As Germany begins reopening its stores, government encourages continued caution by residents

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For the past four weeks, clothing designer Malina Sebastian has sat in front of the sewing machine in her central Berlin shop making cloth masks instead of dresses. She fashions the masks out of organic cotton for personal-care workers and members of the public, and she says that business is “really good at the moment.”

Business is good because Germany is slowly emerging from several weeks of coronavirus lockdown, and into a period of cautious reopening, called ‘’lockerung,” or loosening. The world will be watching to see if Germany, which has so far been a model of pandemic response in terms of testing widely and keeping fatalities low, can maintain control over the spread of the virus – or whether further spikes will cause restrictions to tighten again.

For now, shops that are smaller than 800 square metres, like Ms. Sebastian’s, can open in Berlin. She plans to open for a few hours a day initially. Wearing a mask or facial covering will be mandatory in all of Germany’s 16 states as of next week. In most places, that means covering up on public transit or in shops, although the states of Berlin and Brandenburg are requiring masks on public transit only.

Early in the week, many shops still remained closed, and the normally rowdy streets of Berlin were unnaturally quiet: bars and restaurants can only open for takeout, and the rules of physical distancing still apply. For Ms. Sebastian, the new rules make sense, as they maintain “a balance between safety and paranoia.”

Across Germany, leaders are every day revising rules about what can and can’t open. In most places, older students writing exams returned to school this week, with younger pupils beginning to return on May 4. And while the great opera houses remain closed, at least one other German institution may reopen: the Bundesliga football league might begin playing “geisterspiele” – literally “ghost games” without crowds – as soon as May 9. The Bavarian state leader Markus Soeder was probably speaking for many Germans when he said: "A weekend with football is much more bearable than a weekend without football.” However, another great Bavarian tradition, Oktoberfest, has fallen victim to the virus and won’t be held this year.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made very clear that the loosening of restrictions is very much predicated on people’s good behaviour and rates of infection staying low. (The virus’s reproduction rate was 0.9 on April 20, according to government health centre the Robert Koch Institute, with 143,457 people having been identified with the disease and 4,598 dead.) In a meeting with state leaders, Ms. Merkel cautioned against the dangerous enthusiasm of “offnungsdiskussionsorgien,” or opening-discussion orgies.

“We must proceed slowly, step by step and with caution. It would be a real shame if we were now to suffer a relapse,” Ms. Merkel said at a news conference this week. She added, “We don’t want to endanger those who are already ill, or the elderly. But we also don’t want to isolate them for months.”

This methodical approach to serious challenges has often annoyed Ms. Merkel’s domestic critics, but it has won her accolades abroad, where the idea of a scientist in charge is deeply appealing. (Ms. Merkel, who has said she won’t run for office again next year, has a doctorate in quantum chemistry.) German political analysts are slightly bemused at the idea of their celebrity chancellor, while acknowledging that she may be uniquely positioned to help Germany weather the crisis.

“It’s notable that Merkel’s popularity rates have gone up so much. That’s an indication of her extremely rational leadership style, the scientist’s approach to managing almost unquantifiable risk,” says Constanze Stelzenmueller, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. The careful loosening of restrictions, and the warning that they could be tightened again, “is a sophisticated response to managing the crisis, very honest and transparent.” At the same time, Ms. Stelzenmueller says, Ms. Merkel has to be given credit for brokering consensus from Germany’s powerful state leaders, at least two of whom are vying for her political crown.

Several theories have been proposed for Germany’s relative success so far, from early and widespread testing for the virus to the fact that most citizens trusted advice from the government, which meant rules were generally obeyed. Now, it’s the job of the government to move to the next phase of controlling the outbreak.

Health Minister Jens Spahn announced a 10-point plan this week to step up Germany’s public-health response. It included a promise of 125 new mobile tracking teams, with five people per 20,000 members of the public to investigate infections. A third drive-through testing centre has opened in Berlin. As well, German health authorities are conducting a wide-ranging, year-long study to better understand COVID-19 antibodies, and therefore the spread of the disease in the public.

However, there has been controversy around a widely hailed app that would warn phone owners when they were near people identified as having the disease. The app, which is supposed to be ready in May, is the subject of a critical letter signed by 300 experts worried about possible mismanagement of data. Germany, a country famous for loving privacy, faces another challenge almost as perilous as loosening restrictions: How much personal information are Germans willing to risk in return for public health?

By the end of this week, many more small shops will have opened. But of more interest to the city’s children might be the reopening of the zoo in Berlin’s Tiergarten, where two baby pandas born in January are waiting to be presented to the public.

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