Ijoma Mangold keeps a political diary in which he records the events of our present. He describes what he experiences at the Christmas party of the newspaper and on the sidelines of the Berlinale, that his gym teacher never buckled up, and why Greta triggers him. In January, Helena, a Russian-German acquaintance, explains her feminism to him; in February, he reflects on the election results in Hamburg; in March, he notices that the Decameron is sold out at Dussmann. Because of Corona. He looks in astonishment at those who easily speak of virtue terror or multicultural romance on one hand, and ageism or fascism on the other. His encounters make it clear that the foundation on which we make judgments and decisions every day is narrow and shaky. And yet, it is all we have. The old clarity has vanished from politics. It has been replaced by reflexes and gasping, by anger and contradictions. Yet it is precisely this unreflective nature, the emotions, the tavern talk that is constantly echoing within us, that, according to Mangold, constitutes the essence of the political. How we form opinions, how we comfortably settle in with them, and how we ideally manage to let them go again – this is what this book of self-observation is about. It is a text of contemporary diagnostics, presenting a depiction of the political theater of the present through the eyes of an attentive insider, while also serving as a political anthropology.