March 26, 2020 - 10:25am
For the past couple of weeks I have been peering through one little window onto the German C-19 soul by watching the main evening news programme ZDF Heute Journal (on the ZDF app). Reassuringly (perhaps) the story in Germany seems to have followed a very similar trajectory to here, with both countries considerably less draconian than France, Spain and Italy. We have been just a few days behind Germany as it has closed schools, then shops, encouraged people to lockdown so far as possible, and then ordered people to do so.
In the days after Angela Merkel’s big televised address on 18 March advising people to socially distance there was the same official concern, as in the UK, that too many people were disobeying instructions and mixing in the sunshine. So last Sunday she delivered a second address after a meeting with the minister presidents of all the German states ordering people to stay at home. Though she didn’t say order. Instead, just like Boris Johnson in his address on Monday, she said these are no longer recommendations they are rules.
Overall, Germany is in a better position than the UK and fewer people are dying. It has more capacity in its health system and has been doing more testing. But, like in the UK, there has also been plenty of media sniping at political leaders over the “corona chaos” as one newspaper put it. An extra dimension of dispute in Germany has come with tussling between state minister presidents and Berlin with some states, like Bavaria, breaking ranks and imposing tougher measures sooner (though we have had our own version with Sadiq Khan and Nicola Sturgeon profiling themselves against Johnson). There has also been panic-buying in Germany though there it has a cuddlier word: hamsterkauf.
Heute Journal is in many ways an excellent news programme. There is, perhaps surprisingly, no daily press conference in Germany so a lot of public responsibility falls on the TV journalists at ZDF and elsewhere who interview the leading politicians about the crisis and usually do so in a polite but challenging manner. Yet, like so much of the German media, Heute Journal is unremittingly pious. And it has found it hard to shake off its liberal globalist worldview. There was a comic illustration of this the weekend before last. On the Saturday evening programme there was a highly opinionated 10 minute item excoriating the decision of several EU states, particularly Poland, to close their borders and an expert was found to repeat the cliché about the virus not respecting national borders. The very next morning the German government slammed their own borders shut.
One unsurprising difference between the land of Wagner’s ring cycle and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado: Merkel’s TV address was more than twice as long as Boris Johnson’s last Monday (and rather better too). One more surprising difference: Germany is insisting on only a 1.5 metre distance between people while we have gone for the full two metres. My distance is bigger than yours!
David Goodhart is the author of Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. He is head of the Demography unit at the think tank Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeThe media consider themselves a Supreme Court in settling moral and social and even medical questions. This is especially evident in this crisis when no one in authority knows what to do.
The all knowing good people – Liberal SJW’s all told Trump he was racist for stopping Chinese spreading the Wuhan Chinese Corona Virus. Now look at the infection rates per million? Germany is 2.5 times the USA, France is double the USA and Spain and Italy are 6 times the USA. Looks like racist fools like Trump are better for our health.
The final picture of which nation is doing it “better ” will only emerge after some months at the earliest . The things to measure will be the corona infection rate, the corona death rate and the overall change in national life-expectancy of the countries which you mention. Conclusive infection rates will probably not be established until the very widespread use of the antibody tests . At present different published infection rates are likely to be affected by the low rate of testing in some places . There will be different practices in the official cause of death as well, eg , did that cardiac patient die because of his heart , or the infection ? Hence the need to analyse changes in national life expectancy because there are direct casualties from this crisis , as well as indirect ones ( eg cancer patients who have their treatments postponed or rendered more expensive.)
I find it amazing the alacrity with which the French authorities seized consignments of PPE heading for the UK.Yes I am aware it was subsequently just delayed, However it was seized.
I also noted the “compassion” (sarc) being shown to the Greeks again.
Also our press once rabidly in support of no borders has gone strangely quiet. Perhaps the intellectuals were busy decamping from London?
Media sniping at government politicians in the UK acts as a reminder of why mass media have lost so much influence with the public this past half-decade. News coverage of what has actually happened “i.e. News “is mixed in with its opposite, the much lengthier and more frequent speculation, kite-flying and snark. The result is that few in the mass media have been having a ‘good war’.
It means that the far more useful substance, calmly delivered public information, is prized where it does get some space in mass media. The medical people and well-informed researchers answering queries, measuring their words, being as precise as they can be, may not always tell all people what they want to hear but they do come as a far more interesting alternative to the partisan rubbish some political interests seem to think will do. And what a pleasure it is to see Science enhance its prestige and in the process provide an antidote to some of the hysteria that one hears and reads.
The media class has earned the hatred and mistrust of most normal people in recent years. This applies particularly in Germany, and with very good reason, not least because you are forced to pay a TV/media licence in Germany even if you don’t have a TV. At least here in the UK one is free to throw out the TV – as I did 20 years ago – and not pay the tax. So hated are the journalists in Germany that they were attacked in Dresden a couple of years ago.
I understood that the attacks were carried out by Anhaenger/ Mitglieder of the AFD and NPD . Have you any further info about that ?
The attacks were carried out by apparently normal people when they were accused of being Nazis etc for objecting to the very high numbers of crimes – murder in this case – committed by recent immigrants. I expect a lot of these people vote AfD, and why not?