Conscripts 2010 in Berlin
Photo: Sean Gallup/ Getty Images
The first and only time I took LSD was while doing community service.
It was a long time ago, in the early nineties.
I was stationed at a social center in East Berlin, we had to look after old people and alcoholics, buy them food, wash them, make sure everything was in order, have a little chat.
The trip was quite an intense affair and while I didn't encounter any ghosts from deep within my psyche, I was fed up with psychedelic drugs afterwards.
The civilian service lasted fifteen months, which seemed endless to me.
And yet the time was a blessing.
Of course, I didn't feel that way at the time.
I liked some of my patients.
But of course I only went to them because I had to.
But in hindsight, and this is the case for almost all former civilians, I was confronted with people and their fragility that I have not forgotten.
I found an old lady I was caring for dead on her toilet seat.
She had been a dancer and while I was waiting for the medical officer, I listened to her shellac records with the policeman who had come.
One of the alcoholics I liked and who had told me a lot about his life banged his head on his bedside table in delirium and died.
I discovered him in the morning.
But these experiences were only half of it.
Because in the evenings and at night I let myself drift.
This made community service a safe space for self-discovery.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier triggered a surprisingly heated debate with his call for a “social obligation” for young people.
Women and men should "put themselves in the service of society for a certain period of time," said Steinmeier.
The controversy over Steinmeier's statements cuts across the political camps. If there is a trend, it is, in my opinion, the following: younger people reject the mandatory time, while older people often think it makes sense.
The argument against it: Corona has already shaken the younger people enough, the measures primarily served to protect the elderly, while they would have deprived the younger ones of life chances.
That's enough.
There would be no reason to demand compulsory service now.
The argument for this: It is important
Both arguments have merit.
And yet they both go into emptiness.
The decisive thing about civil service (and also military service) was not having to do something.
That's what it was about.
But the special thing was not having to do anything for a while.
In the 1980s in West Germany and then throughout the Federal Republic in the 1990s – during the heyday of community service – growing up as a young man looked like this: you went to school for thirteen years after you had passed your Abitur.
Then came the military or community service, the duration changed, the longest service was 20 months, the shortest was six.
Then came the studies, which – according to the study regulations at the time – could drag on for a long time.
Hardly imaginable conditions for young people today.
They often have to do their Abitur after twelve years.
Then comes the course, which is much more schooled than it was then, with internships and internships in between.
And in your mid-twenties you enter the job market.
A colleague who occasionally teaches at a journalism course said recently that she had asked the students where they saw themselves in ten years.
And the answer from almost everyone was: part-time.
The anecdote caused some amusement among the listeners, all people over 40. In fact, studies seem to confirm the finding that self-determined free time is a much higher value for the so-called Generation Z than for their parents' generation.
In reality, however, this anecdote says something completely different: young people's phases of self-discovery have simply been pushed back.
If you don't get the freedom to make a mess (or put it more positively, the opportunity to find out who you are) in your early twenties,
However, it would make more sense to make this space available to young people earlier.
Not only when they have already completed their training.
Education should not only prepare for the job, but have a humanistic core.
Helping to make people human.
How this should work has been discussed for centuries, and the great educational paradox is probably simply insoluble.
That education necessarily amounts to forcing young people to be free.
That it needs a corset that gives direction and at the same time asks you to throw it off - in order to become a complete personality.
Every emancipation rests on the struggle against authority.
The wise authority knows this and acts accordingly.
Anyone who is now talking about compulsory military service and that young people have to learn to work "for society", as the Federal President is doing, should not forget that politics and all the different parts of society that care about the caring for young people, have established a rather harsh regime of efficiency around being young over the past twenty years.
You won't be able to cope with more duties.
On the other hand, it would make sense to think about whether the rhythm that dominates the lives of young people today is not too fast.
Whether it doesn't need biographical islands that serve nothing but to find out something about yourself.
And for everyone, not just for those who get paid for it by their parents anyway.
A room for reading, doing nothing, making music - and yes, also for drinking and taking drugs.