Photo: Judith and sisters in home village

The pandemic seems to be a never-ending topic for every single country and today I want to share my experiences about how the pandemic affects Germany, especially the politics and my personal experiences. My name is Judith, I am 20 years old and I live in a small village near Cloppenburg, lower saxony, Germany. Personally, I would say the German government had pretty strict restrictions from the beginning up to now. Back in March 2020 I was in school when the announcement came that from now on schools will be closed and we would have to stay home. I currently am in a three-year traineeship to work in a local government as a so called “Verwaltungsfachangestellte”. Therefore, instead of studying from home I went to work. Everyone who had the possibilities and was not an essential worker had to stay at home and work from there, which hit families with smaller homes and less technical equipment the hardest. Another point is that German schools aren’t as digitalized as schools in other countries which made it even more difficult in the beginning. At my office they decided to introduce a shift-system which divided every team into two and made them work one week from home and the other one in the office. This provided one team to always be able to work even if someone would become Covid-19 and the entire team had to stay at home. In most other workplaces they did the same or something similar.

Photo: Lodbergens old school

When it comes to restrictions, I feel like most countries agreed and choose similar or the same ways to slow down the pandemic. A problem in Germany has been that within Germany there have been several different rules in every federal state. At one point some federal states allowed gatherings with 10 people while others still sticked to only one person. This caused extreme confusion for most people and made a lot of them angry. Therefore, the consensus of the German government was missing, which caused disbelieve from the citizens. Another thing that went wrong has been the dealing with the vaccination. For better understanding there needs to be said that meeting people was not really allowed and the restrictions have been quite difficult. For example, there has been a time you were only allowed to meet two people from another household but not more than ten overall. This means the two people visiting you were meeting maybe four people but you were meeting only two. That restriction has been confusing for many people because you never knew how many people you were allowed to meet and at which point it turned illegal. To make it even more complicated children younger than 12 didn’t counted. Now back to the vaccination problem. At a time, people weren’t able to get a vaccination, even though they wanted to get vaccinated, the government decided to not count people that have had Covid or are fully vaccinated when it comes to meeting people. The problem with that is that people who maybe haven’t followed the rules and got Covid now had even more rights and possibilities to live their life like normal than the people who always followed the rules and stayed healthy. This made people not only mad but also frustrated and the believe in the government faded even more. Furthermore, it went public that some politicians made money out of deals to sell masks back when there haven’t been enough. So, in march when everyone needed a mask politicians helped companies to get orders from government institutions and got a ton of money out of that. Clearly many things went wrong and the believe in the current parties dropped significantly. But on top of that a lot is going on in politics because in September there is going to be an election for new parties at federal level. This causes a lot of drama in general, even when there isn’t a pandemic going on, but also many promises of each party in order to become more votes. As a result, the German politics is quite agitated at the moment.

Photo: Lodbergens Glockenturm (bell tower)

Last but least I wanted to share my personal experience with the pandemic. I personally haven’t had Covid-19 or knew someone close that had it with very intense symptoms. In addition to that, I live on the country side close to the nature with a big garden, which always gave me the possibility to leave my house and just go for a walk. Therefore, the pandemic hasn’t been that bad for me and actually gave me the chance to slow down my life especially in the first proper lockdown. Also, I was able to take time for my family because we all have been more at home than before and didn’t have to rush from one appointment to another. So, for me at first it was quite nice to not have any stress and to play lots of card games with my family. Nevertheless, after some month I started to really miss going out, seeing my friends and enjoying life the way I knew it. But I think by know we all do, right?