Photo by Flux FM. Jacinta Nandi rants about stubborn Berliners not taking the Corona threat seriously.
What do my parents and intellectual Germans have in common? A total indifference about Corona: neither think there is any slight possibilty, like even the slightest, tiniest, teeniest, meeniest, 0.000000000000001 percent chance Corona could possibly even one percent-likely kill them. And any other negative consequences except for actual death should just be laughed with the same scorn and derision we usually save for neo-Nazis’ spelling skills! Most intellectual Germans are probably right to be this dismissive about their chances of dying – although their indifference has revealed a callousness and hatred for the weak at the core of the German psyche which I, for one, have been somewhat surprised to discover – but my parents might as well have HELLO WE ARE IN THE RISIKOGRUPPE tattooed on their foreheads, and they still don’t give a shit.
“I’m going to Aldi later,” my auntie says to me over Facebook video chat. She pronounces Aldi like Awwwwwdi and Lidl like Liddow.
“Can’t one of the carers go for you?” I ask.
“Look,” she says. “I know you think Corona is going to kill me off, but to be honest, I think I’d be better off dying than staying inside the house with your mother for the next three months.”
“You’ve got a beautiful garden,” I say. Well, they have a garden, anyway. It probably would be kind of beautiful if it wasn’t filled with bricks and doors and perfectly good wood and chairs and things my auntie has found in skips and brought home.
“I suppose I could hang out in the garden,” my auntie says, sighing deeply. “How are you doing, anyway? Do you still think you have Corona?”
“Yeah, a bit,” I say.
“You haven’t got Corona,” my auntie says dismissively. “You just want to have it, because all your favourite celebrities have it, just like in the 1990s when you became a vegetarian because Kylie Minogue was one.”
I remember that period. I used to slip down to the kitchen in the dead of night and eat salami and pastrami and spicy Italian sausages and stuff.
“I’ve been in actual pain for the past three weeks,” I say. “Like my chest area has been hurting non-stop. Maybe it isn’t Corona but to be honest, I’d still like it to go away.”
“Probably just anxiety,” my auntie says. She puts me onto my mum, as my parents say.
“So what about your 40th birthday party?” My mum asks.
Now I sigh deeply. My mum had persuaded me to hold a massive party for my upcoming 40th birthday. I kept on trying to get out of it, because I have been living in Germany for 20 years, and didn’t really think any of those kids from school/uni would want to come, especially since I had called half of them fascists at least 74 times for voting for Brexit. My mum got her own way, and then Corona happened and I cancelled. My mother is in serious denial about this, though.
“I had to cancel it, mum, remember?”
“Did you get your money for the Airbnb back?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“Did you get your money for the flights back?”
“No,” I admit.
“Great,” she says. “Just fly home on a little aeroplane. You’re a British citizen they’ll let you just pop back. And then we’ll have a nice little party here. We’ll get your auntie to clean up the garden, last time I went out there she’d been collecting lawnmowers. She always thinks of a new thing to collect, doesn’t she. We’ll have a nice garden party, like the Queen does. You can invite everyone you know. Trains are still running.”
“What I actually thought was,” I say, “we could have an online party.”
“Yeah?” My mum says.
“Yeah,” I say. “You can have online parties now. You can have netflix parties or Zoom parties or just really fun online birthday parties. What we can do is, using Facebook chat, we all hook up and we have a glass of wine and put the same music on in the background.”
Pause. Long pause. My mum shuts her eyes. I stare at her face on Facebook video chat. What a fucking life, I think. I wish I was there, I wish I was in the UK, I wish I was in East London, I wish I could hug her and kiss her cold skin. My mum opens her eyes.
“So you’ll fly here, and we’ll have a glass of wine in the living room – or in the garden, maybe – and we’ll broadcast to everyone and they’ll join us over Facebook. Nice idea, Cinty. Just get yourself back here. Bring the boys.”
Pause.
“I’ll be in Berlin, and you’ll be in Britain,” I say quietly.
Longer pause. Her eyes shut and open again. She looks exhausted, I think to myself, but also really stubborn and determined. She looks into the Facebook chat and says, in a fairly polite voice: “Not much of a fucking party, is it.”
