In science, it is not primarily about the correct explanation of a problem, but about the right question that draws our attention to the need for an explanation of this problem in the first place. The ability of a scientist to ask the right questions is the necessary prerequisite for the progress that this scientist can make in his field. Hanno Sauer seems to me to be such a gifted scientist in philosophy.

In his book "Moral; Die Erfindung von Gut und Böse; in English: Moral; The Invention of Good and Evil" (Piper, 2023), he poses many of the right questions that need to be asked about the history of the Incarnation in order to be able to tell this story better than before.
On page 23, Hanno Sauer asks:

"But why was social life so important to our ancestors? Why did our ability to co-operate begin to play such an important role?"
And on page 46 he asks even more detailed questions:

"How did evolution manage to generate altruistic or co-operative tendencies, even though these - it seems, at least - necessarily reduce our reproductive fitness? How could it ever be beneficial for me to help another? How could it ever pay off to subordinate my self-interest to the welfare of the community?"

Hanno Sauer naturally also provides his answers to these important questions. On page 59 we read, for example:

"To explain how the astonishing extent of human co-operation became possible, an increasing number of scientists are falling back on the concept of group selection. The idea here is that we humans evolved the ability to co-operate extensively because only groups with hyper-cooperative members could prevail over other groups in the competition for scarce resources in our environment of evolutionary adaptation. ... And it is also true that, although selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, groups of altruists are superior to groups of selfish individuals."

My (P.J.) answer to these important questions can be given in much greater depth and detail because I have at my disposal the unique tool of the Universal Philosophy of Life, the Universal Time Scale. This time scale orders all past periods of the evolution of the Solar System, and of life on our unique planet of this system, along a common scale of non-linear but circulating time in our quantised Universe.

What most, including Hanno Sauer, evolutionary scientists are engaged in is an analysis of a logical chain of possibilities that could have led our common ancestors with the apes to evolve further and further until at some point (an estimated five million years ago) a smarter, or just luckier group, accelerated their evolution while the rest of our "ape kin" got "stuck" in evolution (that is, not exposed to any further urge for improvement). In the words of Hanno Sauer (on page 23), such analysis sounds like this:

"These questions bring us back to the climatic-geological changes that resulted from the Great African Rift Valley. ... The destabilisation of our environment and the fact that we were exposed to dangerous predators on a far more drastic scale increased the pressure to compensate for this new vulnerability by improving mutual protection. We found support and strength in larger groups with closer co-operation. We humans are what the most intelligent apes become when forced to live in open spaces in large grasslands for five million years."

However, the periods of time in our quantised Universe are always finite. After their expiry, there is always an upheaval in the evolution of the Solar System, and thus also in the evolution of life on Earth. Such a cosmic quantum leap of a certain level of the Cosmic Hierarchy of the Solar System (between the highest level 9 and the lowest, cosmically still relevant level 4) practically always means several impacts of the correspondingly large cosmic chunks on the Earth's surface first. The resulting more or less global earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides and forest fires cause a correspondingly deep disruption in the life of fauna and flora, which living organisms ultimately perceive as an environmental catastrophe. Most groups of organisms do not survive such level 9 to 5 environmental disasters. To date, traditional science recognises only five of these so-called "mass extinctions". In reality, according to my Universal Time Scale, since the explosion of life about 550 million years ago, 2 level 8 environmental catastrophes, 22 level 7 environmental catastrophes, 22x12 level 6 environmental catastrophes, and still 12 times more level 5 catastrophes have occurred. The last level 5 environmental catastrophe occurred between 10000 and 6000 years before today (with its peak in 4720 years before the beginning of our current era).

As long as serious evolutionary research does not take these catastrophes, and especially the last of them, into account, we will not be able to answer Hanno Sauer's intelligent questions in a truly intelligent way.

In the last chapter: Conclusion; "The future of everything", on page 330, Hanno Sauer finally asks:

"What happens next? What can we hope for, what must we fear?

