April 13

Ableism 101

As some of you know, I am studying sign language at a university in Germany, which means a huge part of that is also disabled studies in general. I don’t want to say I am an expert in the field, but I might do know a few more things about it than the average person does. And today is one of these days where I feel like I should share some of that knowledge I have gained with you.

The difference between the words “able” and “disable”

To talk about this topic we first need to define some of the words I will be using throughout this post, let’s start with the difference between “abled” and “disabled” people. Someone is considered “able” when the body they have been born into fits the criteria of what society views as “healthy” and “normal”, meaning just because of their body, they won’t be held back by society in any way(let’s ignore things like racism and sexism for the sake of this explanation). “Disabled” people, on the other hand, are born with or without something, which makes participating in our society harder for them.

So let’s imagine someone who is born with legs that can run, take stairs and be independent. Someone born without or with broken legs in some way, can’t run, can’t take stairs and often is not as independent, not because of their disability, but because society often forgets about them. They make buildings without ramps, without accessible toilets or even without big enough doors for a wheelchair to fit through. And because of those things, they are not able to be independent oftentimes.

In Germany, the translation of “disabled” is actually “behindert”, which would literally mean something like “being hindered to do something“. In this case, a wheelchair user would be hindered to access a building for one or multiple of the reasons I stated above. Their problem would not be their wheelchair in this case, but the fact that whoever build the building did not think of how a wheelchair user would enter. And that’s the general problem disabled people face in life, no matter what kind of disability they have.

What is ableism?

As I said earlier, for the sake of that explanation, we tried to not think of racism and sexism, which I think you all know the definition of already. Ableism is very similar, only that the minority group which is being discriminated against in this case are disabled people. This discrimination can look very obvious, in that for example someone is bullied for their “strange look” because the person might be fully blind and thus has nothing to focus on. But it can be less obvious too, sometimes people don’t even know that they are acting ableist.

A good example of that kind of behaviour is what led me initially to write this post. As you certainly know, there are different kinds of gadgets already developed, which are supposed to help disabled people be more independent in life. The wheelchair is one of the most obvious, but there are many many more. One thing that comes to my mind is a plate that has some cavities and a little stopper, to position food into. It was made to make people who only have one hand or one arm, be able to slice their food without someone else’s help.

But those two Gadgets seem very obvious and self-explanatory to me, and it looks like there are others, which confuse people. Just recently I saw a video of a chef making fun of a device which I can best describe as an egg cracker, but one that does the job for you. You lay an egg into position, grab the handle and press down and the raw egg falls down into your pan, ready to be cooked. This chef in the video did make it seems as if that was an “unnecessary contraption” and it would be so much easier to just break an egg with your hands, “it only needs practice”. That is straight-up ableist behaviour because not everyone has the dexterity or just the right body parts to be able to crack an egg open like that. So making fun of helpful devised is very discriminative, even though I am pretty sure, the chef from the video did not even think of what that gadget might have been actually used for.

Gadgets that benefit disabled people, can benefit us all

This indirect form of Ableism often springs from a lack of education, like it’s the problem with many different things. People often just don’t know and somehow don’t find out, that some devices have been invented with disabled people in mind. And not all of them only benefit them, many of them actually benefit everyone in society. Let me give you some examples.

With TikTok being at an all-time high and Instagram basically trying to copy its functions, short video-based content is all the rage these days. POV, subtitles, Speech-to-text and Voice Recognition are all already part of our daily lives, but have we stopped one second to think about how they are actually helping disabled people more than they help us? Subtitles may not have been designed for deaf people, but they help them engage with said media content, which would otherwise not be available to them. Speech to text is making writing texts digitally easier for blind people, and audiobooks basically only exist because of them.

Curb cuts, which I have often used owning a scooter since last year, were designed to help wheelchair users get across the street. Typewriters were originally designed to help blind people write a letter, back when that was still popular 😉 Even electrical toothbrushes were designed to help those limited motor skills and this list could go on for quite a while longer, but I think I got my point across.

Fin

With this post, I only hope to spread some more awareness and educate people on topics, which at least in my school time, were sadly on no one’s mind. Disabled people do exist in our society, they are part of it and should be treated as such. So next time you pick up something, which seems useless to you, before discarding the product altogether, think about how it might be able to help other people. Who knows, maybe it even sparks an idea for a new gadget in your head, which will become so popular in the future, that everyone will use it. I think in general, we should just think of other people more often and some of the problems we share on a worldwide level would disappear.

