On Normality, Certainties, and the World’s Peculiar Habit of Changing

I was born in Giessen in 1971. That should really tell you everything. Except, of course, it doesn’t.

The Second World War had ended twenty-six years earlier, as had Nazi rule. Its traces were still everywhere: in buildings, in family histories, in people’s minds, and not least in the things people preferred not to talk about. But all that was in the past. At least, that was what we were led to believe. The German Empire was over, too, and nobody seriously expected the Kaiser to reappear on his balcony any day now.

The generation of 1968 had already shaken things up considerably, but the upheaval hadn’t quite reached the village where I grew up. People had heard of Oswalt Kolle and his efforts to educate the public about sexuality. That didn’t mean they had suddenly started talking about sex. The sexual revolution had taken place, and in some places people were still busy trying to prevent its arrival.

By and large, the world seemed to have been properly arranged. There were two German states, two great power blocs, and a border beyond which the familiar world came to an end. From where we lived, that border lay somewhere beyond Fulda. Beyond it began the East.

We lived in a social market economy. As a child, I took social security for granted. Only later did I understand that it was the result of political struggles, historical experiences, and competition between two different social systems. Later still, I watched things that had only recently been celebrated as social achievements suddenly become subjects of debate because they were supposedly no longer affordable.

Apparently, they had only worked for decades because nobody had thought to check the figures carefully enough.

Technically, we were at peace. It was a rather peculiar kind of peace, though.

Our village lay right next to American military installations. On the bus to Giessen, you passed military buildings, vehicles, fences, and barracks for much of the journey. Whenever the US Army held exercises, military convoys rolled through our village. Helicopters and fighter jets flew over the rooftops.

It was part of everyday life. We lived in peace while simultaneously preparing for the next war. A war that might be so thorough that there would be nobody left afterwards to establish who had won.

The possibility of such a war seemed entirely plausible. The question was more a matter of when. We learned to live with the prospect of our own annihilation while doing our homework, riding our bicycles, and complaining about having to go to bed in the evening.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable. They can even get used to the end of the world, provided it doesn’t interrupt their favourite television programme.

By the age of fifteen, I had achieved an important rise in social status: I was finally one of the big kids.

That may not sound particularly impressive, but on our playground it was a matter of considerable importance. As a little boy, you always had to reckon with the possibility of older children turning up who felt the need to demonstrate their physical superiority. Now I was finally big enough to sit on a bench and enjoy some peace and quiet.

Naturally, I could have started bullying the younger children myself. I now had all the necessary qualifications. But I knew from experience how bloody awful that was, and I saw no reason to carry on the tradition.

Just as I was beginning to enjoy the privileges of my new position, a nuclear reactor exploded in Chernobyl in April 1986.

The timing was exceptionally poor.

Suddenly, we weren’t supposed to go to the playground anymore. We were supposed to be careful where we went, what we ate, and what we came into contact with.

Throughout my childhood, adults had told me to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. Salad was healthy, fresh food was healthy, and there was no reason to question any of it.

And now?

Could we still eat salad at all? What about fruit and vegetables? Were they still healthy, or could eating them actually do us harm?

Of course, not every food had suddenly become dangerous. The level of contamination depended, among other things, on where the food had been grown and how much radioactive fallout had reached the area. But you couldn’t tell by looking at a lettuce leaf.

Fresh air, exercise, and playing outdoors had always been recommended as particularly healthy activities. Now an invisible danger could be lurking outside.

Radioactivity couldn’t have cared less that I had finally joined the big kids. Nor was it impressed by anyone behaving sensibly.

Sexuality followed a rather similar pattern.

At some point, my hormones made their presence known. They had their own ideas about my future and showed only limited interest in social debates.

The sexual revolution had already happened, or so we had heard. Gradually, the idea seemed to be gaining ground that sexuality was something natural. You were allowed to be curious, to explore yourself, and even to enjoy it.

That sounded promising.

And then came AIDS.

Suddenly, sexuality was no longer associated only with curiosity, pleasure, and self-determination, but also with the fear of a deadly disease. In those early years, much remained unclear. What exactly was this illness? How was it transmitted? Who was at risk? How could people protect themselves?

Knowledge advanced, but the fear was already there.

Today, we know far more about HIV. Effective treatments exist, along with ways of preventing transmission. What once seemed like a death sentence is no longer necessarily one when appropriate medical treatment is available.

Once again, the world had changed its rules without bothering to ask anyone’s permission.

Sometimes, though, all it took was a journey to discover that even the most familiar things were not governed by the same rules everywhere.

