Why the Germans Do it Better E-Book

John Kampfner

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 504

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

READ JOHN KAMPFNER'S NEW BOOK: IN SEARCH OF BERLIN: THE STORY OF A REINVENTED CITY ***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*** BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST & NEW STATESMAN 'Excellent and provocative... a passionate, timely book.' Sunday Times 'A fine new book... thoughtful, deeply reported and impeccably even-handed.' The Times Emerging from a collection of city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a critical and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate. Raising important questions for our post-Brexit landscape, Kampfner asks why, despite its faults, Germany has become a model for others to emulate, while Britain fails to tackle contemporary challenges. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, Why the Germans Do It Better is a rich and witty portrait of an eternally fascinating country.

Leseprobe

WhytheGermansDo itBetter

‘A rich guide to modern Germany.’

Guardian

‘A revelation of a book . . . with insights based on painstaking research and evidence gleaned from months crisscrossing the country . . . Kampfner’s analysis is simply peerless.’

Literary Review

‘A nuanced but compelling account.’

New Statesman

‘Authoritative, timely and courageous.’

Philippe Sands

‘Smart, provocative and entertaining.’

Kay Burley

‘Kampfner’s clear and unanswerable argument should be compulsory reading for every politician, civil servant and commentator in Britain.’

John Simpson

JOHN KAMPFNER is an award-winning author, broadcaster and foreign-affairs commentator. He began his career reporting from East Berlin (during the fall of the Wall) and Moscow (during the collapse of communism) for the Telegraph. After covering British politics for the Financial Times and BBC, he edited the New Statesman. He is a regular TV and radio pundit, documentary maker and author of five previous books, including the bestselling Blair’s Wars.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2021

Copyright © John Kampfner, 2020, 2021

The moral right of John Kampfner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 978 3

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 977 6

Germany map © Laura Mcfarlane

Printed in Great Britain

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To my late parents, Betty and Fred, who, in theirdifferent ways, saw Germany at its worst during the War

Contents

Map of Germany

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction – Them and Us

1 Rebuilding and Remembering

2 Mutti’s Warm Embrace

3 Multikulti

4 No Longer a Child

5 The Wonder

6 The Dog Doesn’t Eat the Dog

7 No More Pillepalle

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Preface to the Paperback Edition

W hen this book first came out in August 2020, I hoped that it might trigger a new conversation in the UK, and further afield, about Germany. I also hoped that it might prompt Germans to begin looking at themselves in a different, more confident light. I didn’t dare imagine it would strike a chord with quite so many people. But something happened to lend my arguments a greater resonance. I suspect that something was COVID-19.

The pandemic said much about the organization of society and capacity of the state. Invariably, Angela Merkel was cited as an exemplar, alongside Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, the leaders of Taiwan, Finland and elsewhere. The fact that they were all women may well have played a part. People have their own views on that. But what matters far more in Merkel’s case is her science background and her character. She believes in facts not grandiloquence.

Throughout 2020, Britain’s response to the pandemic was a study in failure. Every development was hailed by Boris Johnson as ‘world beating’, only to fall apart. The contrast with Germany’s relative success made it all the more painful for Brits who are often frightened to look at their own country through a clear lens. To say this is to risk being accused of declinism. I would argue the opposite. It is only by taking a cold, hard look at itself that a people can prepare itself for the future. Instead, many people on die Insel – the island – as Germans have taken to calling us, wallow in self-delusion, clinging to past glories as balm. When I read a review by the conservative commentator Simon Heffer in my old paper, the Telegraph, fulminating at the slightest suggestion that the Great British nation had any reason to change, I was more convinced than ever of the wider purpose of the book.

Alongside the public debate came many private messages. People young and old, Germans and Brits, with long memories and short, were keen to add their thoughts about the relationship. Compared to America, compared to France even, Germany receives far less coverage in Britain. I hope the attention this book received is a sign that things are changing.

As the UK hurtled into an uncertain future with the flimsiest of Brexit deals, as trade suffered, goods became scarcer and costlier, as the health service suffered from the exodus of European workers, Johnson and his ministers rallied behind the flag. Even though ministers spoke of a fresh ‘special relationship’ with the EU, their first instinct was to pick fights with these supposed new friends. Asked in an interview why the British had early access to the COVID-19 vaccines (a few weeks earlier than France, Belgium, America and other countries), the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, came up with an ingenious response. Rather than saying that regulators had pushed approval through more quickly, he asserted: ‘That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we?’ Germans are no longer shocked or even disappointed by Britain. It did not take long after the UK’s departure from the EU for them to move on. They were no longer intrigued by the buffoonery of the prime minister or the accompanying Brexit turmoil. Studied indifference became their modus operandi.