The media presents these images of people having Corona parties and, to be 100 percent honest, I am not sure how seriously we should take them. First of all, seeing as how everyone in my house has had vague Corona-y symptoms for forever and a day, I haven’t been going out much. And over here in East Berlin, where last week everyone was acting like Latin Americans partying for carnival, it seems like people are actually slowly getting the message. However, I do find German intellectuals’ indifference to Corona frustrating and, yeah, I’ll say it, morally disgusting. My parents aren’t actually being callous – they’re being more suicidal than callous. But people like Sascha Lobo, who seems to think that out of solidarity with poor cashiers and the depressed, it is the German intellectual’s duty to go out as much as possible and not judge the other people who are out and about, exasperate me. I personally think if German intellectuals genuinely do feel really, really sorry for the poor cashiers, they should, out of solidarity with them, no, let’s use the correct word, out of SYMPATHY, stay the fuck home as much as fucking possible. STAY IN IF YOU CAN SO THOSE WHO FUCKING MUST GO OUT CAN. I find it exasperating, and I do sometimes think about friends of mine who are insisting on their right to go out and wonder how, if when all of this is over, even if somehow the German death rate does stay this low, and I was panicking and they were right, I will ever forgive them. They have no reason to think people won’t die. They’re just assuming they won’t, because they want to – and to be honest, it’s pretty pathetic.
Now I do actually understand, kind of, and I think if you’re not German you never totally get it, why German intellectuals in general think that in Germany, with its special history, curfews for Jewish people under Nazi times, no Reisefreiheit for anyone in the East-Germany times, an Ausgangssperre is especially sinister. And I personally think this Kontaktverbot thing is a fairly elegant solution. But this is what I don’t get: yes, human rights are important, totally fucking important, the most important thing we have BUT NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE ITSELF. For fuck’s sake, do people not get this? Yes, Reisefreiheit is important – but if you’re fucking dead you ain’t gonna be travelling anywhere, are you mate?
And I also feel angry because think even this Kontaktverbot could’ve been avoided if people had taken this situation seriously last week. If German intellectuals weren’t quite so determined to prove that they never worry about anything the BILD thinks will be bad. He who goes against fashion is himself its slave, our old English teacher, Mr Croad, taught us this as an example of a paradox – or was it an oxymoron? I think it was a paradox, and here’s a new one: he who pretends so desperately to not be panicking about Corona ends up spreading it across the city, overwhelming the healthcare system, and causing more deaths than needed to be fucking caused.
A Facebook friend of mine, Darling Fitch, made an important point I want to share with everyone, too. They pointed out that the way people pooh-pooh the death and destruction Corona may cause/will cause/is causing mirrors the way people gaslight abuse survivors and is probably triggering for some people. This really, as the Germans say, leuchtet mir ein. People pretend abuse doesn’t exist, they pretend poverty doesn’t exist, they pretend Elend isn’t real. Just like now, people are pretending nobody has cancer – and if you do have cancer, it’s your duty to die of Corona quietly and not make a big fuss about it.
I’ve been pointing my fingers a lot since Corona came to Germany. I’m stuck home, and I’m bored, and it’s hard to concentrate enough to write with an energetic toddler at home, jumping over the sofas and shouting DINOSAUR FIRE! on a two-minutely-basis. When Dr Drosten said in one podcast that now wasn’t the time to be pointing the finger at anyone, I thought, “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, you don’t want people to start pointing their fingers at you.” Then I imagined myself using my Corona staycation to train as a lawyer in Germany, and when the crisis was over, suing him for negligent homicide in the manner of Erin Brockowitch against the world. I spent three days cleaning and imagining that, and now my flat is sparking clean and I have my Drosten hate out my system.
So I’m pointing my fingers a lot, and now I am going to point the finger at myself. Okay, here goes: I am fucking privileged, I have a fairly big flat. Like, it’s not Ellen-big (what are those celebrities even complaining about ffs, some of them literally live in palaces) but it is spacious enough that I don’t get claustrophobic. I have a beautfiul balcony. I secretly don’t even like nature as much as other people. I don’t like going out that much. I love spending the day in my PJs. I love writing, and I can still do that now, just a little bit less. My main jobs are: mother, writer/journalist, writer/performer – if you consider motherhood a job. I still get to do two out of three even in times of Corona. I don’t like real parties that much. I kind of prefer chatting online to actually chatting to people at parties, in a way. I’m not trying to say this isn’t hard for me – it’s hard and it’s going to get a lot harder. I secretly think we have a year of this ahead of us. But when I was judging the fuck out of people for not being able to stay home, I was forgetting how easy it was for me. I love a glass of cheap sparkling wine and a Netflix show I haven’t yet watched and a chatfenster in the corner. I’m a Stubenhocker.
“We can have a 41st birthday party,” I say to my mum.
“41 is a stupid number,” she says bitchily. “There’s a reason you don’t celebrate your 41st birthday. It’s because it’s a stupid number.”
“Maybe we can get some famous people to come,” I say.
Pause.
“Famous German people?” She says.
“No,” I say. German people are never famous, unless it’s Angela Merkel or that East German cannibal. Maybe we can get some properly famous people to come. Like Kathleen Ryan?”
“Is that the girl with the beautiful anus?” My mum asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“If she comes to your 41st birthday party, it will have been worth it, cancelling your 40th,” my mum says.
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
