Dash Column: See what’s up

Klaus Brink Bäumer is program director of the MDR in Leipzig. You can reach him at Klaus.Brinkbaeumer@extern.tagesspiegel.de or on Twitter at @Brinkbaeumer.

Can it be that we underestimate two crises? That we misinterpret them by noticing and debating them, but not finding them fundamentally dangerous for the world, for Europe, for us? If that’s true: why is that? In two speeches last Friday, Vladimir Putin raged like the despot of a rogue state, calling the West “satanic” and threatening to use nuclear weapons, while changing the globally defined, quietly accepted rules for the use of nuclear weapons.

So far it was clear: only for self-defence in extreme emergencies. Now Putin says: no, even in a territorial conflict, even if the opponent tries to win back four regions annexed by him, Putin. Everything about those speeches was grim, the facts are anyway. Since February 24, thousands of innocent people have been dying in the war on our doorstep, and before that Putin has waged wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and, since 2014, in Ukraine, to achieve cool and delusional goals.

Do we actually understand how close all this is and how existential? What if Ukraine tries to hold and retake its country (which it will) in the coming weeks? What if Putin will take this as an attack on Russia (which he announced)? Fiona Hill, British-American expert on Russia, says we’re in World War III, we’ve been since 2014, and we deny it or don’t see it.

“This crisis is much more urgent than we make it out to be.”

How so? East Germans, explains Matthias Platzeck, may have viewed the conflict differently than West Germans because they are familiar with Russia. There were school exchanges, visits, and there is a shared history where the threat came from the West. And the AfD and some leftists seem to have similar authoritarian longings. And for the CDU and SPD it is embarrassing to have led Germany into an exclusive dependence on Moscow. The crueler the war, the more embarrassing.

The second crisis, that of the hurricane over Florida, the forest fires in Saxon Switzerland, the rising sea level and the melting glaciers, undoubtedly exist, but are complex and creeping. “This crisis is much more urgent than we portray it to be,” said Sara Schurmann on Saturday at the Network Research conference in Hamburg.

I was sitting there on the podium, wanting to talk to colleagues about crises and journalism, when the neuroscientist Maren Urner hijacked the discussion and brought the climate journalist Sara Schurmann on stage. “Excuse me,” both said, but it had to be, because even the language with which the heated planet was discussed did not reach the audience: it was repetitive, i.e. tiring, and bureaucratic.

Maren Urner has already been a guest in this column. In Hamburg, she said that’s how our brain works, unfortunately also the journalistic one: It changes through everything we do, experience and think, and it pushes away what seems to endanger our apparently stable everyday life and our standard of living. He prefers to focus on urgent, easy-to-solve things and find wonderful reasons to think this behavior is rational.

“We have long since left the climatic stability that our civilization made possible,” said Urner. And then: “What could be more relevant than the survival of mankind on this planet, i.e. the good life of people on this planet?”

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