The conviction that democracy, with all its laws and regulations, offers the best way to live together peacefully and prosperously seems to be waning among parts of the population. Assaults on public service employees and attacks on migrants and refugees have been on the rise for years. Hardly a day goes by without people shouting abuse, spitting, or even assaulting officials, emergency services, or cultural institutions. Civil standards of behavior and obligations are being abandoned in the midst of normal social interaction, without misery, mass poverty, devastation from war, or excessive state violence being responsible for this. Rather, it is molecular aggression that is taking root in everyday life, which is still largely intact and busy, and is having a contagious effect through its spread and habituation effect. Wolfgang Engler examines them on the basis of personal experience and with the eye of an astute sociologist, venturing into the combat zone where the law of the jungle once again prevails, and considers how and whether this threat to civilization can be pacified.
Essay
Wolfgang Engler, born in Dresden in 1952, studied philosophy at HU Berlin and works as a freelance journalist. From 1992 to 2005, he taught cultural sociology and aesthetics at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, where he also served as rector from 2005 to 2017. An expanded and updated new edition of his 1999 work Die Ostdeutschen. Kunde von einem verlorenen Land (The East Germans: Tales of a Lost Land), for which he received the German Sociological Association's award for “Outstanding achievements in the field of public impact of the discipline,” was published in 2019 by Aufbau Verlag.
