This piece was published before the election.
From The Economist, Sep 17th 2021:
In a sleepy town with cobbled streets on the eastern edge of Germany, Lea Schneider, a 37-year-old small-business owner, is preparing for the collapse of civilisation. Since she doesn’t yet know what form the apocalypse may take, she is getting ready for multiple scenarios. She is also concerned about all the ways in which her preparations may be derailed. The most pressing of these, currently, is moths.
As Schneider (not her real name) leads me downstairs to her basement, she waves one of the winged insects, a survivor of her most recent poisoning effort, out of the lamplight. “They are such tenacious creatures,” she says. “They keep coming back.”
At the bottom of the staircase a wooden door is secured with a shiny metal padlock. When Schneider turns the key and pushes, the door swings open soundlessly. A neon light on the ceiling flickers to life, illuminating a project Schneider has kept secret for over a decade from all but four people outside her immediate family: a concrete cellar, about four metres by two metres, crammed to the ceiling with food.
No surface in the cellar is unused: Schneider is so economical with space that she calculates the calorie-to-size ratio of goods before stocking them. Each metal shelf holds glasses, cans and packages, meticulously arranged according to size and product type. Barrels are stocked to the brim with flour, rice and pasta, divided into sealed plastic packets (Schneider has already lost one batch of goods to moths). There is enough here to feed a family of four for at least four months, maybe more. “It will give us a head start,” says Schneider.
“When you have no running water, you have a faeces problem”
An object by the door looks like a foldable camping chair with a tube attached. Schneider found this online: it’s a “separating toilet” that siphons off urine (which can be re-used as plant fertiliser) and dries out solid waste to reduce the smell.
Germans have had plenty of reasons to practise stockpiling in the recent past. After the second world war food shortages across the country were so acute that adults were losing about 15% of their body weight, according to one survey from the American-occupied zone. Some everyday goods were scarce in East Germany until the 1980s.
That Germany today is ostensibly stable and prosperous does not stop Schneider, a blonde mother of two, from thinking like someone in a failed state. She is one of a growing number of people whose propensity to worry about the future has been given charge and focus by an internet culture known as prepping. Even stocking up on tinned goods is no longer enough to reassure Schneider. “When you have no more running water, you have a faeces problem,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
It’s not hard for Schneider to imagine what preppers call TEOTWAWKI (The End of The World As We Know It). She has already seen one way of life crumble to dust. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a moment of intoxicating freedom for people in East Germany, but the whiplash was severe. Institutions that had governed every aspect of people’s lives vanished overnight. More than 3,000 state-owned companies were closed.
Prepping used to be the domain of paranoid oddballs in tin foil hats in rural America. Around 2015 it gained a cachet among Silicon Valley libertarians, some of whom splurged on remote plots of land and equipped them with high-tech survival gear. Now, due to a combination of the financial crisis of 2007-09, the increased tempo of extreme-weather events and the coronavirus pandemic, a more diverse range of people have been drawn to the movement.
There are around 20m preppers in the world today according to Bradley Garrett, an academic who has studied them; anywhere from 5m-15m are thought to be in America. Prepping culture remains heavily influenced by a cold-war mindset, even outside the United States. Meeting on Facebook pages and Telegram channels, individuals swap tips on how to survive a world without the rule of law (or, as the movement’s acronym-heavy jargon would have it, WROL).
There is more than a whiff of conspiracy thinking to these forums. Some are preoccupied with phenomena such as electromagnetic waves (which conspiracy theorists believe are used for mind control). Increasingly, though, prepper content consists of practical advice for less far-fetched scenarios like political upheaval and extreme-weather events.
Germany has had its fair share of the former, and this summer a natural disaster hit, too: the Ahr burst its banks and over 160 people died in catastrophic flooding. Prepping seems to be growing particularly fast in Germany, especially in the former East. Sales of survivalist equipment are booming. Courses in German cities offer people the opportunity to go out into the countryside and learn skills such as how to distil their own urine. A company in Berlin that makes steel bunkers now has a waiting list for prospective clients.
What if she built up a stockpile for two months but the crisis lasted four?
The rest of the world tends to see Germany as a paragon of stolid predictability, exemplified by its chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose 16-year reign will end sometime after this month’s elections. During Merkel’s rule she has been hailed for keeping the European Union together during the euro crisis, and as a bulwark of continuity in the turbulent time of Donald Trump and Brexit.
But not everything about the Merkel era has been reassuringly stable. Economic inequality in Germany has increased. Her emphasis on pragmatism and consensus has left debate on some of the thorniest questions about Germany’s future to those on the more extreme fringes.
Germany’s prepper scene offers an insight into some of these undercurrents. The movement is a global one, with some common qualities (its members are overwhelmingly male), common concerns (climate change, financial meltdown) and a common jargon. Yet the kind of people drawn to prepping in each country reflects something of that place’s particular idiosyncrasies and anxieties.
In Germany preppers generally fall into two categories: neo-Nazis, and everyone else. Some on the far right seem to be attracted to prepping because it chimes with their sense that the modern democratic state is weak, as well as the opportunities it offers to spend time with weapons. In 2017 German intelligence services learned about a prepper network of about 30 people, including former police officers and army reservists, who were stockpiling ammunition and apparently drawing up lists of enemies to target in anticipation of an expected collapse of public order on what they called “Day X”.
Neo-Nazis are more visible than other members of the prepper movement in Germany. Yet most of the people buying bunkers from the Berlin-based firm are average citizens, according to its marketing manager. And then there are those such as Schneider who had little wealth to protect in the first place: she already had first-hand experience of how vulnerable life can be in modern Germany.
Schneider doesn’t use prepper jargon, but her relentless preoccupation with supply lines marks her out as one of the tribe. The books around her house give her away too, with names such as “Crisis Preparedness Encyclopedia” and “Handbook for the New Beginning”.
She can pinpoint the moment she became a prepper. It was 2008 and Schneider was unemployed and a new mother; the industrial company her husband worked for was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and hadn’t paid him regularly for months. The moment of reckoning came when she was reading a newspaper report about Greek mothers sending their children to board in orphanages because they could no longer afford to feed them.
Schneider put down the paper and went to look at the supplies in her kitchen. She found a packet of flour and some butter. How long could the family live off that if the social-security system broke down? What would she do then? Googling for answers, she clicked on a website that offered advice for stockpiling on a budget. There she came across a word for such precautions that she’d never heard before: prepping.
“I always have Plan B and vodka. If Plan B doesn’t work, vodka always does”
....MUCH MORE
