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It’s about despair, fear, pressure, and a little hope: Federal President Steinmeier invited citizens to a roundtable on the crown and learned a lot about the state of the nation.
By Kristin Joachim, ARD capital studio
It is an experiment that everyone can see live. A kind of Corona round table, in which everyone can say anything, and even should, regularly in the future, always with the same cast.
The atmosphere is not as relaxed as at the kitchen table at home, they do not know each other as well. Y: The one at the table is the Federal President. Frank-Walter Steinmeier speaks for the first time publicly in a live broadcast with seven citizens about their experiences in the Corona period, their concerns, their fears. He calls it a “civic situation”, he had already met with some of them and planned to do so with others. Thanks to Corona, it hadn’t come to that. Everyone should be honest, they demand it at first. I wanted to feel the pulse of society.
Above all, Katrin Andres is desperate. “It looks pretty gloomy here. Nothing is really going on here right now.” The inn with hotel operations in Freyung, Bavaria, is stopped. The federal president stayed there in the summer of 2018 and met her.
Now the family business is about to end. The November aid has not yet been paid, the December aid cannot yet be applied for. “We have 20 weeks out of 52 this year. That alone is fact enough to describe our situation. Lack of prospects. We don’t know how things will continue.”
Anger also speaks
They would have invested more in hygiene concepts, Plexiglas glass, special cleaning agents. Then the closure. And now there is not even help. Now, above all, anger speaks of her. The federal president asks if he could at least request a discount. She already has. But nothing came to the bill. And the fixed costs were maintained. They only cooked take out on Sundays.
The restaurants of the city have been distributed the days of the week. So everyone does business at least one day a week. “We have all the support of the population. You can really see the solidarity in our small town from the take-out business.” Then there’s Gaby Weber, a nurse at a nursing home in Bremen. She cares about the residents of her facilities. More and more employees are infected, including the first recent resident.
Christmas days are just around the corner and many visitors have already announced their arrival. She hopes “that despite all the excitement at a festival like this, people will adhere to the rules of hygiene.” She also fears for her residents, but also for her employees and for herself. “I have not hugged my mother since March because I work in a health center.”
Children especially suffer
What is also clear in the group: it is mainly children who suffer from the pandemic. Birgit Brandtscheit describes this drastically. The federal president awarded him the Cross of Merit in October. Their children’s table in Zerbst in Saxony-Anhalt generally offers not only sandwiches and hot soup, but all kinds of help that children from an economically weak background need. Help with homework, new shoes, an open ear and most of all a daily structure. None of this is currently possible. “We have to fire the children. We can only have one family here at a time, because otherwise we cannot comply with the hygiene rules.”
That saddens the children. Donations have also dropped dramatically. The volunteers, mostly women over 60, only come to prepare, they do not want to have contact with the children. Brandtscheit says he can understand that.
Even at school, children are under enormous pressure, says Paderborn’s Maxi Brautmeier-Ulrich. There he runs a primary school. It lacks the joy to which children are entitled. “When I sometimes see kids walk out of the classroom into the hallway and then wince because they forgot to put on their masks, then I know that’s not good development.”
They and the other teachers are also under considerable pressure because they always fear that parents will say that their children are simply not learning enough, that the school is doing something wrong.
“For a hard block”
What they thought of a new blockade, the federal president wants to know from everyone, that is, from stricter measures, as they are now being discussed. That would be terrible for the elderly, says nurse Gaby Weber.
Norbert Voss is what he calls a “hard lock.” The painter and varnisher does volunteer work at a soccer club with young people. All of this is fading. He also says that people didn’t take it seriously enough the first time. That is different now. During conversations in his workplace, he often heard that it was now dangerous. “There are just more cases of corona in families now, everyone knows someone who was once in quarantine.”
The principal of the elementary school, Maxi Brautmeier-Ulrich, can also make friends with an earlier start to the holiday. Katrin Andres has long needed closure. “At the moment, the restrictions mainly affect us, but they are useless. They have to apply to everyone, and then they can end at the end of January.” She then says that her husband is celebrating Christmas at home for the first time this year and does not have to work at the inn.
It’s just a small consolation. The pulse the federal president should have felt after an hour and a half was probably a rapid pulse of fear paired with anger. The group wants to meet again at the end of January. Then they will get to know each other a little better. Maybe speak more openly. Then there will be a Christmas behind everyone involved, like never before. And probably locked up again for a long time.
