Berlin – For a few weeks now we have been looking at the incidence values and the number of occupants in the intensive care units. In a dramatic way, we become aware of how much the ongoing formation of a government affects our ability to act politically. The Berlin sociologist Heinz Bude, who advised the federal government at an early stage of the pandemic, is disappointed with the increasingly unsuccessful interaction between science and politics.
Mr. Bude, you and more than 30 other doctors and scientists have just signed an open letter in which you warn the not-yet-government against the end of the “pandemic situation” and sitting out the dangerous situation. What political omissions have been made?
After the summer of this year, politics lost contact with science. After it became clear that the incidence values alone are no longer decisive for assessing the situation, the only thing that counted was acceptance by the population.
Do not make it too easy for yourself to only state a political failure. Doesn’t it have to end with the noble consideration of individual sensitivities?
The sociologist
Heinz Bude, born in Wuppertal in 1954, is one of the busiest sociologists. With his work on the anti-aircraft generation and the so-called ’68 generation, he made important contributions to the origins and development of the young Federal Republic. In 2020, Bude was appointed founding director of the Documenta Institute in Kassel. In the same year the novel “Aufprall”, which was part of the Berlin squatter scene in the late 1980s, was published (together with Karin Wieland and Bettina Munk) by Carl-Hanser-Verlag
There is such a thing as the collective conditions of individual freedom. Someone has to stand up so that I can realize myself. If that is no longer guaranteed, you are left pretty alone.
How could such an increased fear of vaccination come about in a considerable part of the population?
I don’t think that’s vaccine fear in the first place. Most of them are more likely to test their veto power because they consider the system as a whole to be corrupted.
In view of the situation, is it a fatal social luxury, as happened in the Kimmich case, to deal so intensively with the emotional state of football players?
No, spectator sport has now become a field of social participation. At transfer.de, for example, you can experience yourself as a powerful player who indirectly determines the market value of a player. That is why Joshua Kimmich’s private decision becomes a public “Kimmich case”.
You have dealt intensively with social anxiety, but at the same time participated in an early Corona phase on a paper of the federal government that was definitely based on social fear. A contradiction?
No. The pictures from Bergamo at the time left no doubt about how serious the situation is and that action must be taken. We have only made a suggestion of what to do.
What were your suggestions?
We developed a scenario of probable courses, which in the end spoke against a strategy of herd immunization and in favor of a controlled lockdown.
Has corona deniers and vaccination skeptics been given too much attention? How do you see the role of the media in the past two years?
For me, corona denial is a phenomenon of our time. Since then I have been wondering what to do with the madness that apparently exists in society. Religion used to absorb insanity, then art, and now science fails to disenchant conspiracy theories.
There are now pleading calls for a return to common sense. Does this one reason even exist?
Reason is different from understanding. Mind tells you that you cannot be in two places at the same time. Reason poses the question of the meaning of a world in which many people lose their minds.
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk recently speculated that the state is now shedding its velvet gloves. Has the role of the state changed in the pandemic?
In any case. Society’s need for the state can no longer be dismissed out of hand. Mario Draghi, as Italian Prime Minister, has drawn the consequence of strict behavioral regulation to the detriment of the unvaccinated, which, if you look at the incidences in Italy, is obviously for the good of the people.
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