Can you be apolitical?: The party is not always right

Actually, I don't want to open the barrel of Spiegel vs. Elif Eralp again. The ongoing question of whether it's closed at all doesn't bother me that much either. My twist is that I don't see the matter in such a negative way.

I rather see that things still work: Ultimately, politics is now being done in closed rooms, and the crazy people who - who knows - maybe the wise ones of tomorrow - are protesting in front of closed doors. The Left is reviewing its press work and Spiegel has to be careful not to burrow too deeply into sulk after making the basically right decision to publish the glitch.

In any case, it has been confirmed that politics and political, let's call it hard journalism - the opposite of what I'm doing here - are very similar. Both are rather unpleasant professions. Some want to make things public that shouldn't be made public, others want to quietly clarify things that should be made public.

You have to have the appropriate personality to cover up or cover up. My heart races – Gen Z here – when a strange number appears on my display.

Which could lead me to question whether I'm a good, tough journalist, which doesn't even interest me. I make an effort when it arises. I don't ask anything more of myself.

The other story is whether you can stay away from politics, find it and its protagonists unpleasant, whether you can, in an unsatisfactory word, be apolitical.

As a Jörg Fauser reader, I am on the one hand in tune with this and, on the other hand, critical of my own, to put it an unsatisfactory word, contempt for politics: "Politics," writes Fauser in his novel "Raw Material," "was a hair-raising madness, but on the other hand it was there, it was done, it was necessary. Two people together, that was politics."

The latter is undisputed in times of private negotiation processes and inevitable discussions about care work. In private life there is no alternative to democracy. In the public sector, the protection of the individual is more important to me than the rule of the majority.

One reason I live in a big city is so that I can be left alone. I think it's good if red-green-red creates a government for Berlin, but if this government fails, Berlin will remain Berlin. Democracy is the framework that I as an individual want to be able to rely on. Which picture to choose in the frame is another question.

This may have the positive effect of not putting politicians on a pedestal from which they can only fall sooner or later. And it protects against making up conspiracy stories that are just about hard, sometimes very hard, political disputes.

Specifically: The constant narrative about the left's election victory in Berlin is not helpful. What is much more important is the realization that a party that has only won a quarter of the votes has to reach out to the rest of the city that did not vote for it. And of course the first thing she has to do is clarify who she actually is.

Willy Brandt showed how to react to defamatory campaigns - which I cannot recognize in the Eralp case (but am always willing to learn) - with a large, radical, selfless gesture. The poster with his Warsaw kneel hangs in our house as a poster. Keeping this gesture present may ultimately be political again.