Can the Germans do without? Twelve writers respond

Anything but slavery

By Katya Petrovskaya

1. Renunciation is active resistance. This question is important. Recently, however, the discussion of energy dependence on Russia and its impact on our lives has often replaced other issues. As if the war were reduced to the scale of our homes, as if this private question were the only thing we people in Germany can do: prepare to give up as a sign of our solidarity and our morality, the only thing we can still influence. Certainly it is politically necessary that we free ourselves from energy dependence on Russia. But this “renunciation debate” domesticates and downplays the question of how the war was going, of the destruction of the cities, the murder of people, and the terror in the occupied territories. If you lose that focus, Ukraine suddenly appears as a disruptive factor.

2. For the majority of readers and writers of this newspaper, rising prices will not be about making sacrifices, but about paying more. For people with a low income, on the other hand, higher prices and the necessary sacrifices quickly become existential. Responsibility for this should lie with those who created and deserved this criminal dependence on Russia, those who worked on the entire Nord Stream 2 energy constellation. Couldn’t Herr Schröder pay for the poorest? The industry that is now making record profits in the crisis? Aren’t crises an opportunity to rethink the order?

3. It is not only since today that democratic values ​​are being replaced by the concept of comfort, coziness and a higher quality of life, which is why many today feel that their freedom is also being taken away from them, but it is only about material things. I have an experience of renunciation. We were not refugees, none of us were in prison, but my father paid for his political views with his job, with poverty and social exclusion, with the sacrifice of wealth. I’m not a heroine, and I always understood the willingness to make sacrifices as a private matter. Anything but slavery.

Window open!

By Durs Grünbein

Whenever I hear the word renounce, a parable always comes to mind, perhaps the first that came to mind in my early school days. It was deep winter and we little third years were cooped up in the classroom in the rather hot weather. The room, like so many in which one later had to endure one’s education through socialism, was totally overheated. Saving energy was not a virtue back then, I assume, like it is today in Russia, spoiled by raw materials, which, as you can see, can open and close the valves of the natural gas and oil pipelines and in any case has the upper hand. The main reason for the enormous concentration of power in the military-petrochemical complex of this state oligarchy, which under the Kremlin robber captain can now even wage war against the rest of the world thanks to the billions of dollars they have accumulated, lies in this natural privilege. Whoever determines heat and cold has the civilized world in his pocket, decides on the form of government and can drive the democracies of the West before him and properly destabilize an unstable continent like Europe. We will experience that once the northern hemisphere of the globe has turned into the shadow zone.