Brandenburg

Dear friends of piano music,

Everything was better in the old days, so it often seems to us. Of course, there was no corona pandemic in the past.My grandma always said that nobody was sick before, not like today, when everyone has chronic colds, allergies, back pain, migraine, tinnitus, burn-out, midlife and quarter life crises , Dyslexia, ADHD, ...... When I said that her family had taken in her second cousin as the third child because her entire family had died of typhus, my grandma said: Yes, but that was during the war. If I then kept digging - Omi, your sister died at the age of 18 because she had scarlet fever and diphtheria, and you had it too and have had a heart defect since then - my brave grandmother said. Yes, but that only happened because the weather was so bad that we couldn't take the horse-drawn carriage to the doctor - it had snowed so much. And it happened so terribly quickly - only two days and she was dead. That was in the1930s in Brandenburg, 100 km north of Berlin, in a rural idyll. ,The diphtheria serum by Behring and Ehrlich had been in series production for 40 years by then, and it would have been very easy to save my great-aunt, the teenager, from the children's strangling angel, as diphtheria was also called back then. So the weather was so bad that you couldn't drive to the doctor, and that for over two days. I didn't understand the problem until years later when I read to my son Astrid Lindgren, the story of Michel from Lönneberga, who saves the life of his best friend, the servant Alfred, with his tremendous courage and childlike carelessness. Alfred had cut his hand with a dirty knife while carving. About a week later, symptoms of advanced blood poisoning became noticeable, the bacteria had gotten into the bloodstream, a vein in the arm was affected, and the "poisoning" made its way towards the heart. Even today around 300,000 people still die of blood poisoning in Germany alone, a small injury is enough if it is not disinfected immediately, and even if rescue were actually possible and even easy, any help often comes too late because it is rather difficult n the critical phase to succeed in finding the cause of the disease quickly enough. I am in no way in favor of constantly thinking about such things in order to become a notoriously neurotic pessimist as a burden for oneself and one's environment. Nevertheless, I think one should always livein the knowledge that life is life-threatening and always ends fatally - everything else is naive. But of course it's not for the faint of heart, I gladly admit that. Nevertheless - in India, the pandemic is currently causing corpses to be burned in parking lots because there are simply too many dead to be buried with dignity. And here in Heidelberg, around 20 percent of parents are upset that their children should wear a mask in school and have to take a corona test twice a week in order to be allowed to attend school. The mask interferes with the child's personal rights, and the coronatest pokes the nose. Ouch. that again is not for my faint of heart Hey wake up! What does it mean when the health system collapses because the coronavirus celebrates its perfidious mutant parties? Your child is hit by a car, you call an ambulance, and there is simply no rescue because all available vehicles are in use and save other lives. Unfortunately there is no one left for your child.But I still have to tell Michel's story to the end, because of course I don't want to end my text in such a negative way. The adults had already come to terms with the fact that Alfred was going to die, because it had snowed so much that it was impossible to drive a horse-drawn cart to the next larger place, where the doctor would have saved him. But Michel drags his beloved friend all alone to the horse-drawn wagon, bravely he climbs on the driver's seat and fights his way through the horrific snowstorm, a couple of times he gets stuck, he slips into the ditch, he almost freezes to death, but then a snow plow comes to rescue. Michel follows the snow plow to the doctor, who can actually save Alfred with a risky emergency operation. he will get well again, and everyone is incredibly proudof little Michel - an elementary school child, courageous and brave. He did what my great-grandparents didn't dare to do back then, and so my great-aunt had to die - 18 years young, beautiful, talented, dead. Michel from Lönneberga - guys like that could save the world. we, on the other hand, with our small-minded ease - I don't excuse myself - no, I'm afraid that if we carry on as before, it will no longer work. Now we really deserve some Beethoven - the land where the lemons bloom. No, this is not escapism, this is just consolation, well-deserved consolation.

Kerstin