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January 12

Sexism in Cartooning and Manga / Anime

My Art Journey

I was always fascinated by people who can draw and for a long time, I thought that would be a talent you have to be born with to actually create amazing art as we see in Comics, Manga, Cartoons, and Anime. But with Corona coming around and me saving some time on not having to get to University and back, for example, I wanted to use that newfound time to learn some new skills or maybe get some more hobbies. Drawing or better learning how to draw became an idea that manifested in my head and nagged me till the point where I finally just started to try it out.

My goal is to be able to tell my own stories with engaging characters, interesting backgrounds, and just expressive art in general. I want it to be something in between western comics and eastern manga, but of course, I have not found my definitive style yet 😉 To get better, I am currently watching a lot of tutorials on Youtube on how to draw eyes, mouths, noses, and faces in general, since I have to start somewhere xD And while watching these various tutorials from different artists there has been something coming up again and again which just does not sit right with me, thus I feel the need to talk about it over here: Gender and Sexism.

Just as a heads up: I don’t want to talk about sexist plotlines and character actions in Cartoons or Anime, since that’s a whole other can of worms I might be tackling another day xD What I want to talk about is solely limited to the way people draw and teach how to draw people in a comic or manga style. Let’s begin with the light stuff and end on the very problematic ones 😉

Female and Male attributes

The First thing I have noticed in these videos is that there is a distinct separation between how you draw a male and how you draw a female character. And I get that there has to be some kind of indication, as guidelines. So if an artist wants to make a character of his being read as female, he should be able to do that. But some of the things which are getting taught, sits a bit wrong to me.

Like the fact that the biggest two distinctions between male and female read characters are eyelashes and lips, female characters get them, male ones don’t. Because as real people we all know those features are not gendered, male read and female read people both have these features and they are not different from each other. There are other factors like certain genes which might give BIPOC larger lips, some might have naturally red lips other have the same colour as their skin tone. But again the factor here is not the gender, but the general genes. The same thing goes for the eyelashes, some people naturally have longer ones and others might have shorter, or thinner ones, making them appear less visible.

Obviously, we all know that and what you might think to yourself now is: those features on women are extraggered because they have been known to wear makeup more often, especially in the past. And I have to agree with you on that to some extent. I am sure that’s where this phenomenon of drawing originated from but we have to ask ourselves the question: Why do we still use or repeat that kind of style? Because in these modern times, all genders are allowed to wear makeup and if they would have been in the past, there would have been a lot more men doing it already too.

“I draw caricatures, not real people!”

Now I know many people would say at this point: These are not fully realistic characters anyways and you have to make a distinction between them. It’s just normal to see eyelashes or thick lips and expect them to belong to a woman, right? But the thing is: It’s only normal to us, because we see it reproduced a thousand times. It’s not set in stone in the way our brains are wired, it’s a man-made thing and it can be changed, by representing gender differently. For example, pirates are often represented wearing eyeliner, so many people are actually totally fine with male pirates wearing makeup because they have seen it so often that it has become normal to them. Meaning that if you would show them other kinds of makeup on men often enough, that too would become normal at one point.

Since I have thought about this topic for so long here are some features that I might suggest we all try to use for drawing different genders in the future, because they are actually often(but not always) based on the gender a person is born with. The overall shape of a woman’s body is more curved, they have bigger hips for example, and if they gain weight or muscles it will show in different areas than when you would draw a man. Men are more edged, less round so to speak, the same thing with weight and muscle gain showing differently in their anatomy. And of course, in non-realistic styles, you don’t have to show every muscle, but you can keep in mind that it will take the shape of a man’s body and the shape of a women body different and you can use that to convey your message as an artist. I am sure that’s only one of many ways, but it shows that change is not impossible.

The role of women as objects

This post already is a bit longer, but I still want to speak about the other thing I have noticed and it will be a lot quicker to talk about it because sadly it’s something all women are very familiar with. When listening to those mostly male teachers on YouTube talking about how to draw the female characters, they often used words like “seductive“, “sexy” and “lushes“. But when I want to learn how to draw a mouth, why do I have to learn how to draw it in a seductive way? Why do eyes have to be sexy? Just as a reminder: those were basic tutorials. I am not against art that is seductive and I am sure there are tips and tricks on how to create art like that too, which are very helpful. But I just don’t get why that would be something taught to a beginner.

