F In case anyone didn’t notice: It was snowing in northern Germany, and it was really snowing. “Can Hamburg have winter? Can Lower Saxony have snow?” is the media’s outrage. “Can the media make dwarves out of shit?” I ask back, rhetorically of course, because I know that just as well as I know that it’s no use yelling at the television, but it’s fun. In fact, they can even bake gnomes out of snow.
The addiction to shared catastrophe seems gigantic and insatiable. Why are we all so obsessed with the large-scale sabotage of our everyday lives, which we then, see Corona, get pretty fed up with after a very short time? Perhaps weather is the last unifying phenomenon in a deeply divided society; It is snowing just as generously on AfD Hanseln as it is on Antifa and everyone in between and outside of it. Or we’re just bored.
Because it is of course not true that storms level social differences beyond recognition. Winter is an existential threat for homeless people, but not for us people with functioning central heating. We snuggle up on the warm sofa and watch on TV how the poor bastards all have to get out: truck drivers sliding into the ditch, emergency services, fire departments, gas station staff…
“Can the sofa have pity?” Yes, when it comes to feeding the winter birds, but not when it comes to the railway. It was clear that it wouldn’t work, and as a result our regret for the poor souls lost in Hanover train station – this “important hub in the north”, which is coming down on us like de-icer – sounds a little hollow. Couldn’t they have guessed that they would never reach their goal, only Hanover? Ultimately, we in Lower Saxony have to ensure that our population does not continue to shrink.
But at least the stranded people employ an outside reporter who knows that the mood at Ernst-August-Platz is not that good, while in Hamburg the journalist can hardly calm down about the fact that “the Hanseatic city”, as we media people like to call it, to avoid constantly saying Hamburg, that is, the Hanseatic city of Hamburg has not had this much snow in fifteen years.
“Dünnerslag!”, as we former residents of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg like to shout, and what does that mean now? Only the very old can remember this frosty white stuff, and that’s why it stays there because everyone threw away their snow shovels? Or climate change is now canceled because of snowfall? Maybe I’ll find out once we’ve dug a path to the street and back to everyday life. I miss him already; I think he’s lying under the big snowdrift behind the terrace and freezing.