The moral crisis of the present is a crisis of divisiveness, or more precisely: of apparent divisiveness. The contradictory dual promise of freedom and equality that modern societies have given us has never been honoured. The frustration and outrage that resulted released the energies of old instincts, dividing the world once again into Us and Them. If we want to overcome this crisis, we need to understand the mechanisms that led to this social division. The clash of identities that defines our present arises from the forces that have always driven the biological, cultural and social evolution of humanity.

The evolution of co-operation explains why our morality is group-oriented. Cooperative behaviour could only prevail because and when it was limited to a small number of people - us - and withheld from others - them. Us and Them arise because only kinship, reciprocal exchange and cooperative behaviour within our narrowly circumscribed group create the conditions under which the benefits of moral behaviour outweigh its costs."

(p.331) "We acquired the ability to orientate ourselves to norms, to monitor and punish their violation. Our group-orientated moral psychology became punitive. ... Shared values and markers of identity created the necessary social trust. Our punitive, group-orientated moral psychology became identity-orientated. In the course of cultural evolution, ever-growing large-scale societies emerged that generated surplus income, which, legitimised by the first ideologies, was organised hierarchically and distributed unequally. Our social world split into small ruling elites and a majority of exploited and oppressed people. It became inegalitarian."

[We put it once more here: All these changes in our moral psychology, however, were mainly forced as a necessity reaction; out of fear of physical annihilation by the numerous wild and crazy (because of the incredible cosmic irradiation) members of our new Genus and Species Homo sapiens Sapiens as a result of the last cosmic quantum leap of stage 5 of our evolution around the year 4720 before the beginning of our modern era].

(p.332) "With the development of modernity, the existing inequalities and moral failures of war, genocide, discrimination and exploitation became increasingly morally intolerable to an enlightened society. The final realisation of the demand for freedom and equality for all became more and more urgent, accelerated by the catastrophic experiences of the 20th century."

[P.J.; But above all through the transition of Level 3 of the Cosmic Hierarchy, whose energy fuelled this evolutionary leap of humanity around the year 1989].

(p.333) "It remains to be seen whether we have the ability to develop values and strategies that are global and resilient in the long term. How can social co-operation be made possible at the level of humanity as a whole, including generations living far into the future? We are facing this task for the first time: we do not know whether we are capable of doing this or whether we have created a world in which we can never be at home again."

[My proposal of participatory family democracy could be a real solution].

Chapter: Introduction; "Everything that was important to us"

(p.12) "Every change has a dialectic, every welcome development has a hard, dark, cold side, every progress has a price. Our early evolution made us co-operative, but also hostile to all who did not belong to our group - whoever says >>we<< soon also says >>they<<; the development of punishment domesticated us, made us friendly and agreeable, but also equipped us with powerful punitive instincts with which we monitored compliance with our rules; our culture gave us new knowledge and new skills which we learnt from others - and thereby made us dependent on these others; the emergence of inequality and domination brought unprecedented wealth and a new level of hierarchy and oppression; modernity unleashed the individual who brought nature under his control with science and technology; in the process we demystified our world, in which we are now homeless, and created the conditions for colonialism and slavery; the 20th century sought to create a peaceful world through global institutions. The 20th century sought to create, through global institutions, a peaceful society in which all enjoy equal moral status, brought us the most breathtaking crimes in human history and manoeuvred us to the brink of ecological collapse; more recently we have been trying to finally shed that legacy of arbitrariness and discrimination, racism and sexism, homophobia and exclusion; it will be worth it, but we will pay some price for it too."

(p.13) "The story I am going to tell wants to make a contribution to understanding the present. ... To understand the present, one must turn to the past. ... An increased need for co-operation due to external environmental changes could only be met by living together in ever larger groups."

Chapter 1; "5,000,000 years; genealogy 2.0"

(p.19) "A shopping trolley half-filled with stone bones. That's all that's left of our earliest ancestors. In any case, nothing more was ever found than a few teeth, skull fragments, fragments of eyebrow ridges, parts of upper and lower jaws, splinters of a few thigh bones."

(p.20) "Finally, the term Hominini includes all humans in the narrower, but still not in the narrowest sense: this tribe - biologically Tribus - includes the earliest human-like (but admittedly not yet very human) beings who began to populate parts of southern and eastern Africa about five million years ago, a number of australopithecines and various more familiar categories such as Homo ergaster, erectus, heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis. Of these hominins, only we remain today: Homo sapiens."