Also, why are those words only used when talking about female features? Can’t men’s eyes have a sexy look to them too? I am a bisexual woman, I get the appeal of other women, but again that’s not something I am looking for when searching for tutorials. We can’t justify that by saying those teachers were male and they will be attracted to female read people, so that’s why they are using the language like that. Are they supposed to only teach other cis-male people learning art, so we are supposed to think that is the way how they communicate and that’s why “they understand” that the teachers “did not mean it like that”? Because YouTube is available to everyone. Drawing is available to everyone. Art is something that can be created by anyone. So make it for everyone and think about how 50% of the people potentially watching will feel if you can’t stop fantasizing about the lines to draw to create a female character.

Verdict

I am not sure if there is a real verdict to be made here, since I can’t review the way people teach something in a way I can review a book or a movie. But I think it helps to speak up when you notice things like that. Because if we don’t, things will never change. I don’t expect this post to go viral, or for those teachers to read it by accident, but if just some people start to notice similarities in videos they watch or lessons they listen to and they speak up, we already made progress 🙂 It was just very strange for me to see that something like this did not really change in so many years, that artists from over 50 years ago are still referenced and copied. Not that I don’t think we shouldn’t honour the old artists! I just think with new times, there will be new artists and new ways to draw too and that we maybe should focus more on those. Go with the time and explore new possibilities^^

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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September 15

Covid 19: Vaccination Diary

At this point, you might have already read my 3 part commentary about the situation in Germany with the pandamic still going on. In the last part, I have mentioned wanting to do this diary where I talk about my experience with the whole vaccination process, well here it is. I want to talk about how the vaccination, in general, is perceived in Germany, how and what kind of vaccine options you have, and what it was like for me personally to go through all of that.

The vaccine seems to be a double-edged sword, on the one hand, many people believe it’s the cure for everything and it will get us back to a pandamic free life, on the other hand, people are very confused about the different kinds that there are and who should get them, that they might not actually want to get them at all. I am kinda in-between, I have a problem with needles at the doctors’ office in general, so I have fought with myself for a long time about if I should get the vaccine or not. In the end, I have decided that I want to get it to be protected myself, but also help to prevent the virus from mutating and more variants to come up. But I do also get why some people might be scared.

The first vaccines we had in Germany were AstraZeneca from England and the Biontech/Phizer vaccine which was produced in a collaboration of a german and an american company. They are totally different kinds of vaccines, but most people don’t know how vaccines in general work, so that was confusing right off the bat. Kinda like with the articles which were spread on WhatsApp about who was responsible from the pandamic in the first place, which I had talked about in my commentary part two, misinformation was spread very quickly. Some of it intentionally or unintentionally was even reported about on the news, especially AstraZeneca was made to look bad. At the latest when the risk of getting thrombosis was tied to getting vaccinated with it, no one wanted to get it anymore, which lead to many doses just ending up unused and having to be thrown away.

Partially that was due to the priority system we had at first. Because we had so few doses of the vaccines, they were only giving it to the people who needed them the most, because they had the biggest risk of dying if infected with the virus. Starting with very old people, risk patients with pre-existing conditions, and staff in hospitals and retirement homes. Young people were just not allowed to go to their doctors and get the shots, because we did not have enough and the few doses we had were saved up. And the ones who went unsued oftentimes were not able to be reused again or could not be used on younger people because of dumb rules. The priority system was taken down when we got more doses and more different kinds of vaccines were approved by the EU. Right after that happened, my husband and I got our appointments.

When you wanted to get a shot you had different possibilities. You could either put your name on a list at your locals’ doctor’s office and get notified when they had enough vaccine to give it to you. You could also go into a so-called vaccination center which basically was a temporary build-up hospital for the sole purpose of vaccinating people. Or you could wait for one of the possibilities which were kinda Walk-In Events, where they tried to vaccinate as many people as possible on one day, using the empty stadium from football or other buildings that were just not being used because of the pandamic. My husband and I decided to make an appointment in a vaccination center, because it was the best option for me, as I don’t like to go to the doctors’ office and I had hoped the vaccination in a different environment would be easier for me. Our first appointment was at the beginning of July and the second one was at the end of august(because you had to have a certain amount of time in between).