We had relatives in East Germany and had already visited them as a family. Before such visits, we were thoroughly instructed in what we should avoid doing. Above all, we had to watch what we said. Everything might be monitored, we were told. And if we said the wrong thing, our relatives could get into trouble.

We didn’t know whether anyone was actually listening. But the mere possibility was enough to make conversations more cautious. You went to visit your relatives while having to make sure you didn’t cause them trouble with a careless remark.

In 1987, I travelled there again, this time on my own. My parents were in the middle of getting divorced, life at home was chaotic, and the trip promised a brief respite.

At the border, the train stopped.

Border guards boarded. I still remember their manner, their harsh tone.

I was wearing a studded leather wristband. To me, it was nothing unusual. It was part of who I was, part of my taste in music, part of how I dressed at the time.

It had never occurred to me that a strip of leather with a few metal studs could become a problem at a national border.

A few intrusive remarks followed. In any case, I was relieved when the train finally continued its journey and I was still alive.

All I had wanted was to visit my relatives and get a little distance from the chaos at home. Instead, I had learned that a studded wristband wasn’t necessarily just a studded wristband everywhere.

Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell.

Suddenly, large numbers of people from East Germany were arriving in Giessen, where there was a reception centre for people coming from the GDR. We grabbed a few drinks, went over, welcomed the newcomers, and raised a glass with them.

I was curious. I wanted to know who these people were, how they had lived, what they had experienced, and what they hoped for now.

The remarkable thing wasn’t that I was meeting people from East Germany for the first time. I had done that long before. What was remarkable was that I could now meet them without first having to consider whether my questions or their answers might get them into trouble.

A border had disappeared. And with it, some of the caution that had accompanied our earlier encounters.

With the end of the Cold War, a new era seemed to be dawning. The Soviet Union dissolved, the Warsaw Pact disappeared, and surely we could now finally spend the money we had devoted for decades to preparing for our mutual destruction on something sensible instead.

Schools. Hospitals. Culture. Social security.

People talked about the peace dividend.

And disarmament really did take place. There were genuine changes and new possibilities. Unfortunately, nobody had informed the world that it was now expected to behave peacefully.

In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In early 1991, an international coalition went to war against Iraq.

I still remember my fear. I had the feeling that everything could escalate. Perhaps life would soon be over. Perhaps we wouldn’t even notice our own end.

I went to a peace demonstration.

I was having an animated conversation with some other people and, without noticing, began walking a little faster than the group I had originally been with.

Suddenly, I heard voices.

“A man! What are we supposed to do with him now?!”

I looked around.

Without realising it, I had wandered into a women and lesbians‘ contingent.

At the time, I believed that people should be judged by what they did or failed to do. The idea that my mere presence could be a problem hadn’t occurred to me.

I didn’t wait to see how things developed. I shook my head and went home.

Well, I thought, this isn’t going to get us very far with world peace.

Today, I understand why such separate demonstration groups were formed and what purpose they could serve. Back then, I didn’t.

And while we were still hoping that major wars had become a thing of the past, a series of bloody conflicts began in Yugoslavia. War in the heart of Europe. Expulsions, massacres, cities under siege.

In 1999, the German armed forces participated in NATO air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The intervention was justified as an attempt to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

The humanitarian justification did nothing to make the involvement of German warplanes in the bombing of a European capital any less disturbing.

The old world order had disappeared. The wars had remained.

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger aircraft crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

I wasn’t there. At first, I could barely comprehend what had happened or what the consequences would be. But I could see my own surroundings changing.

People brought flowers to the gates of the American barracks in Giessen. Where people had previously been able to come and go relatively freely, massive concrete barriers suddenly appeared. Military vehicles turned up in places where I had never seen them before, even near the outdoor swimming pool.

Until then, I had also known American soldiers as people who spent their evenings going from pub to pub in Giessen. Now, all at once, they were very obviously soldiers again.

On September 12, 2001, one of them pointed his rifle straight at my face at a barracks gate. Just one day earlier, I would never have imagined that something like that could happen to me while delivering car parts.

I didn’t have to travel to New York to experience how the world had changed.

It came to me in Giessen.

All these events changed the world I lived in. But while borders disappeared, wars were fought, and new security measures were introduced, ordinary everyday life was changing too. Sometimes so quietly that you only noticed years later how much had vanished.

When I was little, we didn’t have a telephone at home.

Eventually, we got one. With a rotary dial and a lock on it.

Telephone calls cost money. Apparently, it was necessary to prevent children from using this expensive technology on their own initiative.

There was a public telephone box around the corner. For us children, however, it wasn’t merely a way of calling someone. Occasionally, it was also a source of income.

We regularly checked the coin return slot to see whether anyone had left money behind.

Sometimes, there really was a ten-pfennig coin in there.

