardly any discarded tube screens left, maybe there are collectors for them again?
I'm happy about everyone I can still find and document.
I often came back from running with souvenirs that I took from gift boxes, of which there have been many more in the doorways since the pandemic (especially on Sunday mornings), and transported them under my shirt, you can find them in "better areas". a pair of brand new children's ice skates, once I also found boxing gloves, an old childhood dream, unfortunately we had just sold my girlfriend's punching bag on eBay classifieds, I now use them as a doorstop.
We ourselves always have to take our giveaway waste to the outskirts of Berlin so that my children don't discover the boxes and lug everything back home.
Sometimes I've stopped while walking to look at a chain of painted rocks in front of a kindergarten, or I've swerved to pick up a foil-wrapped sermon hanging in plastic bags on a church fence, but I never have it Yes, you read that correctly, but it was a nice gesture.
There was even a candle.
I was perfectly fine with not having to go to the hairdresser for a while because I've always hated it.
Also, I don't see that after cutting my hair, they sweep it into their "hair hole" and probably sell it as an expensive commodity without me benefiting from it.
I also think it's nice when one of the many food messengers that are now available stops next to me at the traffic light with his bike and his cube-shaped backpack and makes a phone call in an interesting foreign language, it's a bit like vacation, you could call it "passive travel". name, just as I, when I gave up smoking, sometimes voluntarily dipped my nose into someone else's cloud of tobacco at traffic lights.
I developed a passion for chess after I always considered myself completely untalented and without that suddenly changing. The best games are of course the games against my daughter, in which each piece can and does move as it wants hit several opposing pieces at once until they are all gone.
She always turns the horses' heads forward, that's important to her.
For a couple of months I played one of Daniel King's Test and Practice games from Chess 64 magazine every night.
Virtually superfluous to any other intellectual endeavor, chess is exceedingly complex and, what I particularly like, completely pointless.
I even have the book "Playing Against Grandmasters," which I once bought in a department store as a boy to see if I was as good as Bobby Fischer, and which I couldn't do anything with at the time because I didn't have one guessed the only correct move, worked through it, a real pleasure to finally have paid such an old debt.
The nice thing about chess is that you always think you're on the verge of understanding it, but that's not possible.
I sometimes play games on the phone with my father-in-law,
and we drink red wine.
Because he knows wine, he always has to buy expensive ones, while fortunately I like the cheaper ones too.
He used to be a club player and thinks only chess players and lawyers should have the right to vote.
If Corona lasts long enough, I might also read the BGB.
Of course, these are all rearguard actions, because my mental resilience is already diminishing at my age, I can't do anything about it, but at least I can document it.
For example, I now always write down which words I couldn't think of, recently in the "plywood" home improvement store, I felt as if I were playing "taboo" when I tried to explain what I was looking for without "plywood" accept.
Other times it was the name of that one actor that you already knew from that other movie, if that was the same.
You always think you have Long Covid.
(There was actually an awkward moment when I thought my bronchial tubes were going to swell and I couldn't breathe, but it ended up being heartburn.) I've also fallen asleep reading to my kids, I have the floor "Duck pond," muttered, although it had nothing to do with the book.
I don't know what that means.
Once we went sledding, it was indeed snowing, and because too many people had gathered, the police had to tell people to leave the place ("Just come back in half an hour," a policeman murmured to me.) Some were very upset about this measure.
"We're just following our instructions..." "Yeah, just like '33!" On the one hand, this might be the last time my children will see snow during their childhood, but on the other, I felt the comparison was a bit exaggerated .
Some of the things that bother others about the corona measures I tend to take calmly anyway.
(When I see a Maserati, I always think: definitely opponents of vaccination.) The vaccination requirement in the Bundestag has just failed.
I, on the other hand, am actually happy that the cannulas used for vaccinations are so sharp these days that you can hardly feel the puncture, it was completely different when I was a child, the nurses had the cannulas, which of course were sterilized and reused when they were too blunt had become, even sanded.
I left the small band-aid stuck to my shoulder forever, like the youngsters who always wear their summer festival bracelets on their wrists all year round.
The nose self-tests actually inspire me, because you can feel a bit like a scientist when you hold your diluted mucosal swab against the light with a pipette and carefully drip it onto a special paper (why
three
drops of all things? That's something fairy tale.)
It's fun doing these chromatography, like in chemistry class, although I didn't like it at all, we did it with ballpoint pen paint, you can see the different dyes that make up the ink, because they move at different speeds and distances from the paper to be absorbed.
Waiting for the redeeming line is as exciting as waiting for the image to develop when photos were developed in the darkroom.
One is almost a little disappointed when the result is always negative.
A friend texted me asking if we wanted to meet up for a walk again: »I'm positive.
Appointments in February?” It wasn't until two weeks later that it struck me that he was “positive” and not “positive about a meeting” because he had used an Anglicism, along the lines of “I'm positive” (which of course it also means something completely different in reality).
I was also insulted once because I didn't stop a department store door that was slamming shut, but scurried quickly through the gap, like between two defenders in soccer.
The man was a shade too far away for my politeness to hold the door open for him that long, but he seemed to think I didn't want to touch the door for fear of coronavirus, which made him immediately aggressive.
You then always have the choice of getting angry yourself or realizing that other people's anger has nothing to do with you, but rather has your own 'pedigree'.
The intensity of anger is usually out of proportion to the importance of its trigger.
Since there is little you can do about the pandemic as an individual, you should perhaps see it as an opportunity to practice composure, which will certainly be useful afterwards.
There are no final certainties for us in this universe, and very likely one will have to say about me at some point: "He died at the end of his life."