Post-COVID-19 Futures: A Tale of Two Germanies

Major era-defining events have shaped cities for millennia. So what will this one bring? ‘The Post-COVID-19 Urban Futures’ project will hear from contributors about the future for urban development after COVID-19.

Case Study: Berlin; Hannover

Since the world paused in mid-March, Germany has been hailed for its response to coronavirus. Outlets from across the world — particularly American ones eager to cease any good news — have looked to explain a relatively low German death-to-infection rate.  The apparent German success and luck in taming COVID-19 is well-documented.

But what has not been? What everyday life is like as Germany gradually ‘reopens’ on the ground. Frankly, rules appear fungible, and social distancing is a farce.

Not to spoil the reopening party (masks optional), but if we’re going to learn anything about what the next few months or years may look like, it appears essential to question what reopening means now and in the future, especially as leaders and pundits have begun referring to Germany’s bout with coronavirus in the past tense. Let’s look at Hannover, the stale but tranquil provincial seat of Lower Saxony, vis-a-vis Berlin, the alternative misfit doubling as capital city.

***

In mid-March, freedoms taken for granted in the West disappeared overnight. Although some, like Bavaria, got a head start, all states agreed to march in lockstep with the federal government for a nationwide lockdown. Merkel, set to retire next year after a decade and a half in rule, framed coronavirus as a challenge for Germans to abide by the rules for each other’s sake. (It also helped that she has a background in science.)

German culture is known for being rule-abiding; I would add that it is not very rule-questioning, too. From a young age, German culture conditions an unwavering faith in structure, even in matters as simple as crossing the street. Expats like this New Yorker lose our camouflage at intersections. Merkel, in turn, saw her approval ratings soar to a record-high after the lockdown went into place.

So how was the lockdown? More straightforward, and not entirely shut. Borders closed, as were anything that could be conceived of as an entertainment venue, Flixbus, schools, restaurants, bars, fitness studios, spas and hair salons. Public transport and parks stayed open, with no restrictions on how frequently one could leave the house, unlike in many other countries. Whenever in public space, the rules were clear: no more than 2 people together (unless from the same household), avoid contact with anyone else, and grab a shopping cart at the grocery store.

Who or what enforced the rules? Embedded fear, plus glances from normally-cold fellow occupants of public space and deliberate public-facing police interventions. At the crowded pedestrian plaza in front of Hannover’s Machsee, for example, police vans blared megaphone instructions, while kiosk workers drew a chalk queue with 1.5 meter markings. In the popular Herrenhäuser Garten, mounted police berated what appeared to be a family of four, a scene I witnessed also in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

Although there were official sources, plenty of vital information arrived by hearsay. Something like: “So-and-so heard they’re going to reopen the schools in two weeks—I think they’re going to announce it on Wednesday.” Or, “apparently the Berlin Senate might open the bars again.”

***

Gradually, in a phased rollout, Germany has come back to life. First, on April 20, came certain semi-’essential’ shops, including barbers. More people out in public brought mask restrictions for public transport and within shops. Schools reopened on May 4, and restaurants and gyms have been following suit.

At a point in early May, the federal government, states, and civil society fell out of harmony. Extremist anti-government protests largely co-opted by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland began, while a unified German front across the states — and a consensus as to what the rules actually are — began to crack. Defaulting to pure federal structure makes local decision-making deliberate, but Germany refused to default to divisiveness when they purported to have righted the ship in March.

Now, each state is going at its chosen pace; some, including Thuringia, a hotbed of political crisis, want to lift restrictions entirely. At one point, Bavaria’s relatively proactive ruling bodies were debating which garden needs opening first, bier- or kinder-. A Bavarian mother tweeted that should biergartens open first, she’ll send her kids there instead.

If there’s anything to learn from America, state-independent rollouts breed contradictions without harmonious collaboration. Perhaps a grassroots, horizontal collaboration would be workable. Farm communities and urban tech hubs require different responses, but they can’t have contradictory ones. An example: as of May 21, Berlin no longer will enforce a 14-day quarantine for foreign arrivals. Perhaps this was a precursor to allowing tours from the 25th, but it is certainly unhelpful to nearby states where quarantines remain in effect. Jurisdictional headaches multiply by the day, but do new cases?

