Due to the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the increased tempo of extreme-weather events and the coronavirus pandemic, more people have been drawn to the apocalypse preparation movement
n 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.
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.
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.
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 had reasons to worry about the future even before the financial crisis. By the time she started secondary school she had already been completely uprooted twice: first because of politics; then because of family. By the early 2000s, when Schneider entered the workforce, successive governments had chipped away at what was once a generous welfare system. For years Schneider eked out a living from shifts in McDonald’s and stacking shelves in local supermarkets, often surviving for weeks on little more than pasta boiled up with a stock cube.
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