I am just thinking, because I grew up in Southern Europe, I have the opposite opinion to you regarding this. I think Germany is much more open to "skepticism" than you believe. Where I grew up people differentiating from the mainstream view are labeled as idiots and are in a very tiny minority, whereas in Germany, they go parading in the streets every other month and make up 25% of the population...
Out of experience, it's only about the people you meet, however foreigners will be the ones giving you the less politically correct opinions: they'll just share their opinion. But again, it depends on who you meet and in which context you speak about things.
For me this has unfortunately to do with the fact that there is not a healthy debate about things, there is always this fear of being a Nazi or whatever shit they did in the past, which frankly I don't care about.
The people we look up to because they are typically painted as the agents of social change tend to be the ones who were there at the right moment: they were catalysts rather than major forces and their relatively small contribution caused a much larger force to become unlocked. But for that to happen that force already has to be there, for each and every one of those there are thousands (millions?) who tried the same thing at a different point in time and failed.
Thank you.
You've got a point here. Yes, it's giving up. And to be honest, we both gave up. But since we're responsible for our little one, we still try to make the best of it, hence want to restart somewhere else. But I get your point. It's just that we both spent all of our energy over the last 25 years to improve things in all sorts of different dimensions and simply ran out of "mana".