We didn’t get to choose the company where we got the vaccines from, but we could decide on the kind of vaccine we were getting. We wanted to get one of the mRNA vaccines and then got randomly chosen which one we get by the vaccination center(I will abbreviate it with VC from now on). My husband got Moderna and I got the Biontech/Phizer one. When we got to the VC, it was guarded by security which looked kinda intimidating to me, but with a QR code we got in the mail when booking the appointment, it was fairly easy to get in. We were led by arrows on the ground and a tunnel-like structure with more safety inside guiding us to the booths where the doctors were. We were then briefed by a doctor about what kind of vaccine we were getting and what kind of side effect could arise and after we signed some papers, we were led through another tunnel to a small room.

My husband actually had to shove me in the right direction, because even though we were not at a doctor’s office, it still triggered me and I began crying as soon as I got into that room. But I was very lucky to have a doctor(or a nurse, I am not sure) who was very understanding and tried everything to comfort me. She was even tattooed, which was great because normally when I am in situations like that, people love to say “Oh you have tattoos, therefore you can’t be afraid of needles” even though these are two completely different things, mainly because tattoo needles are way smaller and go only about 3mm deep into your skin. Anyways, the doctor talked to me, tried to distract me, and made the whole process as comfortable for me as possible, which I am very grateful for. I even got candy, which might sound very childish, but was actually meant for my circulation not to collapse.

After the shot, we were led to another corridor where we had to sit for about 15min to see if any allergic reactions would occur, which could have been treated then right away by the medical staff. Gladly we did not experience something like that, drank our free water, tried to calm down, and then we got to leave. All in all, I had to say that it was more pleasant than I feared it to be and we got also pretty lucky, because aside from my husband’s left arm being sore right after, we also did not experience any side effects.

Our second appointment actually had to be rescheduled because of my husband’s work, which only means we got it about a week earlier. We also did not really have to make another appointment, because there seemed to be so few people coming in every day, that it would not have been necessary. So we could just show the paper from our last time getting the shot and were lead-in again. Again everything was the same as last time, we got briefed, signed some papers, and were led to the room. And yes, I cried again, but again everything worked out fine. I did not even experience any noteworthy side effects. My husband had some more pain in the right arm, days after the shot, but luckily also nothing worse.

So that was my experience and I am very happy for it to be done. I was very scared, mostly because of my own pre-existing conditions, but maybe also a little bit because of the very strange and confusing way the media talked about it. I can highly recommend you to go to your local’s doctors office(if you can) and have a talk about which vaccine would be the best for you and then maybe they can also help you find an appointment somewhere. Take someone with you when going there, it makes things easier.
And if you don’t want to get vaccinated for whatever reason, I am not here to tell you otherwise. There is a whole debate going on about an indirect vaccination duty, which I do not support. I think everyone should be able to decide for themselves what they want to do. Even though non-vaccinated people should also accept that they have to get tested to participate in certain events or maybe take an extra step to go somewhere in general. It should not be as big of a hurdle to push someone to get vaccinated, but it can’t be that they have the exact same right as vaccinated people, because that would just not make sense safety-wise, right?
So please keep that in mind, this post is not supposed to be an advertisement or something, I just wanted to tell you how it was for me and maybe answer some questions some of you might have. I hope you all stay safe and healthy.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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September 3

Covid 19: A German Perspektive (Part 3)

The pandamic was devastating for so many people on so many levels, I don’t want to seem like I am not acknowledging that when writing this post. I actually have already written two parts which you can read where I talked about the effect the pandemic had on my student life *here* and how the German public reacted to some of the rules that were made *here*. In this final part, I want to focus on the positive change that the pandemic might have brought to us as a society. I guess in all of that suffering there has to be some lessons or skills we have learned that might help us going forward.

All of the things I want to talk about are speculation on the basis of what we have developed in the last one and a half years, starting with digitalization. As I have mentioned in part one of this commentary, many schools and universities have adapted to digital learning, they have trained their staff, bought the licenses to various different digital programs such as zoom, and made everything available online. I know professors who have never before even thought about the possibility of digitalizing their work and now they make PowerPoint presentations and upload them every week. It’s because they have to and there is no other possibility to teach the students when it’s forbidden to meet up in a classroom. But of course, we could keep that up when the pandemic is over and try out a kind of hybrid model, which is already talked about in some places. It would mean that every student could decide by themselves what kind of learning environment they would prefer and that actually sounds awesome to me.