(p.21) "Access to our deepest past always remains speculative, but not in the nebulous sense of the unverifiable and hair-pulling, but in the solid sense in which legions of clever minds, armed with the most cunning methods of comparative morphology, molecular genetics, radiocarbon dating, biochemistry, statistics and geology, attempt to reconstruct the most plausible version of this history from many heterogeneous theories and data sets."
[Our Universal Time Scale is the best, and even the necessary, tool for this].


(p.23) "But why was social life so important to our ancestors? Why did our ability to co-operate begin to play such an important role? These questions bring us back to the climatic-geological changes brought about by the Great Rift Valley. ...
The destabilisation of our environment and the fact that we were exposed to dangerous predators on a much more drastic scale increased the pressure to compensate for this new vulnerability by improving mutual protection. We found support and strength in larger groups with closer co-operation. We humans are what the most intelligent apes become when forced to live in open spaces in large grasslands for five million years."
[But our ancestors were especially lucky to have come up with the idea of "defence by fire"! These lucky gorillas became Australopithecines 4.3 million years ago, smaller but smarter].

(p.29) "The increasing scale of a community has a destabilising effect in the long run because we inherently lack the institutional toolkit to make cooperative arrangements resilient in the long run. (Robin) Dunbar (the British evolutionary psychologist) is even of the opinion that the natural group size of human populations, derived from their average cerebral volume, can be narrowed down relatively precisely to 150 people. This value can be found in a wide variety of contexts, from tribal societies to the internal structure of military organisations. To put it bluntly, there are at most 150 people that you would be comfortable joining for a drink in a bar. The special thing about human societies is, of course, that they can integrate far more than 150 people. However, this has only recently become possible and not without an institutional framework that regulates the formation of larger groups in a co-operative manner. Spontaneous communities split up as soon as their numerical capacity is overstretched."

(p.45) "A modern, scientifically founded genealogy of morality must therefore explain one thing above all: How have we humans managed to develop co-operative dispositions even though they are evolutionarily unstable? To answer this question, we need to take a closer look at the conditions under which we had to master this evolutionary challenge."
[This is a false question. Individual families have already begun to do so. The right question is: When and why did we lose these co-operative dispositions? The answer is: during the several-thousand-year-long transition period of the last cosmic leap of level 5, so many "good" people were killed by their "bad" fellow human beings that the co-operation of larger groups became necessary to ensure common protection. But this happened much (more than four million years) later than the transition from gorillas to australopithecines].

(p.46) "How did evolution manage to produce altruistic or co-operative tendencies when these - it seems at least - necessarily reduce our reproductive fitness? How could it ever be beneficial for me to help another? How could it ever pay to subordinate my self-interest to the welfare of the community?"
[For fear of extinction! Only the clever "scaredy-cats" survived].

(p.59) "To explain how the astonishing degree of human co-operation became possible, an increasing number of scientists are resorting to the concept of group selection. The idea here is that we humans have evolved the ability to co-operate extensively because only groups with hyper-cooperative members have been able to outcompete other groups in our environment of evolutionary adaptation for scarce resources. ... And it is also true that, although selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, groups of altruists are superior to groups of selfish individuals."

[The first trigger was simply the fear of survival. The co-operative ones survived the last cosmic quantum leap of level 5 best, or successfully at all].

Chapter 4; "5000 Years; The Invention of Inequality"

(p.145) "Every culture recognises the idea of a golden age. ... Myths are always untrue, but often not entirely. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that man's original way of life may have been remarkably more tolerable. True, there was no penicillin, no dentistry and no taxis, but there were also hardly any infectious diseases, periodontal disease or inconvenient appointments. Above all, the age between the separation of humans from their closest relatives primates (a few million years ago) and the emergence of the first complex societies (a few thousand years ago) seems to have been characterised by an astonishing degree of political, material and social equality."

(p.148) "It is puzzling why we ever left our Golden Age of Equality. What led to the discovery of inequality 5000 years ago?"
[The cosmic quantum leap of level 5 has forced humanity to make this corresponding evolutionary leap from the species Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis to our species Homo sapiens Sapiens. Only with the help of the last Neanderthals did we make this leap].

