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meThese are not beautiful images that went around the world from Berlin on Saturday: the protest demonstrations broke up, the protesters were taken away by police officers. But if they covered their mouth and nose, it was to protect themselves. It is enough that the protesters infect each other with the new type of coronavirus. This will not prevent bad believers from using the scenes on the streets around the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate as evidence of pervasive state repression and a police force that is always ready to use violence.
But the security forces have no problem. The images mainly capture what is presented as a performative self-contradiction in the language of sociology: citizens struggle with the means of the constitutional state to be able to make use of their right to freedom of expression, in order to identify a higher morality in his actions. not to worry about this constitutional state.
All of this would be more of a farce if this colored cauldron made up of spiritualists, vaccine opponents and right-wing extremists does not usurp the public space where they can live out their confused fantasies in front of the symbols of the German state. But the Reichstag, the Victory Column, and the Brandenburg Gate represent both the depth of German history and its size.
All of this will not prevent them from being used as a backdrop, if not as a projection screen of the megalomania (“We are the people”) and the violent fantasies (“resistance”) of a vanishing minority. But that’s also what the footage from last weekend says: In the fifth month after the outbreak of the corona pandemic, there is no sign of a broad and noisy protest movement against federal and state politics.
Perhaps one should take note of the show in Berlin with a shrug of the shoulders and focus on the real problems that the virus will bring with it for a long time. Carelessness in everyday life is more dangerous than political folklore on the weekend.