At our local Edeka supermarket, you could buy little cherry-shaped lollipops, two for one pfennig. Ten pfennigs therefore meant twenty lollipops.

A fortune!

You could even share them and still have plenty left.

Eventually, card-operated public telephones appeared. Undoubtedly a technological advance, but a catastrophe for our little sideline business.

Then came mobile phones. At first, they were something special. Some people seemed to own one primarily so that everyone else would notice they had one.

Later, everyone had one. Some people even had several.

Today, I can talk to people on the other side of the world, send them pictures, or even see them while we speak. I can access information on the move that once would have required a visit to a library.

That’s wonderful.

Unfortunately, it also means that you’re now reachable at any time. In theory, at least. And some people seem to have concluded that this means you are obliged to be available at all times.

A new possibility has almost become an obligation.

And you don’t find ten-pfennig coins anymore, either.

The change in how we communicate became particularly clear to me through my children.

In the old days, you thought about what you wanted to say before making a telephone call. Every minute cost money, after all.

Then came flat-rate calling plans.

My children would sit at their computers playing games, with the telephone lying beside them and the speaker switched on.

For hours.

Sometimes nobody said a word. All I could hear was the clattering of a keyboard at the other end of the line.

I stood there wondering why anyone would make a telephone call if they had nothing to say.

But there was something I hadn’t understood.

For my children, the telephone was no longer merely a device for transmitting information. It was a way of spending time together.

You didn’t have to talk constantly to be together. The telephone no longer bridged the distance only for the duration of a conversation. It made the distance irrelevant for a while.

And I thought about the lock on our rotary dial.

In the old days, people apparently had plenty of time for visiting friends, too.

If I wanted to visit a school friend who lived on Eichgärtenallee in Giessen, I had to walk for about two hours.

So off I went.

I rang his doorbell and asked whether he was home.

Sometimes he was. Sometimes he wasn’t.

In the latter case, I had just walked for two hours and now had to work out what to do with the rest of the day.

Calling ahead wasn’t necessarily an option.

Today, you’d send a message and know within seconds whether the journey was worthwhile. That’s certainly convenient. But it has also changed how we organise our time and how naturally we expect spontaneous encounters to happen.

I noticed this when my children were growing up.

They were sitting at home, and I asked why they didn’t go to the playground.

“Dad, why don’t you come with us?”

I didn’t understand.

As a child, I could have imagined almost anything, but voluntarily taking my father to the playground certainly wasn’t among the possibilities.

So I asked why.

“There’s nobody there anyway.”

I couldn’t believe it.

A playground with nobody on it?

When I was young, you were more likely to worry that somebody would be there. Especially somebody bigger than you who enjoyed taking out their bad mood on smaller children.

Eventually, I went along.

And sure enough, the playground was empty.

There was nobody on the adjoining football pitch, either.

We had brought a football, so we started playing.

After a while, other children appeared. At first, they watched us with some surprise. Then they joined in.

All it had taken was somebody to get things started.

When I was young, I had sometimes been afraid of finding someone on the playground. My children saw no reason to go because they assumed they wouldn’t find anyone there.

I had recommended something that had worked perfectly well when I was a child, only to discover, once we got there, that the circumstances were no longer the same.

Then, in 2020, came COVID.

Another invisible danger. Once again, nobody knew exactly how bad things would get, what the consequences would be, or how long the restrictions would last.

Suddenly, we were supposed to keep our distance, avoid contact, wear masks, and stay at home as much as possible.

Some of it reminded me of Chernobyl. Not because radioactivity and viruses are the same thing, but because the familiar rules of everyday life had suddenly stopped being reliable.

This time, it wasn’t about avoiding the playground. It was about avoiding getting too close to other people.

Something that had previously been regarded as an expression of warmth and friendliness could suddenly become a risk.

For me, this period had another dimension.

I had been living with social anxiety disorder for many years. Situations that other people took for granted could be extremely difficult for me.

And suddenly, everyone was being told to stay at home, avoid social contact, and keep their distance.

I occasionally had a peculiar thought: Now everyone else is suddenly living a little like I’ve been living for years.

I noticed how difficult many people found it. What had long been part of my everyday life was an almost unbearable restriction for others.

Not that the pandemic had made my own difficulties disappear. But for a while, it changed society’s expectations.

And I came to understand even more clearly that normality depends not only on the time in which you live, but also on who you are and what you have experienced.

Even during that difficult period, there were changes I could appreciate.

For example, I had a habit of going into the supermarket without a shopping trolley whenever I only wanted to buy one little thing.

By the time I reached the checkout, I would regularly discover that both my arms were overflowing with groceries.