(p.149) "Nevertheless, it is now almost universally agreed that simple, often nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers were almost always organised in an astonishingly egalitarian way. ...
One of the main factors in the transition process to hierarchy and inequality appears to have been the development of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and agriculture. With the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago - after a period of instability lasting many hundreds of thousands of years, which made us intelligent and capable of learning - the climatic conditions arose for the first time to successfully practise agriculture, keep livestock and cultivate plants. ...
Are we humans better off since we left our stateless primitive state? Or is the transition from tribe to state really the root of all evil?"
[The answer to the last question is: decidedly: yes! But we had no choice. We had to go this way in order to survive as a species. We became sedentary, and we domesticated farm animals and plants, not out of the urge to progress, but out of fear; out of fear of our mentally and physically savage fellow human beings, who had seen the light of day as cosmically irradiated "freaks" during and after the catastrophe. But now, because we have finally understood all this, we are in a position to put an end to all this evil and to make a new Golden Age possible for our descendants].

(p.183) "The problem of social inequality arose in the early civilisations of the ancient world. For the last 5,000 years, there has always been no question that there are a few who have power and wealth, while the overwhelming majority remain poor and disenfranchised. It is only recently that the question of the basic principles of a just society has been addressed anew and with unprecedented urgency. What does a society that recognises the dignity of the individual look like? How can we reconcile the freedom of the individual with the desire for earthly happiness? And what does it mean to live among equals?"

[Exactly the right questions; I gave my answers here above].

Peter Jakubowski is a physicist and universal philosopher who has expanded his Unified Physics into the Unified Description of the entire Universe, including that of life and human consciousness. The World Formula he has discovered will fundamentally change all natural sciences and the technologies based on them.

The aim of this small but important book is to provide the best possible substantiated arguments and research results on the Earth's climate. The Naturics model of Earth's climate is so far the only one based on the embedding of the Solar System in its vast Cosmic Hierarchy. The model makes the reconstruction and prediction of changes in global climate over millennia not only possible, but also reliable.

The book begins with the seemingly provocative question: "Does climate change also occur on our moon?" The first part of the book describes the theoretical basis of the Naturics model of the Earth's climate. The three most important consequences of the quantisation of the universe are:

1) The Unified Family of All Physical Quantities (defined in Chapters 1.1 and 1.3);

2) The Universal Spectrum of Matter-Mind Quanta (defined in Chapter 1.2); and

3) The Cosmic Hierarchy of the Solar System (defined in Chapters 1.4 and 1.5).

The implications of the unification of physics for all of science are overwhelming (see the appendix of the book). One of the most exciting of these is the discovery of the World Formula (Chapter 1.3). No less exciting is the new model of today's Solar System, together with its formation more than 7 billion years ago (chapters 2.1 and 2.2). The most important practical consequence is the definition of the Universal Cosmic Time Scale, which in turn leads to a new, surprising history of mankind (Chapter 2.3).

On this broad basis, the theory of the Earth's climate can be formulated on just one page (51). The movements of the Earth (along with the entire Solar System within the Cosmic Hierarchy) through the zones of space with different energy densities cause the fluctuations in the intensity of energy transfer to Earth that we perceive as the fluctuations (or changes) in Earth's global climate.

Part 2 of the book presents a simple practical method for calculating the relative changes in the intensity of this energy transfer to Earth. The modulators of this intensity are freely selectable in the climate model. The length of the period to be calculated and the accuracy of the calculation are also freely selectable. Chapter 3 describes (for copying) all the details of a climate reconstruction and prediction between the years 347 and 2510, and Chapter 4 does the same for the centuries 20 and 21.

Part 3 of the book goes much further into our past, into the times of the birth of our modern Genus and Species Homo sapiens Sapiens (Chapters 5 and 6). Chapter 7 once again illustrates the prediction of the future development of the Earth's global climate over the next five centuries.