Home Office is another thing that was deemed impossible in many workplaces until it had to be tried out for the purpose of staying safe. And mostly everyone was puzzled when it indeed was possible, not only that but for many people, it was just more convenient. They would not have to drive 2 hours to work, which either made them have more free time or time to sleep, both great things. It might also have been easier for people to work in a comfortable environment such as their home rather than sitting in a cubical office the whole day. Companies could even save up on the money which they pay for renting an office building, so it does sound like a win-win situation for most people, right? Why have we not tried it out sooner? I know for some people mainly parents having a place to go to work can be necessary, but maybe we could have a hybrid model here too? Where people could decide themselves: Do I want to go into an office(which can be a temporary one, still cheaper than renting a whole building) or do I want to work from home?

Having work and learning digitalized can also have a positive effect for people who just can’t go there in person for different reasons. Maybe they can’t find an apartment near enough to be there in time every day. Maybe they can’t leave their house, maybe they have to care for someone and so on. I have learned that people from different german states are studying at my University in Hamburg now because it has become possible for so many! Sign languages for example is a subject that is not available to study everywhere, maybe people who want to study that but were not able to get here can now study it from home. My husband got a job in Hannover, which is about 2 hours away from here and would be too far to drive every day, but now he can participate from home too. How great is that?

Corona has also shown us where our system in general might have failed. When it comes to schools for example, because of the virus the public now found out that many schools actually have broken windows that can’t be opened. It came up because when the school took place in person, the teachers were asked to ventilate the rooms properly so that the risk of infection was as low as possible. Some schools just could not do that, which is horrible to know, but hopefully, it will be fixed now. People also began to think more about abuse at home, which has skyrocketed because of the many lockdowns, so hopefully, they will take measures against that too. It introduced wearing masks in public which many Asian countries already do for years and many people in Germany have said they want to keep them here in the future too, especially in cold seasons.

It might sound like I only want to see the good things, but sometimes it’s necessary and it helped me keep my sanity in this kind of situation we all were and still are in. I am sorry for all the people who lost family and friends in these times, to everyone who lost their jobs, had to close their shops or lost part of their childhood, could not live the proper student life, were not able to travel and see the world. The crisis has taken much from us, but we have to see the light in the dark. I hope you still enjoyed this kind of german perspective of the things that have happened. The idea was actually sparked because many people in Germany are currently raging against the vaccination and I wanted to make a kind of journal-like entry about what the vaccination was like for me. But then I thought I should talk about how the situation in Germany is in general and thus you have my three parts now. I think I might still do the vaccination dairy thing, so keep an eye out if you want to know more about what that was like for me.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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September 1

Covid 19: A German Perspektive (Part 2)

So last time I talked more about the german student experience with Corona than I had actually planned. If you have not read that but would be interested in it, check it out *here*. Today I want to focus more and the general situation in Germany, how the people felt, and why it might have been so different than in other countries. Again I want to talk about things that got to my attention, I am not talking for every german person who lived through the pandemic up till now and not every student, everything I talk about here is my own opinion and my own take on the things that have happened over the last one and a half years.

Let’s start right off with the events my penpals were most surprised about, to hear that people were protesting against the Corona rules. I don’t have a definitive answer to why people are fighting against the government that much, but I have some ideas that could have lead to that behavior. The first one is anger: My mother and her boyfriend actually wanted to go on a big vacation, after years of not being able to go they booked a flight to Turkey and wanted to go there in April 2020. But then it was canceled due to Turkey not wanting tourists to come in anymore for obvious reasons. The first reaction of my mother’s boyfriend was anger, he was angry not to go on that vacation he had planned and earned himself and he needed to direct this emotion at someone. That’s where reason two comes into play: Fake News. He read an article shared on WhatsApp about Trump developing and spreading the virus to gain some kind of control over the world. That’s when his anger found a scapegoat: he wanted to believe Trump is responsible, to be able to be angry at him since he could not really be angry at a virus he did not understand. It was easier to believe in a shadowy figure with bad intentions than an invisible thing that acted irrationally.

There were many different articles like that out there, blaming multiple different people for the pandemic and its consequences. They were shared in person and all over the internet and people did not only wanted to believe them, some did not even have any other source to tell them what was going on. In their confusion and urge to wrap their heads around what was causing the government to make such harsh decisions they were eager to jump at the first opportunity for someone to explain to them what was going on, even if it sounded crazy because what was happening around them was crazy too. When the government later tried to explain more, it was already too late, people had made up their minds and they did not plan on changing them. A big distrust between a part of the public and the government with their doctors trying to explain what happened with science arose. Again: it was just easier to believe in an organization of criminals who created the virus than to listen to the explanations about how a virus from a bat was transferred to humans and why it was now necessary to wear masks because of it.