For all the brickbats and attempted jokes, a concerted effort is being made in both countries’ foreign offices to rediscover what Germany and Britain have in common – a considerable amount. That is a noble endeavour, which deserves support. It has to be recognized, though, that what matters far more to Germany now is the future of the EU, and particularly its bilateral relationship with France, alongside managing the many threats posed by China and Russia. But top of its list of priorities is its relationship with the country that post-war Germany depended on: the United States.

Shortly before the presidential election, ARD, Germany’s channel one, aired a documentary in prime time. Called ‘Frenzy. An American catastrophe’, it opened with dramatic pictures of pitched street battles, police officers beating up protesters of colour, and members of the Proud Boys vowing to make America great again. What, the narrator asked, had happened to the land of the free? The programme was designed to shock, but it was only a foretaste of what was to come two months later.

The assault in January 2021 on Capitol Hill, the citadel of democracy as Americans (and many Europeans) like to see it, was, with hindsight, not surprising. It was the logical endpoint of the Trump era, the manipulation of grievance and truth. But it was still deeply shocking. Joe Biden’s socially distanced inauguration two weeks later came as an enormous relief, but Germans in particular would not lull themselves into a false sense of security. Beyond Donald Trump’s histrionics and his refusal to acknowledge defeat, the most disconcerting aspect of the election was the narrowness of the verdict itself. Yes, Biden won a record tally of votes – the turnout far exceeded previous elections. But Trump did well too – in spite of everything: the vitriol, divisiveness and the terrible handling of the pandemic. Imagine, Germans asked themselves, what would the world be like if America was run from 2024 onwards by someone as extreme as Trump, but far cleverer? They have never been more aware of the fragility of democracy.

Locked down, like pretty much everyone else in Europe, Germans went into 2021 with trepidation. The relative consensus on dealing with the pandemic frayed. COVID-deniers and anti-vaxxers mounted vocal, if small, demonstrations. The government responded with less precision than earlier in the crisis. Some of the regions became more fractious. Rules were not adhered to as strongly as they should have been.

Shortly before finishing this preface, the European Commission got into a fierce argument with pharmaceutical companies, complaining that vaccines were reaching member countries far more slowly than the UK. The Commission was trying to off-set blame for its own failure to order enough supplies. Britain, alongside Israel and even the US, had been faster and smarter. It was the first instance of the Johnson government doing anything right during the pandemic.

Many Germans were furious with the Commission and its (German) president, Ursula von der Leyen. After all, the successful trial the previous November of the first vaccine, Pfizer/ BioNTech, had been heralded as a very German success story. They were bewildered by the turn of events. Much of the British media went into instant ‘told you so’ mode over Brexit. Who needs solidarity when you can be nimble? Might Johnson emerge the ‘victor’, some wondered? Might he ‘get away with’ whatever criticisms a public inquiry on the pandemic might throw at him. After all, hadn’t his team scored the winning goal in the final minute of the game?

Politics reduced to sport or a game. A very British way of looking at things.

In winter 2020 and spring 2021, Brits were being vaccinated at an impressively rapid rate. It was a tremendous achievement. However, the verdict on how nations dealt with the COVID crisis will not be written for several years. Will the jabs be effective against all the various mutations? How quickly will the world recover once lockdowns are eased? Only three days before the vaccines row, I watched Johnson announce the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths in Britain. It was ‘hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic’, he said. His head hung low, he couldn’t answer the question why Britain’s death rate was so much higher than any equivalent country and twice as high as Germany’s.

It was a rare and unconvincing display of humility. It didn’t last long. Even after the pandemic, will Britain, I wonder, ever be big enough to learn from others? As the Germans try to do.

John Kampfner

February 2021

Introduction – Them and Us

I n January 2021, Germany turned 150 years old, but its people barely marked the milestone. Germany from the time of Bismarck to that of Hitler is synonymous with militarism, war, the Holocaust and division. No country has caused so much harm in so little time.

And yet, two nearby anniversaries tell a different history. In November 2019, millions celebrated thirty years since the Berlin Wall came down. In October 2020, three decades had passed since reunification. Half of modern Germany’s lifespan has been a tale of horror, war and dictatorship. The other half is a remarkable tale of atonement, stability and maturity. No country has achieved so much good in so little time.