The consequences of the calculated changes in the global climate in the near and distant future for us humans are serious. The most important realisation is that we will soon be entering the new "Little Ice Age", which is already beginning today, will deepen towards the middle of the 21st century and will reach its coldest phase in the 24th century. We must prepare our children and grandchildren for this. We must give them the chance to survive these cold phases with the limited resources of the earth, without damage to world democracy. The two most important tasks here are: radical environmental protection and a restructuring of our global community.

For the first time, another author writes about the need to look to the future for all of us, with very concrete visions, approaches and practical examples. We need more books like this, and we need them urgently. The problems of today are clouding our visions of tomorrow. We need to move upwards quickly to escape the fog "in the valley of history".
(I give my comments on the quoted text in the square [] brackets).

Sebastian Dettmers; "The great unemployment"; FBV 2022

(p.12) "Alongside climate change, I consider workerlessness to be the greatest threat of our time: to our prosperity, to our social cohesion, to the functioning of democracy. We cannot imagine the impact that shrinking populations will have on our society and the global economy. Because we have never experienced it before, not on this scale."
...
"Because just like my grandparents and parents, I want my children to be better off and to live in peace and prosperity. That's why I wrote this book."
[I (P.J.) do not consider workerlessness, like climate change, to be a threat to our future, but rather the opposite, a motivation to reorganise our global community, to strive for more humanity instead of prosperity].

(p.18) "The growth of the past 250 years has been fuelled primarily by two factors: population growth and progress. Small businesses, large corporations and entire economies have been able to grow primarily because a growing population has provided more and more workers and more and more talent. What's more, driven by ever more ideas, ground-breaking inventions and, not least, widespread education, progress has been made that has made all these people ever more productive.
In a fraction of human history, we have invented the railway, the car and the aeroplane, radio, the telephone and the internet. It is above all this combination of population growth and progress that we have to thank for our current prosperity. It is the reason why economic crises have never lasted long."

(p.19) "Today I realise that it was naive to assume that population and progress would continue to develop linearly in the future."
...
"But what are two and a half centuries in the face of the 200,000-year history of modern man, who has lived in poverty almost continuously?" [That's not true! Our Homo sapiens family has lived for 337,000 years, and it has not lived in poverty throughout. It has produced great species. And they have produced great civilisations. Atlantis was the last of them, on all the continents of what was then the Earth. It was only destroyed in the great cosmic catastrophe between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. However, its last members, the last members of the genus Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis, still managed to ensure the survival of our modern species and (so far the only) species Homo sapiens Sapiens. This happened (theoretically quite accurately) only 4,720 years before our modern era].

(p.21) "Growth is the basis of a functioning market economy. 'Without growth no investment, without growth no jobs, without growth no money for education, without growth no help for the weak.'"

(p.22)"'To say that we are renouncing the idea of growth', says the current Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck, 'would mean that we are renouncing the idea of progress'." [I don't see this obsessive connection. A contented, even happy global community can certainly continue to drive progress without having to "cut back" on prosperity].


(p.26) "According to the story, (James) Hargreaves was watching his wife spin cotton yarn when he had the idea of automating the process. In 1764, he cranked his 'Spinning Jenny', the world's first industrial spinning machine, for the first time. ... The period around 1770 marks the beginning of industrialisation. Decisive milestones were the breakthrough of the steam engine in 1769 and the invention of the steam locomotive in 1804. ... Towards the end of the 19th century, industrialisation began to unfold its full force on a broad scale. It was the time of exponential economic growth."

(p.29) "Anyone who wants to understand the world today should recognise how unique the development of the past 250 years has been."

(p.30) "It seems as if the industrial revolution was a story of endless growth. It is hardly noticeable that the engine of growth is stuttering. The growth forces of the industrial revolution are dwindling. The progress that led us out of the poverty trap seems to have stalled. In the motherland of the industrial revolution as well as in the rest of Europe and the USA. A turning point is emerging. The population is beginning to shrink - in large parts of Europe, in China, in Japan, and soon all over the world. As a result, there is a threat of large-scale unemployment. And the reactions are very different."

(p.34) "Without immigrants, the USA would not play a role in the world today."

(p.35) " Hardly any other region is as closely associated with progress as Silicon Valley. If it were a country, it would be the most productive state in the world with a GDP per capita of around 180,000 dollars per year. Yet Silicon Valley is three times as productive as the rest of the USA."

