Birthday Update

You haven't heard from me for a long time, but unlike last winter, this is good news this time! This pandemic year has unexpectedly given me, like many short-time workers, far more time than expected. And after the long stagnation of the dark months, I was able to read and walk more in the last half year than ever before in my short author's life. 

Through the input of many smart books I was able to expand and deepen the concept of Generation Global, so that I can finally work on the continuous text of the first 3 chapters. Of course, the completion by August 30, 2020, which I hoped for 12 months ago, didn't happen, but in spring 2021 it seems to be achievable - subject to renewed winter blockades!

Originally, I had planned to finish it at the end of August, mainly because I'll be 33 years old today. And that's not only one of my favorite ages - writing a book is also on the list of things I would have liked to finish when I was 33. But well, the big party has been postponed until spring due to corona, force majeure. So I have a second and much more realistic chance to check this off at least this year of my life.

For you now, as always, a small sample from chapter 1:

After the uproars and upheavals of the 60s and 70s, the West Germans had slowly become accustomed to the wall and the division in the 80s. An optimistic Star Wars escapism, a staid chancellor from Oggersheim, and the new private television were to make them forget the unsettling of the last two decades. The protests against the arms racwe ebbed away and people arranged comfortably with the stable block situation. A new normality of saturation and boredom, a new generation shaped by consumption and brand mania laid the ground for the carefree 90s. In these two boomer decades before the turn of the millennium my childhood took place.

Even though Gorbachev visibly spread hope, not even the boldest people on either side of the wall believed in a rapid political transformation. And that is exactly why the surprise, the collective euphoria after November 9, 1989 was so great! Everything changed with the European Revolution. Nothing else was the fall of the Iron Curtain but a revolution of the European population - starting in Poland and Hungary, through the GDR and Czechoslovakia, to Romania and the Baltic States. The implosion of an ailing world empire, for the moment almost non-violent, the complete collapse of the old order happened totally unexpectedly and without precedent. Even still too young for any memories, the descriptions of that time, the remembered feelings of those days always seem to lead to one thing: the unexpected happy end of the devastating 20th century.

Although the European Revolution is obviously still unfinished today, it has formed the economic and monetary union of our time from a rugged, unfree continent. This epochal turn was not without good reason followed by euphoria and rush, but the unexpected redemption with the promise of salvation of flourishing landscapes occasionally even took on quasi-religious traits. How else should one call the publications in which the U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama conjured up the Hegelian world spirit and the end of history anew?

But of course, after the manifold, worldwide revolutions, transitions and democratizations of the 70s to the early 90s, there was also some persuasive power on his side: Portugal, Greece, Spain; Peru, Argentina, Turkey, Uruguay, Brazil; the Philippines, South Korea and large parts of Europe; finally Paraguay, Chile, South Africa and even the former Soviet Union! Who could have contradicted Fukuyama with irrefutable certainty? Was the universal victory of democracy and capitalism, of liberalism and market economy not really the probable end of the human system history? The happy end of history?

Inspired by this impressive domino dynamic, he has reformulated an old tale. In a way, he has turned Marx respectively Hegel from his feet back to his head: Instead of socialist world revolution, Fukuyama now proclaims the inevitable new-liberal world revolution to capitalism and democracy - in this order. No doubt he had hit a nerve with this, especially on the other side of the big pond, because no interpretation of world historical events fitted better to the new imperial claim of the United States.

The windows to digital globalization, to high-globalization, had been opened and the American Dream had been made into its grand narrative, even elevated to the whole Western dream. The telling was very simple: freedom and prosperity for all, no walls, no borders, and all this thanks to and through the new unbridled capitalism, freed from all regimentation. As if by an invisible magic hand, the domino of democracy would continue as markets were unleashed and state intervention suppressed. Truly a Western dream - too good to be true.

So while we Millennials were still living through our largely carefree childhood, this dream was baptized and dreamed a million times. We were prophesied a seemingly endless party.