[ad_1]
To contain the coronavirus, people should avoid social contact whenever possible. The government wants to emphasize this request with ironic videos. Opinions are divided.
The federal government uses tongue-in-cheek videos to promote staying home during the crown crisis, declaring heroes to people idle on the couch. The clips, which were distributed online under the title “#special heroes,” attracted a lot of attention on social media over the weekend: there was praise, but also critical reactions. In the videos, accompanied by dramatic music, fictitious older people tell from the future, looking back, how they lived the second wave “back in this Corona winter 2020” when they were young.
You can find the video above in this text – or here.
“An invisible danger threatened everything we believed in,” says a man who introduces himself as Anton Lehmann. “And the fate of this country was suddenly in our hands.” So they did what was expected of them: “Absolutely nothing. They were lazy like raccoons,” the man said. “We stay home on our asses for days and nights fighting the spread of the coronavirus.”
“This is how we become heroes”
“Our sofa was the front and our patience was the weapon.” That was his destiny. “This is how we become heroes.” In a second clip, in addition to the character of Anton Lehmann, his wife Luise Lehmann also appears: “At that time,” the whole country looked “full of hope in us young people,” he says. “Maybe it was true when people said at the time: special times need special heroes. And God knows that we were.”
The videos end with the call from the federal government: “Become a hero too and stay home.” On the government spokesperson Steffen Seibert’s Twitter account alone, the clips, reminiscent of television history documentaries in their staging, were viewed hundreds of thousands of times Sunday afternoon.
A spokesman for the Federal Press Office said on request that the videos were part of the corona pandemic information measures. “His message is clear: reducing contacts is currently our most important and effective means of containing the pandemic.” The objective of the videos is to bring this attraction closer to the largest possible number of young people.
“And so damn important”
The attempt to spread this message in a humorous way was met with a mixed response. “So strong. So comforting. And so damn important,” Berlin SPD politician Sawsan Chebli wrote on Twitter. Several users of the social network praised the action. Others, on the other hand, criticized the fact that themes such as loneliness, domestic violence or existential fears do not play a role in the spots, or that the real heroes are, for example, health workers.
Author Sascha Lobo, in turn, responded to the criticism: “German Twitter is rarely more dubious (and German) than when these shiny Corona dots meet in cramp shit,” he wrote on Twitter. “Some people may be contacted this way, so DO NOT allow your internal high school graduate conference to stay for 10 minutes ONCE.”
The campaign also generated reactions outside of Germany. A London Financial Times reporter, Henry Mance, commented on Twitter: “I can handle the fact that the German response to the pandemic is better than ours, but I don’t think I can handle the fact that it is more fun.”
The Federal Press Office said they were “looking forward to receiving a lot of positive feedback and the attention that can be drawn to this important message.” The spokesperson did not initially comment on critical voices. Regarding costs, he said: “The videos fit our previous measurements. We cannot provide more detailed information at this time.”
