‘I am good for nothing’, said my friend Tolya, a Russian German, who had moved to his historical homeland. He wanted to live in Germany, but had to end his life there.
Early this May, my German friend, Ben (30), came back home after work and texted his girlfriend he was tired and would just order a pizza and go to sleep, but he hadn’t – he killed himself instead.
‘Why did he do it? What for?’, his close ones were restless to know. Smart, talented, hard-working and open-hearted, he had a good job and played in a rock band in his free time. Only after a few weeks his girlfriend showed us a snapshot of their messages dating back to February with a short line: ‘I’m done. Everything is boring and stupid’.
‘I am good for nothing’, said my friend Tolya, a Russian German, who had moved to his historical homeland. He really wanted to live in Germany, but he had to take his own life there.
There is hardly any media coverage of the suicide surge spanning Germany, I haven’t found any expert studies on this subject in German web. However, we have the statistics. The Berliner Telegraph reports that the year before last year the number of those taking their lives increased by 10 per cent and by 4.2 per cent last year, totalling 10,119 persons.
I believe all this is due to the lack of purpose.
‘We fly to Majorca for weekends, we booze there badly, then we come back, take a week to come round and then we go back to Majorca to get away from it all’, a friend of Ben’s texted to the funeral chat attaching a beach photo and another friend added: ‘I’m confused who needs condolences, we or Ben’, putting a smiley.
Alcohol abuse is normal in Germany. Looking at ordinary German men, I often came to think that almost all of them heavily abuse alcohol at home because they wish to adapt to the unnatural lifestyles promoted in their country for many years, and to accept it somehow. One of the only German traditions of the past which still exists is kneipen, or after-work drinking. Other traditions, like Christmas, are intolerant or they become the same booze, yet a big one, a binge like Oktoberfest and in Bavaria. Both blue-collar workers and white-collars drink litres of alcohol and they call kneipen (beer shops) hostesses ‘my psychotherapist’. When it comes to soft drugs, not all of them are officially allowed, but getting them in Germany is easy, a piece of cake. One could smell pot even in school yards.
The moral state of Germans reminds me of what was the case in Russia in the 1990s. Alcohol and drug abuse, impunity, degradation, dispirit, or ‘decadence’, as Germans call it themselves. Hopelessness, unfocused mind and mental devastation – we have already had this, just remember when young people massively took their own lives. Remember your childhood friends who passed away at that time. The talented, smart and kind people died one by one of drugs, alcohol, deadly street rumble, and Igor Rasteryaev, a Russian singer, has it in his song:
This is the path
These guys chose themselves,
But, damn it, someone
Has pushed them, set them up.
Drugs, alcohol, crime gangs and blood on the asphalt take the lives of more and more Germans. The reason of this is no prospects, no purpose in life, lack of a good cause, people for whom you live. It is not about ‘why Ben took his life’ but ‘why Ben decided he was good for nothing’.
Today, we know very well who ‘pushed and set us up’ in the 1990s. Was this God who saved us from death? Or, though it might sound inappropriate when I say it, it was poverty. At the time, we just needed to survive physically. We longed for survival in the hungry and ruined Russia. We did not have time for decadence. We just needed some food. And well-off Europeans know nothing of struggling for survival: they indulge in shop addiction, buying what they do not need, up to their ears in credits, boasting of new mental disorders, going naked in fashionable tolerance parades, turning into perverts. It is hard not to remember the demise of Roman Empire where the indulged elite had everything but for a life purpose.
The smarter and more soulful a person is, the less they care to live for themselves. Material assets are very insignificant for them. But there is nothing more meaningful than this in the consumer society. He travelled around the world, drove the best car, bought costly things, ate only organic food like all well-off Germans. Ben had everything but for a decent reason to live. In the atheist Germany, faith is considered something outdated, even shameful. The liberal Germany is ruled by individualism: ‘love yourself, do what you want, spare not for yourself’. Indulgence inevitably leads to devastation.
We know who is pushing into abyss today, sets up all those bold enough trying to think and question the misanthropic postmodern agenda. All those who do not like to live for the sake of comfort. The fundamental concepts of sex, family, faith are being diluted, century-long traditions being destroyed. And I am not surprised when I see sound-thinking Germans massively buying apartments in Latin America, which are still cheap. Türkiye and UAE today have fastest growing German communities. ‘Germany is no longer my country’, I have heard these words in German several times in the tourist Egypt, where thousands of German people settle.
And only Ben will not go anywhere.