Turning the tide backwards: listen to the boomers!

Enlarge image

Trabis on the Glienicke Bridge, November 13th, 1989: We boomers know what a break in an epoch is

Photo: Eric Bouvet / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images

There is little that is as condescending between generations as the saying:

All the superfluity, what has fallen out of the present, the manifest day before yesterday - all these insinuations are served

Go to sleep, you born in the 1960s, now it's the 2020s and you're embarrassingly old.

In the public sphere, too, it seemed for a while that younger people had largely taken over the debates of the future: Especially when it came to climate protection, it was claimed that certain groups had a higher right to life simply because of their naturally longer life expectancy on this planet Hearing and assertion had when it came to the question of how to save him.

Many arguments were upgraded or downgraded solely based on the age of the person making them, wasn't it?

When Christian Lindner publicly suggested that the Fridays for Future demonstrators leave the problems to the political "professionals," he was swept away.

Professionals, as Lindner said, have a certain amount of experience and therefore a certain age.

And that alone made them suspicious and even completely impossible in certain milieus.

But now it's the second leg.

Forward is where the

are.

Russia has invaded Ukraine with tanks, guns and soldiers.

Rockets are flying towards Kyiv, which is as close to Berlin as Florence.

The Federal Chancellor calls the war a "turning point in time", but it is also a turning point in generations: the globalized present of the West is being swept away by events like Rome was once by the tribes from the north.

But the future that follows is closer to the older generation than to the younger generation, because it brings with it a general political and economic climate that is very similar to the 1980s.

Nothing against Fridays-for-Future or Luisa Neubauer, but the avant-garde of the new era, that's the

.

Because they are familiar with the old days and their laws.

more on the subject

Return of the Fear of War: We were past that!By Frank Patalong

We, the

, know what an epoch break is because we have experienced one.

For the vast majority, ours was a happy one, namely the fall of the Wall, the end of the armed blocs and the hope for the global triumph of cosmopolitan democracies.

We

but also know the Cold War and its strange mental mixture of nuclear threat and nuclear shield.

When the time came, people in my years were for or against retrofitting NATO, they refused to do military service or joined the federal government, they found the Soviet Union aggressive or not.

But everyone knew what it was all about.

Everyone, at least everyone who was interested, knew the codes of these debates and their terms.

In my oral master's degree in politics (minor only), I was supposed to explain what MIRV is.

Has anyone under the age of 35 heard this abbreviation?

We

know the times when globalization had not shortened all distances, made all goods available and pushed down all prices.

This same global interconnectedness and its blessings are now subject to national "resilience," which is just another word for defense.

The Minister of Agriculture is now even wondering whether enough wheat is being grown in Germany for people to have bread.

Unlike the younger ones, most

also know seven percent construction interest or the words: stagflation, wage-price spiral or degree of self-sufficiency.

It's all coming back now, IG Metall will demand a wage increase of almost ten percent this week.

The justification for this demand is obvious, but it is also true: continued currency devaluation of this magnitude can slowly but surely decompose a society.

Anyone born in 1990 or later does not have this concern.

This isn't meant to heroically glorify the past, really.

It doesn't make the demand of many younger people for more climate protection any less urgent.

And of course the last 20 years have been anything but crisis-free for them: apart from the steadily worsening global warming, the financial markets went haywire at times, the euro almost broke, millions of refugees and immigrants came to Europe within a very short period of time and finally Corona swept the world .

But in the 16 years with Angela Merkel, in her own words: Germany, the euro or society can (and will) emerge from the respective crisis stronger than they entered it.

Merkel's promise was: "Dear compatriots, let me do it, and when this is over, you'll all get your old life back."

In that sense, there was a well-recognized normal and several crises that interrupted but did not end it.

The hope of returning never faded in mainstream society.

That held them together.

Completely different now.

Even if the most recent war speech by Olaf Scholz was very similar in tone to Angela Merkel's first Corona speech from March 2020: Whatever the future brings - the old life, that of before Putin's war, will not be for many in Germany hand back.

And even if it might sound old-fashioned: We now have to deal with it, the younger as well as the older.

This must not go wrong.