Körperliches Erinnern im Krisenmodus. Pandemiebedingte Veränderungen im Selbst- und Weltverhältnis junger Erwachsener

The article explores the question of how the COVID 19 pandemic affects everyday body practices and thus also young people’s relationship to the world and to themselves. The focus is on implicit body knowledge fed into everyday actions. The starting point is the observation that the pandemic as an experience of crisis leads to a conflict in the process of remembering practices that are taken for granted. We assume that the pandemic confronts the non-declarative memory with matching deficits and thus leads to the explication and reflection of everyday “taken for granted” processes. A desired state is remembered and compared with the present in situ state, whereby people experience a sort of alienation on an affective or atmospheric level. Central to this are both the individual lived body memory and the practical “entanglement of bodies”. With theoretical references to eccentric positionality (Plessner 1982), resonance theory (Rosa 2016) and the new phenomenology (Schmitz 1965), we use our empirical material from two explorative studies (Frankfurt am Main, Hildesheim) to address the extent to which what was previously considered a collectively shared norm and normality has now to be renegotiated in the process of remembering, both on a practical and on an affective level. Narratives such as “zero hour” portray this confrontation with an everyday reality, that has become problematic and induces a collective irritation through bodily experiences. It is not only the “thinking as usual” which is being challenged, but also the “being as usual” (Schütz 1971).