No leader alive has ever managed an event similar to the scale of the coronavirus, yet there is consensus that the concept of ‘phased reopening’ makes sense. For us laypeople, simple draconian life has certainly become far more complicated. For policymakers, here’s the key question: when you gradually roll back the rules, are the rules in that particular moment enforceable, especially when nobody knows what they really are?

Not everyone’s day involves obsessive-compulsive news reads—that also goes for polizei.  

Merkel agreed to roll back lockdown rules on the condition that they can easily be re-instituted again. Not only has that not been the case, it sure doesn’t feel that way on the ground. One prevailing attitude is “I probably got the virus already,” which is still prohibitively expensive to prove with an antibody test, if at all accurate. Universally, there has been this overwhelming sentiment: “Time to enjoy some renewed privileges with our pent-up energy.”

***

Has the social end to the pandemic arrived?

When I first imagined this piece in early May, the title was meant to juxtapose a normally unruly Berlin with a more stately, German experience in Hannover. Late April was just as everyone became collectively more lax; during my first week back in Berlin, I was even told to remove my mask in one of the late night Späti kiosks.

I had no idea the rest of Germany was also getting more relaxed, too. There were plenty of non-socially distanced crowds upon a subsequent return to Hannover. There are ‘two’ Germanies: the pandemic one in orchestrated rule harmony, and this new post-lockdown state, often occupying the same grounds in our cities. Perhaps this duality also extends to outside perception. Germany has a terrific reputation externally, one predicated on efficiency, order, calm, and sustainability, which this social rebellion questions. Coronavirus is still here, but Germany is going down the reopening conveyor belt in a disorderly fashion.

Another key question: if summer wasn’t on the horizon, would Europe reopen as quickly? Crowds flock to parks every sunny afternoon; people here act as if they’ve never seen the sun. To be fair, Northern European winter is especially bleak, a mandatory fast of sorts before long summer nights. (Impressive actual fasting: vendors in Berlin’s Turkish Market during Ramadan, on their feet with no food, drink or swearing from 4 AM to 9 PM). 

Still, ‘summer first’ makes for bold policy, especially if designing freedom around weather conditions becomes any sort of precedent. My girlfriend and I spent German Father’s Day biking around a Berlin lake. It was as if we traveled back through time to a summer we shouldn’t be in. Groups of 20-30 men brought out rolling speakers to blast techno and Deutschrap, chased down appropriately with a stream of warm pints. Granted, this was an exception, but groups of 8-10 friends in parks has quickly become the norm.

Why, anywhere, will there be ‘summer break’? After the government shuttered schools and businesses for two months, do Europeans really need another break that disrupts social distancing just a month away? A break fundamentally assumes conditions in a few months will be suitable for work and school. Have we learned nothing about expectations?

***

For now, volcanoes of pent-up energy are simmering. To appease restless populations, governments must aspire to strike perhaps a balance that looks like this: enable spaces for humanness, while reconfiguring expectations in a restricted future. As everyday values retreat towards subsistence, basic goals for finding purposeful activities, places to go, food to eat and (limited) numbers of people to see return to prominence. 

Western European countries (Germany in particular) have the luxury to experiment in finding intersections of these simpler goals with environmental sustainability. For futures after this pandemic, it’s worth considering whether Germany is a replicable pandemic model — in terms of public health infrastructure, it’s sort of how Copenhagen is for bicycles.

Even with advantages, cracks in the German reopening armor are showing. The World Medical Association just accused Germany of choosing to endanger the public for economic reasons. Authorities traced a 40-person cluster from May to a church, similar to New York’s first outbreak in March tied to a synagogue. Surely, this jump in cases won’t be the last. Does the German government respond with an iron fist? What happens next? 

Maybe this rule-amorphous rollout doesn’t make sense. Maybe everyone shouldn’t all be near each other outside. Maybe the next would-be lockdown won’t start on time, and more people die. But right now, Germans are asking: does all that really matter?

I’d counter, but in a different direction: tomorrow, everyone will wish they had been better prepared for the real second and third waves. Until then, it’s time to tan.

***

Tim Lazaroff is a freelance journalist and researcher. His areas of interest include political communications and transport governance. A native New Yorker and University of Pennsylvania dual degree graduate, he now studies Urban Management at Technical University Berlin.