(p.48) "Today, Chinese women have an average of only 1.3 children."

(p.48) "In this showdown, the European continent is struggling with two challenges at once. Here, too, productivity is stagnating. But there is also a second problem: unlike in the USA, population figures will soon begin to shrink rapidly. How will Europe react?"

(p.62) "From 1955 to 1973, Germany attracted 14 million labour migrants and their families. ... Since 1852, the country has continuously exported more goods than it has imported. Four industries dominate: the car industry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and chemicals. ... Today, Germany is the third largest exporter of goods in the world after the USA and China. Its share of world trade is 7 per cent, although the proportion of Germans in the world population is only 1 per cent."

(p.63) "The growth forces of the past 70 years are dwindling. ... The population is beginning to shrink. ... Worklessness casts its shadow ahead."

(p.68) "Having fewer children is a direct consequence of progress and prosperity."
[Jain! I am convinced that in large, multi-generational families, two to three children per woman would become the norm rather than one or none].

(p.73) "If there is one thing that should frighten us people in Europe, it is the effects of population decline!" [No! This decline should rather give us hope that we will be able to innovate democracy in the sense of a family-participatory democracy].

(p.88) "Progress ensures that industrial enterprises and service companies are created. They drive urbanisation, because only agriculture requires a dispersed life in the countryside." [However, this trend towards urbanisation must be reversed. Healthy (large) families will only thrive in a rural environment, on their own hectares of land. Human coexistence must be completely redesigned and made possible].

(p.91) "A third forecast was recently published. It comes from a Bill and Melinda Gates-funded research group at Washington State University in Seatle led by Professor Christopher Murray. Over 5000 researchers from 152 countries contributed to it. According to this forecast, the world's population will reach its peak of 9.7 billion people by 2064. From then on, it will shrink to 8.8 billion by the end of the century."

(p.96) "Population decline is therefore not an issue for futurists, but a fact. ... And nobody yet knows how, under the current conditions, an ever smaller number of working people will finance an ever larger number of pensioners." [Yes, I suppose I do know! As the population stagnates, the number of pensioners will also fall and stagnate. But more importantly, we can and must reduce consumption to such a level that prosperity remains sufficient but stable. Family-participatory democracy will make this possible. This will also benefit the environment].

(p.113) "We have halted the process of creative destruction that is so essential to the functioning of our economic system. ... A new combination of production factors - and thus also of labour - displaces old structures and ultimately destroys them. ... In the end, competition must decide which companies can prosper in the long term under the changed framework conditions and which are better off leaving the market. The more room we give to the new and innovative, the greater our chances of living in a country with increasing productivity in the future." [In my opinion, it is not (only afterwards) the competition that decides, but (already in advance) the chosen vision of our future].

(p.115) "Perhaps the greatest potential lies beyond our national borders: in immigration."
[I don't believe that. In the long run, that can't be right. In the long run, when all societies are shrinking, we must work within our demographic units (from basic families, through extended families, clans, to metropolises, nations, and continents) towards a natural stabilisation of the number of workers].

(p.140) "Shaping the future instead of managing the past". [100% correct!]

(p.150) "Fusion reactors promise to meet large parts of the world's future energy needs with virtually zero emissions. ... What a vision! ... A real moonshot for some: Boris Johnson's government has already announced the first commercial fusion reactor for 2040." [Unfortunately just a joke. Physically no more realisable than a perpetual motion machine. These research funds would be much better spent on capturing and storing the energy of lightning storms or flowing volcanoes, like in Hawaii."]

(p.153) "Progress arises when existing knowledge is translated into visionary goals." [This is precisely why I try to translate my existing knowledge into a vision of the global community in 50, 60 years' time].

(p.164) "One third of Germans feel that their own work is pointless." [These are millions of potential workers in industries that are already affected by unemployment].

(p.169) "Numerous studies show that long-term economic growth is largely determined by the quality of the education system." [Not only economic growth, but also the personal satisfaction of all people].

(p.170) "Our education system

is one reason why productivity in this country is sluggish. Too many young people leave school without sufficient qualifications and then struggle more or less through their working lives."