I don’t want to say those people were dumb, but maybe a bit naive and easy to manipulate. Which was sadly almost instantly used by the people who had problems with the government before. Basically, every group left or right who had some kind of issue with either our Chancellor Merkel, the form of government we have or something related to that used the chaos Corona caused to get more people to march with them. The so-called “Querdenker(lateral thinker)” movement was born out of the unity of all those people, which actually surprised everyone since it must have been the first time ever where people from the far left and the far right came together. They organized so many different protests all over Germany that if you have seen a news report about protest, you might have seen photos of them marching through the streets, neglecting the Corona safety rules, and not being stoped. Why have they not been stopped but at some point even lead by the police, is what you might be asking and it’s a good question, hard to answer though.

In a democracy you should always have the right to protest, if you have not and have to fear getting beaten up or arrested for speaking your mind, you live in a dictatorship or something radical like that. So in general I guess having these protests is a good sign of democracy working or it shows the flaws of it, depends on your point of view. Anyway, that’s the biggest reason why Germany could not just forbid events like that. They have tried to make them as safe as possible, by ruling that protests can only take place with enough distance between the participants and them wearing masks. But as I have already mentioned that was mostly ignored and when hundreds of people, in some cities even thousands of them do not obey, what is the police able to do? Leading them through the streets, trying to prevent them from harming others, and hopefully ending the event as soon as possible, was the most reasonable thing I guess.

It was still hard to see that happening on TV for many people, who had to buy and wear their masks to go grocery shopping or to work. Masks and the ruling on them is a whole topic for itself actually. We began using cloth masks for the start of the pandamic, they could be made by anyone at home, which was not only cheaper but also the only possible option. The demand for medicals masks would have been so big, that the government could not have provided enough for everyone. But when they had bought enough from who knows where they ruled that now people were not allowed to wear cloth masks anymore, only medical masks were deemed safe enough. That was a huge problem because it was also advised to not use the medicals masks more than once, meaning that we went from cheaps masks that you could wash and reuse to having to buy a new mask every time you wanted to leave the house.

So again people got angry, about being forced to buy masks and spend money some might not even have, while thousands of protesters were shown not doing that on TV every day. Small businesses were angry about not getting the help they were promised in time, causing some of them to have to close. Parents were angry because they did not know when and for how long schools would open again, and how to balance their work-life with having to care for their children 24/7 and the list goes on and on. What I want to say is that it’s totally valid to feel confused and be angry about what has happened in this time of crisis. But I hope many people have also learned and maybe changed their minds about what caused all of this to happen and why the government acted as it did. It might not have been perfect, not all decisions made were the best but it was the first time for all of us to deal with problems like this. And maybe we will be more prepared for future situations because of it, not future pandemics I hope, but children learning from home, a new perspective on Work-Life-Balance and working together for a common goal. That’s what I want to talk about in my final entry of this series: positive change.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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August 30

Covid 19: A German Perspektive (Part 1)

Covid 19 better known and often referred to in Germany as Corona seemingly came out of nowhere and started to mess with all of our lives around 2 years ago. I can vividly remember how I got my first tattoo in Hamburg, only weeks before we got into our first lockdown, how I was running around unphased and driving in busses, even though the virus was already spreading. It’s very strange to think back at it now to be honest. It was the last time I saw my friends and the fellow students of my university for a long time. And since it’s been so long, I thought that I could maybe write about how if effected me personally and give all of my non-german viewers an idea of what it was like in my country. I will touch on topics of fear, protest, vaccination and postive change, so if any of that might trigger you in some way, I suggest on maybe skipping this post and enjoy one of my others. If you are still here, then let me take you back to march 2020.

I can’t remember anymore, but I don’t think we were the first country to take measures against Corona. In the beginning, we only had some news covarge about what happend in China, but I would say only a few people actually knew what happend. I was so clueless actually, that I got a tattoo of a bat, which has nothing to do with Corona and never will, but people like to joke about it, when I tell them about the time I got it. Everything was actually so new to us back then, that we did not even had a german word for the concept of a lockdown, which is why we just used the english term and never came up with a german one after. It was actually something that I personally had never experienced before. The only “lockdown”-esuq situation I was in, was when it snowed so heavly in winter, that I did not get to go to school, because the busses were not driving.

