How AIDS has changed German society – culture

Some wanted to train, others helped and clarified: journalist Martin Reichert recounts how people were stigmatized by the disease and politicians opposed it.

Anyone who is at the supermarket checkout today can often use condoms in the so-called quengel products – where children are usually required to make surprise eggs. If they are called "unicorn", they are even vegan because they are made without milk proteins. Or they are called "Performa", then there is a slightly numbing gel at the front of the head, so that it does not come back so quickly.

Let condoms buy today, let others see how you disgust or persevere: In the past, this would have been unthinkable. It meant: AIDS. And: in front of the legendary television spot of the Federal Center for Health Education 1989, in which the customer Ingolf Lück red, because the cashier Hella of the senses, condoms, that he has well hidden on the strip under the vegetables, fate and through the store exclaims: "Tina, wat has cost the condoms?"

Today no one would blush, and that is one of the positive consequences of AIDS. It sounds macabre, but that's it. The false understanding of godliness does not help, the victims of the virus anyway anymore. This is pretty much the approach of journalist Martin Reichert, who also knows in his book "The Aid Capsules in the Federal Republic" that the cashier in the first version of the spot was not Tina, but Rita – which had to be changed because "a possible reference to the former Federal Health Minister Rita Süssmuth should be avoided at all costs."

Reichert presents with "The Capsule" an excellent research subject, captivating, according to the serious story, in places but just as humorous of the HI virus in this country. With the Federal Republic is not, as usual, that the old RFA meant. "By the time of the fall of the wall, 133 citizens of the GDR were officially infected with the HIV virus, 27 of them had the disease," writes Reichert. In the Federal Republic of Germany, at the time, 42,000 people were carrying the virus and 5,000 were sick.

"At the time, one was afraid to be" picked up ""

The wall was, if you like, the condom of the German Democratic Republic. In the State Council building, drastic measures were taken. For example, the men and women of the socialist brother countries considered "particularly at risk" had to prove "a negative test if they wanted to enter or stay in the GDR".

This is reminiscent of Bavaria, where the Christian -The social state government derived from the consensus of the other states of West Germany decoupled. He said the stigma and exclusion of those affected – mostly homobadual and bibadual men, as well as drug users and hemophiliacs – should be avoided. Heiner Geißler put it to the formula: "Ratio instead of Razzia."

Martin Reichert, himself a gay and since 2004 employee of taz, mixes in his book editorial writing and factual history with portraits of people affected and protagonists. Fight against AIDS. Among other things, he encounters a long-term Bavarian positive, which infected in 1985. He still remembers CSU's discriminatory "catalog of measures": mandatory and serial investigations, raids and settlements for so-called dangerous places, such as : doors hanging in the saunas, rotating radiators in the public toilets.

The goal was to crush the gay infrastructure instead of supporting them in the crisis and – help for the mutual aid – in the education work to involve. Horst Seehofer, already a bulldozer at the time and having no embarrbading "master plan", told in the mirror, known for his homophobia in his coverage of AIDS, the project of "concentrating" people infected in "special homes". "At the time, one was afraid to be" picked up ", remembers the interlocutor of Reichert.Many left the fleeing Bavaria – and so their friends, which they could have gotten away with. to occupy otherwise: an exodus, politically induced