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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