Because it was such a new phanomenon, nobody knew how long a lockdown needed to be to be effective. But since my new semester at university startet in april already, I soon got to think about what it might look like if I was not allowed to step foot inside of my faculty. I actually thought that I might have to stop studing for a while, because I really did not believe that online classes would be a thing in Germany. Not because I did not believe learning online would be possible, but because I highly doubted that classes being online in general could be a possibility in Germany. When I told my penpals about it back then, they did not understand my worries at first, because they thought: Germany is such a modern and rich country, why should that be a problem? I don’t want to go into politics deeply here, but from what I can tell, the government really was the problem when it comes to technological development. The Internet and it’s possibilities in general just did not seem to intrest the people in charge as much, maybe it even scared them.

“The Internet is new land for all of us” was a quote of our Chancelor Angela Merkel that went viral in 2013, because it was so funny. Back then of course Facebook already exsited, mostly all of the plattforms and apps that we know today, were already present back then. But as funny as that might have been, it really displayed how unfit our government was to tackle issues like digitalization, because to them the Internet really way a new place. They just had not payed much attention to it, because they felt like they would’nt need to. So 7 years before the pandamic hit Germany, our politicans began to think about stuff like tablets in classes and online seminars for the first time. And in 2020 it just did not feel like much had changed since then, which is why most people thought online classes would fail at first. But suprisingly they did not.

When I speak about what happend, I can only talk about my personal experiences, about what happend at my university, at my work and my envoiroment. I do not want to say I know how everyone felt or how every state acted and just wanted to make they clear once again. I don’t know how but Hamburg and my university actually managed to buy a zoom lisence and get almost all classes online in less then a month. They were able to show the teachers and professors how to use it and even though it might have been a bit cringy at first, everyone did really try their best to make it work. The only thing they did not do was actually handing out equipment, so only people with a stable internet connection and a PC, phone or tablet that support the zoom software were actually able to take part in it. That might have been the only thing I would have critisied back then, but since I was one of the lucky few to get a borrowed PC, I really could not complain.

I only got a PC because before the lockdown and everything, I actually applied for my first job ever. As some of you may know from my old posts I actually work as a student assitant in a project of my university that aims at creating a digital dictonary for german sign language(DGS). My work requires me to be able to use a certain software that people at the university itself have developed, which is why I was not able to use any PC, but a certain type and it had to be hooked up to the universities servers somehow. They actually used the fact that the computers in my faculty were not used and got them for us, to work with them at home. And thus I also had them when the new semester started, which I was and still am very grateful for, because it made working in zoom classes so much easier, than it would have been with my normal laptop. But I know how many other people had problem with their home office set up, so maybe don’t take me as the best example. Many people struggled and even though things were working, they were far from perfect.

There are many things I could tell you about the one and a half years of digital university. For example, I could tell you about how easy it seemed to be for my deaf professors to adapt to the situation, because they were using videochat for a long time already and they had no problem signing within the frame of the camera, but we students sure did. Or about how I met a student who tried to set up a digital room for meet and greets where he could try and recreate the feeling of meeting new people at the campus, talking with friends and just not only using the technological possibilities for learning porpouses. Or this one professor who cared more about how much work he would have when checking the digital test, then about the saftey of his students when having to take this text in person when we were at some of the highest corona case numbers in winter! All in all I would say everything has worked out much better than anyone might have expected, but there is still stuff to improve upon.

Improvement is the last point I want to talk about, connected to university. But since the post is already so long, I guess I will have to make a part 2 or 3 to tell you about the other thoughts and topics I had teased xD Hope that is okay for you and that you are still intrested in the rest 😉 Back to the topic: Improvement seems to be a big problem, because noone wants to invest in it. Why? Because they think a situation like this will never come again and “hopefully”(for some people) everything will go back to normal. In my eyes, that’s a very problematic way of thinking, because I don’t think the situation before was perfect and everything we would improve on now, would also benefit people later. Stuff like Home Office accsessability, online learning and so on. But I fear that most people in Germany who are in charge, still have not understood how important things like that can be. To say it with the words of one of the students I had a class with: “I really hope we don’t go back to stone age, after the pandamic is over”.

In my next post about the topic, I want to talk about why there were and still are so many protests about the lockdowns and vaccinations. But keep in mind, all of this is out of my experience and following my opinion. I do not talk for all german people or students in general. Thanks for understanding.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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