Commentary: On the heat, pigeon chess and the collective false memories we owe to a Dutchman

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In case readers are unfamiliar with the term ‘pigeon chess’, here is one of the usual explanations: “Arguing with ignorant people is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how well you play chess, the pigeon will knock over all the pieces, poo on the board and strut about as if it had won.” Anyone familiar with the original will have noticed that I replaced the word ‘stupid’ with ‘ignorant’ at the start – and there’s a reason for that.

The equivalent of ‘pigeon chess’, given the current heatwave, is the debate about climate change. Who hasn’t been there? One person says summers are getting hotter and hotter, so we really must do something about it at last! The response from the ‘pigeon faction’ is: ‘It’s always been hot!’ If you then quote temperature statistics, you’re met with screenshots of an old BILD article with a ‘50-degree’ headline and, in the worst-case scenario, the quote with the statistic that you didn’t fabricate yourself. Then Hildegard struts out of the room, full of self-assurance. It’s not stupid, but it is ignorant. It’s just ‘pigeon chess’.

Do people actually remember heat like that?

How reliable are people of my generation – those born in the mid-1950s – when they claim to remember such heatwaves? I remember my school days from 1963 to 1973; sometimes it was hot, and we’d recite a clumsy little rhyme: “30 degrees in the shade, we’re sweating like rats. Mr Teacher, this is a right mess, we want the day off because of the heat!” It wasn’t great poetry, but it did mention 30 degrees.

Shortly after I left school, and following one or two rainy summers, this Dutchman called Rudi Carell came along and sang “It was up to 40 degrees in the shade”, and the 40-degree story took the world by storm.

Of course, it’s just my own speculation that it was down to Rudi Carell, but songs – especially hits like that – become etched into the collective memory. If you look at the weather records, summers with ‘up to 40 degrees in the shade’ aren’t really documented. The highest daily temperature recorded in Germany up to that point was 39.6 °C on 2 July 1952 in Neustadt/Weinstraße and Schallstadt-Mengen. A night-time temperature of 29.4 °C, as recorded in Kubschütz in the Bautzen district of eastern Saxony on the night of 27 to 28 June 2026, certainly did not occur in the past.

What was it like during the heatwave of 1983?

The ‘heat record’ – though one should perhaps avoid always talking about ‘records’ outside the context of sports reporting – had long stood at 40.2 °C, recorded on 27 July 1983 in Gärmersdorf, Upper Palatinate. I remember that summer well, for very personal reasons. At the time, I was on holiday at a campsite near Potsdam and, as can be seen in the photo, out on the Havel lakes in my boat. For that 27 July 1983, the Potsdam weather station reported a maximum daytime temperature of 32.6 °C and a nighttime temperature of 18.6 °C. A far cry from the temperatures – particularly the nighttime temperatures – at the end of June 2026.

As for how memories can be misleading, one can also construct an example of this. In 1983, the summer holidays in the GDR began on Saturday, 2 July. On Tuesdays – that is, 5 July and the following Tuesdays – were arrival days at the FDGB holiday homes, most company holiday homes and many campsites on the Baltic Sea. People from all over the GDR set off, often in the middle of the night, in Trabants, Wartburgs and the like. There are no written or oral accounts of people dying from the midday heat in the traffic jam on the Rügendamm. Yet with temperatures like those we experienced at the end of June 2026, such deaths would have been inevitable in those non-air-conditioned vehicles.

Nor are there any reports of West German holidaymakers suffering from heat exhaustion en masse on their way south in their Golf 1s, R 4s or 2 CVs.

Yes, we’ve had hot summers. The number of hot days – and especially hot nights – has certainly increased.

So what now?

It’s not just the older generation – people like me – who vehemently claim: ‘It used to be hot back then, too!’ Younger people are joining in as well. Those who haven’t experienced that ‘back then’ themselves, but know about it from stories. They’ve often heard this from the very same storytellers who also talk about the ‘good old days in the GDR’. Could these young people find out more from reliable sources? They could – and some do – but parents, grandparents and other people ‘who actually lived through it’ are often seen as reliable sources.

Many people are unaware that memories can be misleading, even without any malicious intent. There are, of course, research, studies and publications on the subject – but there is also a latent scepticism towards them. Perhaps it helps to view the whole thing with a touch of sarcasm; otherwise, one would have to give up. Or one could talk about ‘Aggnoranz’ instead of ‘Taubenschach’ and false memories, as Christian Stöcker does in his highly recommended article.