No, you haven't read it wrong. The saying from the headline, which can also be seen in the picture, was written in thick white letters on the shop windows of a 65-year-old Gelsenkirchen businessman. That's the bad news. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. When readers sent me the picture, I fervently hoped it was a fake. But it is real.
The good news: the businessman's action, painfully reminiscent of "Jews not wanted" signs in the Third Reich, caused a storm of indignation. It was so violent that the 65-year-old removed the writing. And replaced it with the inscription "I am ashamed".
In an interview with the newspaper "WAZ", which is hidden behind a paywall, and in a telephone conversation with the "Digital Chronist", the man justifies himself "I like to use my shop window to make people think with such slogans," he says there. He said he wanted to give people something to think about when it came to Corona. "I wanted to polarise people with it," he tells the WAZ. "It wasn't meant seriously: if the hygiene rules are observed, even unvaccinated people can enter my shop." He had imagined that people would come in and discuss it with him. "That was a huge mistake," he says today, according to the report.
A reader of the newspaper already filed a complaint with the police for incitement of the people. The shop window was smashed. There were threats, he reports. He did not think of the connection with the Nazi era at all, he says in the interview with the newspaper: "That was a huge stupidity on my part, I am very ashamed of it." In the interview with the Digital Chronicle, the businessman, who calls himself a leftist, said: "How stupid can I actually be?" Asked what he was thinking when he did the action, he admitted he couldn't say: "I don't even know what I did there." He was afraid, and it got out of hand. At first he trusted his immune system: "Then we were bombarded with more and more news, then insecurity got involved. Then I followed a herd instinct and also got vaccinated. I believed."
I think that is the key moment in the whole story. That no thought is given at all. Especially not of the lessons of the past.
Any equation of what is happening today with the Nazi reign of terror would be absurd and criminal (but that goes both ways - for stigmatising critics of Corona measures as "Nazis" as well as for comparing discrimination against the unvaccinated with the minorities persecuted in the Third Reich).
But as criminal as an equation would be - it is just as criminal not to see that today the very psychological mechanisms are being fomented by politics and the media, and unfortunately taken up by many people, that in the early days paved the way for the darkest hours in German history.
In his simplicity, the Gelsenkirchen businessman has demonstrated exactly that in an impressive, haunting way. He has shown how alive the ghosts still are!
May it be a lesson to at least some!
Most of the horrors of history started small and in the beginning many made fun of those who cried alarm.
But apparently a not small portion of people are incapable of learning from history.
PS: Here in the comments it became clear again that unfortunately equation and comparison are confused by very many in Germany. One can, indeed must, compare many things. One must also always compare what is happening in the present with the past. In order to recognise similarities - and also differences. An equation, on the other hand, is something quite different.
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
) where I could go and where I should wait between the different examinations. In the end, I had the feeling that she was apologising to me and that I should just bring a negative test next time.
