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