(p.171) "In order to utilise the opportunities of the digital revolution, Germany therefore needs a new education revolution." [Not just Germany, but Poland too, for example].

(p.175) "In Canada, children who fail to reach the minimum level in English and maths are assigned a tutor." [My proposal goes even further: not only the five weakest, but also the five best children in the class should have an appropriately qualified tutor (additional teacher), with the total number of children in each class around twenty, no more. The main teacher should be increasingly supported by their personal "AI avatar". The teachers' salaries should be at least doubled].

(p.219) "There are far too few educators. We will not be able to close this gap without upgrading this professional profile, including better pay." [But this is only half the solution. There is even more potential in multi-generational families, where their members who no longer work could possibly enjoy looking after their own and their neighbours' young children in a meaningful way].

(p.229) "Let us therefore develop a dream of a better future, a 'German Dream', without a 'business as usual', without clinging to old recipes, but with the courage to reshape the future. The future of Germany, Europe and perhaps even the whole world. That is what this book is about. It provides impulses and examples of how people and countries are already confronting unemployment today and breaking new ground. They are intended to trigger debates and provide food for thought for new concepts and strategies." [That's exactly what I hope.]

(In memory of the many, by no means nameless, dead of the Second World War; based on the book by Timothy Snyder: "Bloodlands; Europe between Hitler and Stalin"; dtv; 6th edition; 2022).

On 15 October 2023, very important elections were held in Poland, which mobilised a record turnout of around 75%. The hoped-for rebirth of Polish democracy is yet to come. However, when analysing the various statistics on voting frequency, I was struck by a previously inexplicable peculiarity. Most adult (over 60 years old) male villagers in the eastern part of Poland voted almost without exception for the disastrous ruling party of the last eight years. I could not understand the reason for this until I read Timothy Snyder's book. Now I think I understand: These people form the last, still relatively cohesive group of Polish survivors of the Bloodlands. For these people, the instinct to minimise risk in life is still more important than any vision of a better future. How could this situation come about? To understand this, you have to read at least the last sections of Snyder's book. On page 410, for example, we read:

"Each of the 681,692 people shot in Stalin's Great Terror had a different life story: the two at the end could be Maria Juriewicz and her husband Stanislaw Wyganowski. Each of the 21892 Polish prisoners of war shot by the NKVD in 1940 was at the centre of life. The two at the end could be Dobieslaw Jakubowicz, the father who dreamed of his daughter, and Adam Solski, the husband who wrote from his wedding ring the day he was shot in the neck.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into figures, some of whom we can only estimate, others of whom we can reconstruct quite precisely. It is our task as scientists to search for these numbers and put them in the right context. It is our task as humanists to turn these numbers back into people. If we don't succeed in doing this, Hitler and Stalin will not only have shaped our world, but also our humanity."

As to the historical background of the book, I quote Snyder's definition of the Bloodlands (p. 395).

"Nevertheless, the consequences of multiple and uninterrupted occupation were most dramatic in the territories that Hitler conceded to Stalin in the secret protocol of the Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, then took back from him in the first days of the invasion in 1941 and lost to him again in 1944. Before the Second World War, these territories were independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the eastern part of Poland. Although these states were ruled by authoritarian nationalists and popular nationalism was undoubtedly on the rise, the number of people killed by the state or in riots in the 1930s was only a few thousand in all these countries combined. Under Soviet rule from 1939 to 1941, hundreds of thousands of people from this zone were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia and tens of thousands were shot. The region was the main home of European Jews, and when Germany attacked the newly enlarged Soviet Union in 1941, they were trapped. Almost all the Jews living in this region were murdered. Ukrainian partisans also carried out ethnic cleansing against Poles here in 1941, before Soviet troops expelled Ukrainians and Poles from 1944 onwards.

This zone east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line was the place where the Holocaust began and where the Soviets extended their territory twice to the west. Most of the NKVD persecutions of the 1940s, over a quarter of the German mass murders of Jews and major ethnic cleansing took place in this particular strip of land within the Bloodlands. The Europe of the Hitler-Stalin Pact was a joint production of Soviets and Nazis."

