Spontanhelfende als Vergemeinschaftung des resilienten Selbst? : eine ethnografische Spurensuche im Kontext des "Jahrhunderthochwassers 2021"

The ‚Flood of the Century 2021‘ in the Ahr Valley, large parts of Western Germany, and neighbouring European countries has initiated a series of security policy discussions, generating new impulses regarding questions of resilience. In this context, my field research examined civil protection conferences – considered as apparatuses for the governance of ‚natural‘ disasters – focusing on this flood. By combining a Foucauldian and ethnomethodological understanding of problems, I investigate three conferencing practices (categorisation, integration and technicisation) in order to reconstruct the development of a communitised-resilient self. Within these practices, I use the concept of the ‚Spontanhelfende‘ (spontaneous volunteers), which is anchored in German disaster management, to show how a specific synthesis of individual and communalised resilience thinking leads to the emergence of this self. Simultaneously, this accompanying perspective provides a heuristic for examining subject positions in their emergence, further development and entanglement based on concrete governance practices.