This year was also marked by Corona. The scientific facts have been overwhelmed by the primal fear of an unknown, invisible danger. Many people compare this exceptional situation with a dictatorship. Right-wing speakers make use of this and pervert the world by invoking the threat to individual freedom and announcing the arrival of the total surveillance state. Wasn’t that the position of liberal-minded intellectuals in the past? Meanwhile, they drift into the corners of the cancel culture and lose the values ​​of the Enlightenment because of the sheer identity-laden thinking. Extreme contrasts and single colored – monochrome – positions predominate.

And yet, the year can also be positive. Means against a life-threatening infection have never been found so quickly. Many good things have been done and many new discoveries have been made. Creativity is hardly hindered by the problematic social developments. The future of our planet is driving more and more people, it brings us to action, inspires the economy to innovate at previously unimaginable speeds, even if more can still be done and still more needs to be done.

With this in mind, I am looking forward to a new, colorful, varied New Year and wish all of us a peaceful Christmas and a happy, peaceful, exciting and healthy year 2022.

If the old year was successful, look forward to the new one.
And if it was bad, then even more so.

Albert Einstein, Physicist, 1879 – 1955