I'm sitting in a coffee shop. Outside it's April, and spring is acting as if none of this concerns it. The chestnut trees are budding, brazenly green, as if no one had told them that the world is currently hanging by a strait most people wouldn't be able to find on a map. My espresso costs forty cents more than it did four weeks ago. The waiter didn't tell me. I read it on the receipt. — Forty cents; that's the price of war in a cup of coffee.
At the next table sit two men. One is wearing a vest that smells of craftsmanship, broad hands, a face that looks like it's risen early. The other: corduroy jacket, reading glasses perched in his hair, the kind of person who uses the word "narrative" on talk shows and means it. They know each other, I can tell, but they don't like each other today. There's something between them, something invisible and heavy, like diesel fumes.
"Fifty liters," says the man in the vest. “Fifty liters a day. In Slovenia. The military is stationed at the gas stations.” He laughs, but it doesn’t sound cheerful. “The military!”
The man in the corduroy jacket nods. “It’s a precaution. The warehouses are full, it’s a logistical—”
“Stop it,” says the vest. “Don’t even get me started on logistics. That’s what it was called last time, too. First it was logistics, then solidarity, then regulations, and then we were all stuck at home.”
I understand immediately. He means Corona. He means the lockdowns, the word that has left a scar in this country, one that still itches when the weather changes. — And I think: Perhaps the fear of the next lockdown is more dangerous than the lockdown itself; because it poisons any reasonable conversation before it even begins.
The Strait of Hormuz. Thirty-three kilometers of water between Iran and Oman, and the global economy is currently drowning in it. Twenty percent of global oil trade, a fifth of liquefied natural gas, a third of European jet fuel—it all has to pass through here, and since March 2nd, Iran has only allowed its allies to cross. Friends are: Russia, China, India. Enemies are: us. The price of oil is at $110. Diesel costs €2.29 at German gas stations. The IEA speaks of the greatest energy crisis in history—greater than the oil shocks of the 1970s combined. "Eleven million barrels a day," says Fatih Birol, and you can hear in his voice that he himself can hardly believe what he's saying.
The IEA has presented a ten-point plan. Speed limits. Driving bans on certain days, sorted by even and odd license plate numbers. Mandatory working from home. Less flying. Less driving. Less of everything. In another century, this would have been called austerity; today it's called a crisis, and it feels like déjà vu in a nightmare you've already had.
Eleven million barrels a day, says Fatih Birol, and you can hear in his voice that he can't quite believe what he's saying. The man in the vest—I call him the gas station philosopher—drinks his coffee in one go. "You know what really bothers me?" he says. "Not the price. Prices go up, prices go down. What bothers me is the matter-of-factness. The matter-of-factness with which those in charge say: Stay home. Drive less. Don't ask questions. And then they're sitting in a video conference in Brussels—informal, mind you, no minutes—talking about how to wean us off driving."
The man in the corduroy jacket—I call him the rational citizen—lean back. “There’s a crisis. A real crisis. Twenty percent of the world’s oil is gone. What do you suggest? Do nothing and hope?”
“I suggest they ask me.”
“They ask you. It’s called democracy.”
“Democracy is when they ask me before the army lines up at gas stations.”
Silence. Long. I hear the hiss of the coffee machine, and it sounds like a sigh.
—I think of Hannah Arendt, who once wrote that freedom is not the same as sovereignty; that the free person is not the one who can do everything, but the one who acts in the public sphere, among and with others. Freedom, she wrote, reveals itself only in plurality. That is to say: freedom is not a state one possesses like a driver’s license. Freedom is something that happens between people—in conversation, in debate, in negotiation. Freedom happens in this coffeehouse, right now, between the vest and the corduroy jacket. – But it doesn't happen in informal, unscripted video conferences.
Last week, the German Bundestag passed a package of fuel measures. Prices at gas stations will only be allowed to rise once a day. Antitrust laws will be tightened. A €9 ticket is to be reintroduced. — Measures that act like a band-aid on a gunshot wound; they show good intentions, but they don't stop the bleeding. Because the problem isn't the price at the pump; the problem is that thirty-three kilometers of water between two coastlines raise the question of whether we are even still in control of our own light. The Minister of Economic Affairs hasn't ruled out fuel shortages at the end of April. Fatih Birol says that political decision-makers haven't yet grasped the full extent of the situation. – And in Sri Lanka, Wednesday has been declared a holiday because there's no more gasoline to drive to work.
