Cologne: knighthood for Karl Lauterbach - as a mocked stick puppet in the Hännesche Theater

Created: 01/16/2022 15:26

By: Peter Pauls

Cologne accolade: Karl Lauterbach, as a stick puppet, gets the mild mockery of the Hännesche Theater © Hänneschen Theater Köln

Our guest author Peter Pauls says we have as little control over the world as Corona - and also explains why Karl Lauterbach is now being mocked as a stick puppet in Cologne.

Cologne – It seems to me that someone has thrown a huge net over our society called Corona.

Because the pandemic is accompanied by a network of rules and restrictions that reach into the finest ramifications of our everyday life and which I - vaccinated, boosted, masked and willingly - do not always have an overview of in detail.

At least I'll be able to go back to the studio for morning exercise in the future.

In the Covid-19 economy, a booster vaccination is worth as much as a current test. 

Corona: Rarely has politics had such everyday relevance

Jens Lönneker from the Rheingold Salon in Cologne says that those who make these rules have become more important than they have been for a long time.

He is a partner in our press club and I like to ask the psychologist about social processes.

Rarely has politics had such everyday relevance that can be felt immediately and everywhere - at the weekly market or at the supermarket checkout, in the theatre, opera and football stadium.

"The topic is simply latent," says Lönneker.

It shapes our lives across the seasons as well as across society.  

Cologne accolade for Karl Lauterbach: As a puppet in the Hännesche Theater

Or the Hännesche Theater.

There, the SPD politician Karl Lauterbach experienced a kind of Cologne accolade.

A year ago he haunted the carnival procession, which had shrunk to the size of a doll in 2021 for corona reasons.

Now promoted to minister, the Cologne citizen Lauterbach has to put up with mild but appropriate mockery.

He probably doesn't know the other bacillus in this city, the carnival one, the chairman of the session calls out to him and Lauterbach murmurs that it's not in his documents.

Almost like in real life.

An effective hit for the politician with a Cologne constituency.  

Our guest author Peter Pauls is chairman of the Cologne Press Club.

Before that, he was editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger for many years.

This article is from the Cologne Press Club newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Psychologist Jens Lönneker: "People have lost faith in their own omnipotence"

What does all this do to us in what will soon be the third year of the pandemic?

Jens Lönneker replies that people's belief in their own omnipotence has been shaken by Corona and the consequences of climate change.

We just don't have the world under control.

Figures from Manfred Güllner's Forsa Institute underpin this. In the Institute's "topic radar" the corona virus is by far the front, named by 75 percent of those surveyed.

Fields such as energy and nuclear phase-out, on the other hand, only account for ten percent.

So it is not surprising that, according to Forsa, Germans place their greatest trust in doctors (87 percent) and universities (79 percent).