During the pandemic, many shops required customers to take a trolley.

Suddenly, I always had one.

An extraordinary achievement for civilisation.

And something else happened.

Some people suddenly had time to clear out their cellars, attics, and cupboards. What were they supposed to do with all those things they no longer needed but that were too good to throw away?

They put a box outside their front door and wrote “Free to take” on it.

Other people could look inside, take something they could use, and be pleased with their find.

Naturally, there were discussions about this, too. After all, you can’t simply leave boxes on the pavement wherever you like. Where would we end up if people started giving things away without forms or fees?

But the idea survived. Even today, I still see boxes like that outside people’s homes.

An unusual situation had given rise to a habit that turned out to be useful.

So not every change was a threat. Unfortunately, I also had to discover that some developments could return even though I had long considered them overcome.

When I was born, the end of Nazi rule was only twenty-six years in the past. History was still close enough to touch, and its consequences were visible.

In 1993, I helped set up an exhibition about Auschwitz in Giessen.

I had already read a great deal about National Socialism and its crimes. Numbers, dates, facts, historical connections. You can spend years studying all of it and eventually come to believe that you understand.

And then you look into the eyes of the people to whom all those things were done.

After that, you no longer believe you know everything.

You never forget it.

That is why I never expected to find myself one day having to seriously discuss why fascism is a bad idea.

Of course, right-wing extremism had continued to exist after 1945. Not every old conviction had vanished with the end of the war. But I had assumed that at least the fundamental understanding of where fascism can lead had become firmly established in society.

Today, we are once again witnessing electoral successes for far-right movements, a longing for authoritarian rule, and debates about matters I thought had been settled long ago.

The knowledge of history is there.

But having that knowledge does not guarantee that people will draw the same conclusions from it.

Apparently, learning something once isn’t enough. You also have to be willing to remember it when remembering becomes inconvenient.

And that brought me back to an idea that had accompanied me since childhood: the belief that the future would inevitably be better.

Machines would take work off our hands. Diseases would be defeated. We would have to work less and less, leaving us more and more time for the pleasant things in life.

The future was a promise.

Today, it is often described as a threat. Climate change, wars, dwindling resources, surveillance, artificial intelligence, job losses.

The question of what the future might make possible has, in many cases, become a question of what it is going to inflict on us.

Yet I have experienced for myself how much can change for the better.

Today, I can talk to my children even when they live far away. I can find information that would once have taken me a long time to track down. Diseases that inspired enormous fear in my youth are now far more treatable.

But technological progress is not the same as human progress.

We can communicate with people on other continents in a matter of seconds. That doesn’t automatically mean we treat one another more sensibly.

I didn’t need a technological innovation to understand that you shouldn’t beat up smaller children. All I had to do was remember how it had felt to be the little one on the playground.

By now, we have developed astonishing ways of changing the world. Whether we do anything sensible with them, however, remains our responsibility. Technology isn’t going to make that decision for us.

When I look back on my life so far, I see a remarkable collection of vanished certainties.

States that no longer exist. Borders that have disappeared or been redrawn. Currencies that have been abolished. Technologies that have transformed everyday life. Diseases that appeared unexpectedly, and others that have lost some of their terror thanks to medical progress.

And convictions I had believed were finally behind us.

One thing strikes me: how often we confuse three different things.

What we are used to.

What we believe is right.

And what actually is right.

We tend to declare the first to be the second without paying much attention to the third.

But normality is not a moral category. Something doesn’t become right simply because it is customary. And something doesn’t become wrong simply because it is new or unfamiliar.

I have watched a national border disappear that I had believed would never change. I have seen a telephone that once had to be locked become a device through which my children could spend hours together in companionable silence. I have seen a playground where I was once afraid of the older children stand completely deserted decades later.

And I have watched social certainties begin to crumble that I had assumed we had left behind long ago.

Not every change is progress. But not every familiar habit deserves to be preserved, either.

One of the most important abilities we can develop over the course of our lives is probably the willingness to keep questioning the things we take for granted. It isn’t always pleasant. After all, we’ve spent years carefully arranging our certainties. We don’t particularly want to rearrange them every time a new insight comes along.

The future is open. Including the possibility of things going in the wrong direction.

But not only in the wrong direction.

When I was born in Giessen in 1971, the world still seemed settled. Countries had their borders, adults had their certainties, and everyone on the playground knew who the big kids were.

Since then, the world has rearranged its furniture several times. Some things got better, some got worse, and some simply became different. And occasionally, I had to realise that it wasn’t the world that had been wrong, but my idea of it.

The world had never been finished. I simply hadn’t been old enough to recognise all the construction work going on.

View all topics