“It’s not about driving,” the rational citizen says suddenly, quietly, as if talking to himself. “It’s about the fact that we’ve realized we’re vulnerable. That everything we take for granted—fueling, heating, flying—hangs by a thread through a strait we can’t control.”
The gas station philosopher shakes his head. “You sound like the Greens.”
“I sound like someone paying a gas bill.”
I think of Schiller. Of the “Aesthetic Letters,” in which he writes that man is only truly human where he plays—where he is free from compulsion and free from instinct. Freedom, for Schiller, is not the absence of limits; it is the ability to set limits for oneself, out of insight, out of dignity, out of what he calls the aesthetic state. The gas station philosopher doesn’t want limits. The rational citizen wants limits, but imposed from above. And Schiller would tell them both: The only boundary that sets you free is the one you set for yourselves. – But who voluntarily sets a boundary when their neighbor has none? That is the tragedy of the community, as old as the polis, as unresolved as double parking.
“Dare to know,” I say, almost unintentionally.
The philosopher at the gas station turns around. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Kant. Have the courage to use your own understanding.”
He studies me. Then, surprisingly: “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
And the rational citizen, simultaneously: “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
—And there it is, the rift. Both invoke Kant. Both want autonomy. Both want reason. And both mean something completely different by it. One means: Think for yourself, and then leave me alone. The other means: Think for yourself, and then act responsibly. — Kant would probably have said: Both. Kant would have said: Man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity doesn’t mean driving wherever he wants, but understanding why sometimes he shouldn’t. But Kant didn’t own a car.
The conversation takes a turn. The philosopher at the gas station is now talking about the decommissioned nuclear power plants, the blown-up cooling towers, about a political system that turned a blind eye and burned its future. He's not entirely wrong. The head of the IEA—no, the head, Fatih Birol—publicly accused Germany of abandoning nuclear power, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. While China is building thirty reactors, Germany is planting playgrounds on the foundations of its nuclear power plants. They're down and out and are declaring the ground their strategy.
The rational citizen counters: renewable energies, photovoltaics, heat pumps, the future is electric and decentralized, and anyway, they saw all this coming and still did nothing. And he's not entirely wrong there either. And so they sit there, two people who are both right and yet can't bear to listen to each other, and I think: This is Germany in April 2026—a country that is right and clueless.
Perhaps, I think, as my second espresso arrives—also more expensive than the first, or at least it feels that way—perhaps the real question of this crisis isn't whether or not lockdowns will come. The real question is whether we are capable of acting responsibly before someone forces us to. Whether we are capable of driving less, not because a regulation commands it, but because common sense suggests it. Whether we are capable of doing what Kant demanded: being responsible. But responsibility is exhausting. Responsibility is the most exhausting thing of all. Because it means that you can't blame anyone—not the government, not the IEA, not Iran—if you can't control yourself. And nobody wants to hear that, least of all in a coffee shop.
Hannah Arendt also wrote this: that the most dangerous form of unfreedom is not tyranny, but the refusal to think. Thoughtless participation, thoughtless opposition—both are an escape from the freedom that lies in thinking. And perhaps this is precisely the energy lockdown we should truly fear: not the one imposed from the outside, not the regulation, not the speed limit, and not the driving ban; but the lockdown in our own minds, the shutdown of thought, the switching off of reason, because it is more convenient to be outraged than to reflect.
The philosopher at the gas station pays. He places the money on the table, precisely, no tip. The rational citizen pays by card. They stand up simultaneously, without looking at each other, and walk through the same door out into the same spring.
I remain seated. My notebook is full. My espresso is empty. And outside, past the window, an SUV drives by, as big as a small apartment, and double-parks in front of a bakery where the bread is also more expensive today.
Dare to know, I think. And I order a third espresso. It will be even more expensive. But that's the price of maturity: you stay seated and think while everyone else has already driven off.
S.
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