I I’m worried. About the Federal Minister for Women Karin Prien, about the Berlin police and about Germany. Of course about Germany, always about Germany!
The Federal Minister for Women gave an interview to the taz and when asked about her rejection of gender, she explained: “For me, the issue of gender is more of a symbolic issue for the excessive speed of social change, which has been driven forward by left-wing parties in particular.”
And I immediately thought of the Berlin police and their president, and the pain grip. It is currently relevant again because the police chief declared in 2023 that it was not part of the training of the Berlin police. Unfortunately, the “Ask The State” portal has Now a textbook has been unearthed, “Classified Information, for Official Use Only,” which suggests she may have been telling an untruth.
The Berlin police use the pain grip to (said the police chief in 2023) to protect the officers from injuries that they could sustain if they have to carry away participants in a sit-in, and it is not a pain grip at all because its goal is not to cause pain. The goal is to protect the officers, and the pain is basically just a side effect.
Your own fault
I once saw a video of two older German police officers practicing pain grips on two very young women who, as expected, screamed and burst into tears. I think they were climate activists in Hamburg. I have never forgotten the ease with which the officers traumatized the two women, as if they were testing a new method of filing files.
Above all, the Berlin police chief said at the time that the handles would only cause pain if those affected defend themselves. So that those affected would, so to speak, inflict the pain on themselves, as if the handles were just a kind of invitation to self-harm. And then I’m suddenly back to Minister Prien and her statement about the rapid social change being driven by “left-wing parties”.
Isn’t this the pain-grip of discourse that we, who want change, have been writhing under for years? This claim that everything is going too fast for some people and that we all have to do what these people want because otherwise – what? This is unspoken in the room.
Bureaucratic inhumanity
What is too fast? Who sets the maximum speed? Who operates the speed cameras? There is no debate about that. The crucial thing is: we have ourselves to blame for our pain. It’s our own fault, we were too woke.
Karin Prien’s sentence, like all such sentences, contains an unspoken threat. It’s not even her own, she’s just passing it on unfiltered, this threat that has been our federal leitmotif for the last ten years.
And that is also the problem with the police’s painkillers: in all their bureaucratic inhumanity, they contain a punishment that the police are not entitled to. And there is a threat in that too.
Of course, the Federal Minister herself is trembling under the pain of the political consulting industry, which forces her, under the threat of never being re-elected, to only ever address people’s feelings and never to “overwhelm” them. And if we can only feel things, we can of course no longer talk sensibly about the future, not even if our lives or freedom depend on it.
So what remains is the pain. Because of Germany, of course, which you can never expect to change. Then things get very, very bad.