Frankly ... Berlin  Nothing learnt?!

In this photo taken Aug. 20, 2014, a recently-hatched two-headed turtle is held at NEA Turtle Farm in Amagon, Ark. A state biologist says turtle mutations are rare, but are becoming more common.
In this photo taken Aug. 20, 2014, a recently-hatched two-headed turtle is held at NEA Turtle Farm in Amagon, Ark. A state biologist says turtle mutations are rare, but are becoming more common. Photo (detail): Sarah Morris © picture alliance / AP Images

Our Berlin columnist Margarita Tsomou writes every month about the capital from a feminist perspective. Today it is - of course - about what the new lockdown regulations mean for feminism.

The new lockdown in Berlin is “soft” – meaning that public life must be scaled back unless it serves indispensable economic purposes. The idea is to protect the economy so as to reduce the damage to society resulting from the need to protect our health – a line of argumentation that seems entirely logical at first glance, but at second glance makes it entirely clear that we have learnt nothing from corona.
 
Let me remind you the first lockdown, and the fact that the pandemic sparked debates that suggested that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we live if we are to be able to cope with the pandemic in the long term. For example, the feminist hypothesis was discussed that our bodies as well as the care sector must be the primary political objective.

Imbalance in the setting of priorities

This resulted in the rather delayed realization that the public health system had been destroyed and devalued by cost-cutting in favour of “more important” industries such as heavy industry and the automotive sector. No less devalued have been those we now dub “key workers” in jobs that for the most part are done by women or racialized people under unfavourable conditions (in many cases the working poor) – i.e. the carers, supermarket workers, cleaners and Amazon employees who we applaud, only to expose them to the risk of the virus in their essential professions. As I recall, this suddenly showed just how skewed our economic priorities are.

I remember that during the first months of lockdown an unconditional basic income or the right to affordable rents appeared more plausible to many people for a short while. And that the virus revealed in no uncertain terms just how dependent we are on the environment, and how it urged us to rethink the way we treat animals, ecosystems and global food chains. And I remember the criticism that the LGBTQIA+ community and the global south have been left entirely at the mercy of pandemics in the past, just as was the case with HIV and Ebola, yet we – in a spirit of solidarity – all want to pull together and protect ourselves in order to protect others.

Pandemic as a catalyst for change

I remember that at the start of the pandemic some people hoped that this could mark a kind of “point zero”, an opportunity to question and modify our way of life. It was not only day-dreaming do-gooders but also pragmatists like Wolfgang Schäuble who hoped that the pandemic might serve as a catalyst for change: in an interview with Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper he said that “structural transformations of the economy, society and politics” were necessary. He was referring to “compensatory and limitation mechanisms” between north and south, rich and poor, aimed at promoting a “more sustainable” and “more moderate life”. Isn’t it impressive how even this dignified and leading CDU politician is searching for a new yardstick for life and is opening himself up to change …
 
As I wrote in my first column in the spring, the philosopher Paul Preciado described this opening up to change during the first lockdown as a process of mutation: on the one hand, our bodies are raised to be individual teleconsumers/producers and are digitally (cybernetically) monitored, while on the other the “stopping of the world” may prove to be the most important collective experience of the century – he believes it could potentially trigger a crisis of habits and perceptions, thereby creating a political desire for an ecological and social transformation.

Lockdown as a process of mutation

However, the second lockdown now is making the state into which we are mutating abundantly clear: work and consumption – following the same pattern of our previous toxic lifestyles and production methods. We are supposed to give highest priority to proceeding along the same path, while continuing to accept the injustices in terms of how the virus risk is distributed.
 
In our individualized homeworking enclaves, we are exposed even more intensively to the algorithms of the monopolized Web moguls – those who capitalize our data and decide which reality is tailored to my user profile. We are mutating into beings that now experience collectivity only as a collection of likes, and are convinced that we can do nothing but wait until humankind has overcome the annoying natural phenomenon that is the virus so that we can then return to “normality”.
 
Yet the virus is not only a natural phenomenon. How it affects us – indeed how it changes us – is linked closely to political decisions about how to deal with the pandemic.

Treat short-term symptom

At the moment certainly, the drug that we are giving ourselves is designed to treat our short-term symptoms so that our functionality can be restored. It is not aimed at any kind of holistic long-term therapy in which a cure involves tackling the causes in order to learn lessons from corona.
 
And thus we have not only missed out on an opportunity to change our toxic normality more quickly; we have also decided on the state into which we will mutate. This “soft lockdown” winter will not be merely a temporary dark chapter, but rather the start of a future that is in the process of changing forever. After all, let me remind you as one final note that a mutation is an irreversible process.
 

“Frankly …”

On an alternating basis each week, our “Frankly ...” column series is written by Gerasimos Bekas and Magrita Tsomou, Maximilian Buddenbohm, Qin Liwen and Dominic Otiang’a. In “Frankly ... Berlin”, our columnists throw themselves into the hustle and bustle of the big city on our behalf, reports on life in Berlin and gathers together some everyday observations: on the underground, in the supermarket Frankly … Berlin, in a nightclub.