Jüri Reinvere ⟩ The Soviet Union is back

Jüri Reinvere Photo: Mihkel Maripuu

• The area around the central train station in Frankfurt resembles the Third World.
• The ruling class in Germany lives in an idealistic rosy ideology.
• In Estonia, we also tend to forget how bad it was during the Soviet occupation.

The situation where nothing actually works, but the state sings a song about how well everything is, is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, composer Jüri Reinvere writes.

About ten years ago, everything still worked in Germany. It really did. Trains ran on schedule, medicines were available in pharmacies, and restaurants served food. Newspapers reported on the world more or less as it was.

Today, very little of that remains. Much of the media describes the world from a narrow perspective. Right-wing media clings to a view of the world as it was at the end of the Cold War. Left-wing media is engulfed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, viewing it in an exaggerated black-and-white manner.

Restaurants serve expensive frozen food from China. Pharmacies selectively offer medicines. Most medicines are no longer available – if you are lucky, a pharmacist might have set up a private waiting list, through which there is a chance of getting your prescription medication over a longer period. Many prescriptions are no longer accepted because pharmacies gave up on engaging in supply chain battles some six months ago.

Deutsche Bahn is a complete nightmare. It is rare for a train to arrive on time. Mostly, trains are canceled, diverted, stop in the middle of nowhere, or unload passengers onto platforms like waste. To arrive on time, one must allocate four to five hours of buffer time. Dining cars, if they function, often announce that no food is available. Usually, they are closed, and a sad-eyed waiter in some other car sells chocolates from a cardboard box and pumps coffee from a thermos.

I have been on a train where the conductor announced, «I have no idea where we're going.» Usually, trains simply do not run. The reasons can be anything: the driver forgot his glasses, the crew did not show up, a herd of animals blocked the track, it rained between cities and the tracks are out of order, children are playing on the tracks with no one to remove them, or there is no driver at all.

Customer service is usually staffed by people who lack any authority to make decisions.

Grocery stores! They have their own issues. Prices have doubled due to the Ukraine war and the Nord Stream pipeline shutdown, but what you get is rotten vegetables or moth-infested products. Even more expensive and well-lit stores offer little help. Though the floors and walls may be cleaner and the products shinier, everything is just as dubious and moldy.

Meanwhile, popular organic stores in upscale neighborhoods thrive, despite TV programs exposing how they sell regular products at higher prices. The national audit office does not touch them.

If you order a newspaper, you will invariably receive a different, unknown paper. Then an angry sales agent will demand money for the new subscription. Calling customer service involves long waits, sometimes half an hour or more. If you are lucky, someone answers. Whether your issue gets resolved is uncertain. Customer service is usually staffed by people who lack any authority to make decisions, and it is not unusual for the agent to hang up after finally answering.

Fortunately, in Germany, most service staff speak German, even with dialects, unlike in English-speaking countries where your call might land in India or Africa, making it difficult to understand the accent. But the Kafkaesque runaround in institutions, to handle even the simplest task, is the same.

The police! The area around the central train station in Frankfurt looks like the worst of the Third World. Streets filled with soiled mattresses, vagrants with their pants down, and a pervasive stench. Prostitutes and drug dealers competing for the same clients. The police are helpless and and sit idly by.

In violent incidents, which occur almost daily, the police are seen fleeing while criminals continue their reign. The police suffer from a lack of resources, compounded by the prevailing belief that the problems they face daily in the city do not even exist.

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I have always emphasized how the right-wing populism's popularity in Central Europe is based on accurate observations and how the government and the liberal economic elite harm themselves by ignoring reality in their idealistic ideologies. Such ideologies assume that everyone is kind, supportive, and values freedom as the highest good, where no one harms anyone else.

The longer this persists, the more a semi-schizophrenic situation grows, where people's real lives conflict with the «song of reality» imposed by the ruling environment. I often tell many people in Germany: «The Soviet Union is back.» Or at least: «We are heading back to the Soviet Union.» A place where nothing truly works, but the state sings songs of the best life ever. A place where people cannot make something of themselves unless they are born into the right family or bear a certain surname. A place where an invented reality is laid over everything else like a white carpet to hide the dirty stains.

What is most bizarre is how deeply this statement offends West Germans. Not only have they not noticed the inefficiency creeping into their country, but they also believe they are immune to such developments. Creating a state like the Soviet Union is the domain of brainwashed, suppressed, ideologically crippled Eastern Europeans. The Western society, they believe, is incapable of such a downfall. That is the impression one gradually gets.

Clearly, things are not that bad yet. In Estonia, we also tend to forget how terrible it was during the Soviet occupation. We easily forget how Estonian identity was at risk, how oppressive it was, and the chronic feeling that nothing depended on us. That we had no power to influence our own affairs.

Ideologies have a nasty habit of extinguishing all lights when they enter a room.

We have forgotten how everything required connections -- a reality I now recognize in Germany today, where even a simple plumber's visit needs connections. How it was dangerous to walk in many new districts of Tallinn at night, similarly to areas in Berlin or Frankfurt today. As mentioned, there is no police presence, and even if there were, their capability would be questionable.

Right-wing populism thrives on news feeds, left-wing populism on foreign news. Rational voices in politics are becoming rarer, and it all comes with an inability to learn from history or neighboring countries. The Western society's belief in being its own ultimate form, victorious now and forever, remains unshakable.

Words fail to describe the mental gap between West and East Germans; those who have lived through societal collapse and those who believe everything will continue unchanged indefinitely.

Where does this confidence come from? From the delusion that they have always been on the winning side, and those who lost did so because they were weak and sometimes foolish. The common belief in Germany is that the true Germany is the former West Germany, while East Germany was a historical fluke.

Ideologies have a nasty habit of extinguishing all lights when they enter a room.

This was true of communism and is now true of typical Western self-centeredness. It is also seen in constant societal despair, most recently evident when Ukraine quickly fell out of focus after Hamas attacked Israel. Voters sway from left to right for the slightest promises of sweet deals, and governments find it increasingly hard to govern amid all this.

As Lagle Parek once said about her ministerial experience: «The real problem is that many issues simply have no solutions.»