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Car destroyed by bombing in Ukraine
Photo: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGEL
It's been going on for over a hundred days now, the war in the Ukraine.
And online, at least, it looks like the public just can't — or don't want to — really grapple with it anymore.
The American news website Axios, which published this data from the online monitoring service Newswhip last week, found a 22-fold drop in interactions on social media when it comes to dealing with this war.
For example, quantitatively speaking, people online were more interested in the trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.
In Germany, the 9-euro ticket, the fear of punks on Sylt, the Whitsun holidays full of Queen's anniversaries - and the good weather in general!
– contributed to the initial blue-and-yellow momentum of solidarity with Ukraine fading.
At the meeting of the Baltic Sea Council on May 25, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in English: "We have reached a moment of
fatigue
." In the reporting, this resulted in the statement: "Foreign Minister warns of war fatigue." That is of course nonsense, because everyone is war-weary person who is in their right mind.
One is war-weary before a war has even started.
Or as the writer Karl Kraus put it in a nutshell in one of his comments: »Weary of war – that is the stupidest of all the words the time has.
To be weary of war means to be weary of murder, weary of robbery, weary of lying, weary of stupidity, weary of hunger, weary of sickness, weary of filth, weary of chaos.
Was one ever fresh and cheerful about all this?”
Of course, what Baerbock meant was not that we should fear our bellicose lust for battle might die down – only sociopaths are keen on war – but rather our awareness of the war and, accordingly, the public interest in what is happening in Ukraine.
So perhaps we shouldn't speak of "war-weary" but, as the Financial Times reported, of "Ukraine fatigue";
but even that is only half true.
The public is not tired of Ukraine, which would be even more brazen and cynical given their situation, but rather saturated with the reporting.
And not because we are ignorant and lazy, but because our attentional resources are of course limited and therefore need to be managed cognitively very economically.
From a psychological point of view, where you direct your attention and where you feel compassion, works analogously to the resilience of a muscle that cannot remain tense permanently and at some point becomes acidic and closes.
The brain can also acidify, close up.
In fact, in psychology this is called "compassion fatigue," a condition characterized by emotional exhaustion that results in a diminished ability to
The term was coined in the 1990s to describe a phenomenon among health care professionals, particularly nurses, who experienced numbness due to work overload.
And now, in our present, compassion-fatigue grips people in the face of increasingly powerless crises (and we are also less interested again in the fate of the nursing staff, which is still not the rosiest).
Ukrainian freelance journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, who works for the Guardian, said at an awards ceremony organized by the organization National Endowment for Democracy: "Compassion fatigue has already made people just not want to consume sad things anymore - it's too much, it's too heavy." And further: "We felt that during the Donbass war."
The longer the war goes on, the more jaded the West becomes.
A phenomenon also explored by writer Susan Sontag in 2003's Contemplating the Suffering of Others, an essay in which she examines the limits of human empathy towards images of suffering.
Under a flood of images that used to shock and outrage us, we would lose the ability to react.
Compassion is constantly being overwhelmed and is therefore flagging.
The Kremlin also relies on this tiredness of our sympathy.
While Russia is working on the moral, physical and ultimately military exhaustion of Ukraine on the battlefield, Putin is also hoping for a weakening of the West and a political disinterest that will reduce willingness to support.
In addition to the military war, there is still an informational and political one, and there, too, Putin is trying to progressively attrition, to the point of stunning the public.
Quentin Sommerville, the BBC's Ukraine correspondent, has dubbed this phenomenon the "war of oblivion."
And indeed: With every day that we let this war, which has just recorded its highest number of victims, move out of the media and political perception, Putin wins the informational war of displacement, he gains more space through our indifference, while we with progressively Time the country and its citizens seem far away again politically and in the media.
A meta-analysis published in 2019, which includes 41 studies, confirms that the larger the victim group, the lower the compassion, so the sad dynamic means that support could be even lower now, with the number of victims soaring.
Selenskyj and the Ukrainians not only have to fight for their survival within Ukraine, but also with each passing day to ensure that their fate is not suppressed internationally;
so that the systematic killings in Butcha, the war crimes, the rapes, the attacks on hospitals and maternity clinics and the starvation of the population are not drowned out by royal anniversaries and overcrowded trains.
That is why the actions of our government seem all the more oppressive.
So I can only hope that you didn't turn off your brain at the very beginning of my column.
Please don't let it acidify.