Some additional explanations by Timothy Snyder also seem important to me. In the "Afterword to the 6th edition" (from the 7th edition) we read, for example: (p. 412)

"I had been inspired to write a dissertation in history before the revolutions of 1989 that ended communism in Eastern Europe. My Master's programme began in 1991, a few weeks before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia had been my main area of specialisation before that, and Poland became my main subject as a Master's student and doctoral candidate. While I was finishing my dissertation and afterwards, I lived in Central and Eastern Europe. I lived for long periods in Warsaw, Prague and Vienna and travelled to the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. My time in Belarus and Ukraine was particularly important. Poland and Russia have powerful stories of suffering that are based on facts. Belarus and Ukraine are less present in the West, although their inhabitants actually suffered more than the inhabitants of Poland and Russia in the 1930s and 1940s.

The years of living and travelling by train in Eastern Europe also helped me to see the geography of the Holocaust. I discovered that the mysterious Eastern European place names that were misspelled in history books belonged to real places. When American Jewish friends said that the family shtetl no longer existed, they were wrong: it was still there, without the Jews. What Jews in the USA called 'Russia' was usually Ukraine, sometimes Belarus or Lithuania. In the national histories of Eastern European countries, the Jews had been marginalised. It was not only because there was almost no one left to tell the Jewish story. It was also because the communists found it opportune to appeal to ethnic nationalism. After the archives were opened, historians (and the public) were first interested in the communist period, which had just come to an end. Much less attention was paid to the 1930s and early 1940s. Courageous and competent local historians wrote local studies about the Holocaust. Important as they were, the history of the Holocaust could not be written within a single Eastern European country. Any national history was incomplete without the Holocaust, as these pioneering researchers recognised. The Holocaust itself, however, needed a framework that both contained and transcended the national histories.

...

At the beginning of the 21st century, German Jews had become part of history. But their perspective was atypical of the Holocaust as a whole and in some respects misleading. The number of German Jews was not very large, and most of them survived. 97 per cent of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust had nothing to do with German culture. German Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust died beyond Germany's pre-war borders in places like Łódź, Minsk or Riga. 'The East' became a kind of mysterious vacuum where only forgetting was possible. But it was precisely 'in the East', not in Germany, that Jews had lived in large numbers for centuries. Łódź, Minsk and Riga had been major centres of Jewish life in Poland, Belarus and Lithuania before the war. How places of Jewish life became places of Jewish death cannot be understood without sources from Eastern Europe. (Text marking by P.J.)

...

How could 14 million non-combatants be murdered in such a short time and in such a limited area? Each murder campaign is important in and of itself, and the account of each one leads us to an account of this terrible whole. What's more, knowing something about each of them helps us to recognise common patterns. Only if we have descriptions of all of them can we follow the course of the Soviet and German murders - and see moments of interaction between the two. It helps to know that Nazi planners knew that Soviet policy had created a terrible famine in 1933, because then we understand that they were aiming for the same thing. It helps to know that the murder of Polish citizens in Katyn in 1940 was carried out using the same methods and sometimes by the same men as the Great Terror. It helps to know that the SS Einsatzgruppen were ordered to exterminate Poland's political elite in 1939 before carrying out a similar task in the Soviet Union in 1941. It helps to know that the brutal SS units that killed civilians in Belarus in 1942 under the guise of fighting partisans were sent to Warsaw in 1944 to put down the uprising. The more pieces we put together, the closer we get to seeing the whole. The closer we come to seeing the whole, the closer we come to seeing ourselves."

(p. 417) "I started from an area that Hitler and Stalin wanted to control and where their measures claimed the most victims."

(p. 419) "American schoolchildren read the diary of Anne Frank, but no one told them that she had died because the US would not give her family refugee visas."

(p. 423) "What should Americans know about the Holocaust? It seems important to know that Hitler admired slavery and the conquest of the West."

(p. 424) "The more history we have, the less confusing the present and the clearer the future." I hope that the new government will lead Poland back onto the path of European and global democracy. The traces of blood in the 'Bloodlands' will only be able to dry up once Poland has once again become a model country for Europe and the world, as it has done several times in history.