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Chancellor Angela Merkel, Berlin's Governing Mayor Michael Müller
Photo: Jesco Denzel / Federal Government / Getty Images
If you look at the Federal Republic from the outside at the moment, you sometimes cannot get out of the wonder: Despair, anger, hatred and contempt seem to shape the debate like in hardly any other European country.
And the tone becomes a little sharper every day.
One could almost think that Germany is the table leader among the pandemic failures.
As if it were producing one negative record after the other.
As if the politicians were successful in trying to pull their country into the abyss.
Actually, the country is not doing so badly in a European comparison
But if you follow the discourse from afar, you can also sneak another suspicion: Germany is currently developing into the European champion in black painting.
Actually, the country is not doing so badly in a European comparison: The seven-day incidence (109) is well below Italy (254), Poland (395) or Estonia (797).
German intensive care physicians warn of overload.
But her stations are far from the problems her colleagues struggled and struggled with from Portugal to the Czech Republic.
The German death toll is a tragedy, but it is well behind France, Russia, Italy and the United Kingdom.
And the German economy as a whole comes through the crisis with a level of resilience that other EU partners can only dream of.
It is correct: The EU and Germany have made many dramatic mistakes in crisis management that cost human lives, destroy economic livelihoods, destroy educational opportunities and lead to difficult, lengthy restrictions on civil liberties.
For this they are rightly criticized harshly.
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But that also applies to those states that are now admired for their vaccination numbers and are being shown as role models.
It wasn't long ago, for example, the USA (542,000 dead) and the United Kingdom (126,000 dead) in Germany were ridiculed, pityed or ridiculed for their corona policy.
The world is experiencing a crisis of the century.
From the first appearance of the virus to this day, no country has come through the pandemic unscathed and with a consistently brilliant strategy.
Could it be that Germany wanted to shine as a model student, as a world champion - and now that it is stumbling like many others, it is all the more at odds with itself?
Maybe that's why the standards get a little mixed up.
It is of course shocking that some politicians and business people benefited from the mask crisis in questionable ways last year.
If they have not yet done so, they must be held politically and, if necessary, criminally responsible.
But you can also look at this situation differently: If politics pays too much for masks, it is a scandal.
And if it spends too little on vaccines, so does it.
How does that fit together?
Perfectionism instead of pragmatism is obviously the maxim
The outrage over unused vaccination doses is enormous.
Almost as big as those about some district administrators, fire fighters or passers-by who had injections prematurely because older or more frail vaccine candidates had not turned up.
Berlin is planning a fine of 25,000 euros for vaccinators, was recently read - perfectionism instead of pragmatism is apparently the maxim.
Sometimes the anger in the country seems so great that nuances are difficult to hear and a cool weighing of advantages and disadvantages hardly seems possible.
For example, when it comes to solidarity in Europe: What state would the European Union be in today if Germany had successfully ordered vaccines for itself on its own - and EU partners hadn't had a chance?
Or German federalism: of course, a regional patchwork quilt is confusing, especially when individual districts or federal states erratically change their rules.
But a centrally controlled lockdown, enforced everywhere without distinction, would not do justice to the differentiated infection process in Germany as long as the incidence values even in neighboring districts such as Göttingen (32.5) and Eichsfeld (208) diverge drastically.
Italy has shown how it can work: a traffic light system has been regulating the lockdown measures in the various regions for months.
Sometimes Tuscany is declared a red zone with strict curfews, while Sicily as a yellow zone enjoys more freedom, sometimes it is the other way around.
The system is easy to understand and generally accepted.
Actually, it wouldn't be that difficult to structure the German mess for a change based on the Italian model.
When, in addition to justified anger and necessary error analysis, it is possible to look ahead again.