As much of the contemporary world succumbs to authoritarianism, as democracy is undermined from its heart by an out-of-control American president, a powerful China and a vengeful Russia, one country – Germany – stands as a bulwark for decency and stability.

This is the other Germany. This is the story I wish to tell.

Those with longer memories struggle to accept the notion of Germany as a moral and political beacon. I want to compare all parts of this society with others, particularly my own, Britain. It will discomfort those still obsessed with Churchill and the Blitz spirit. Germany’s constitution is strong; political debate is more grown-up; economic performance has for much of the post-war era been unrivalled.

Which other nation could have absorbed a poor cousin with so little trauma? Which other nation would have allowed in more than a million of the world’s most destitute?

Germany faces many problems. The refugee influx has exacerbated cultural divide. Faith in established political parties is waning. Many, particularly in the East, have turned to the simple slogans of the extremes. The economy has slowed, weighed down by an excessive focus on exports, particularly to China, an ageing population and worsening infrastructure. At a time when Europe and the democratic world desperately needs leadership, Germany has been reluctant to meet its foreign-policy responsibilities.

And then the country was hit by another crisis. In early 2020, COVID-19 came to Europe, a pandemic that killed several million around the world, shattered economies and destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods. It also forced people around the world – locked down wherever they lived – to reassess their priorities and to look again at the role of the state and society. As people impatiently pondered a return to normal, after a year of fear, uncertainty and grief, it became axiomatic to ask: what is the new normal?

So why the confidence, why the faith? The measure of a country – or an institution or individual for that matter – is not the difficulties they face, but how they surmount them. On that test, contemporary Germany is a country to be envied. It has developed a maturity that few others can match. It has done so not because of a preordained disposition. It has learnt the hard way.

Coronavirus provided the ultimate test of leadership. Angela Merkel, after 15 years in office, rose to the challenge. Empathetic, dogged, she told Germans in precise detail the sacrifices they would have to make and the emergency laws her government would have to impose – something that was extraordinarily sensitive in light of the country’s history. She told citizens what she, her ministers and scientists knew and what they didn’t. She never blagged. She never boasted. Most of the decisions she was forced to take went against everything modern Germany stood for. The closing of borders showed how easily the great dream of free travel across the continent might end. A people fearful of giving their information to the state was asked to sign up to being tracked and traced. Yet Merkel knew she had no choice.

On the other hand, Britain provided a case-study of how not to deal with a crisis. The bombast of the recently-elected prime minister was in inverse proportion to his government’s competence. Boris Johnson was slow to grasp the seriousness of the problem. Even though a pandemic was listed as one of the highest-priority dangers facing the country in the UK government’s 2015 National Strategic Defence and Security Review, almost no preparations had been made. With a mixture of libertarianism and English exceptionalism, the prime minister declared that with good old-fashioned pluck, Britain would get through it. However, despite witnessing the tragic advance of the virus in Italy, societal restrictions were slow to be implemented. The British also faced a crisis in their provision of testing and personal protective equipment (PPE). All in all, the UK could not have alighted upon a leader less qualified to deal with a situation that required methodical attention to detail. Johnson had engineered his ascent to power through a flexible relationship with the truth and a reliance on bluster.

It was desperately sad but no surprise that so many died. Care homes became death traps. By May 2020, Britain found itself in the ignominious position of having the highest death toll in Europe and one of the highest in the world. That sorry statistic remained consistent throughout the many months of the pandemic. Meanwhile, the economy contracted at a far higher rate than others.

This British tragedy did not come in isolation. Some of the mistakes related specifically to healthcare decisions. But most of the problem was more deeply embedded in the fabric of government. Germans watched in horror as a country they admired for its pragmatism and sangfroid fell into pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion. For most Germans I have spoken to, Britain’s recent travails have been the object of sadness and sympathy. So many conversations began with the same question: ‘What has happened to you, my British friends?’ They hope that, one day, good sense will return.

The post-war Federal Republic of Germany has had only eight leaders, most of them of considerable stature. Konrad Adenauer embedded democracy and anchored West Germany in the transatlantic alliance; Willy Brandt helped engineer detente at the height of the Cold War; Helmut Kohl steered reunification with determination and dexterity; Gerhard Schröder introduced radical economic reforms, albeit at great cost to his party. He was replaced in 2005 by Angela Merkel, the woman around whom so much of contemporary Germany has revolved. She has already overtaken Adenauer in terms of time in office. If she survives until December 2021, she will have outlasted Kohl and become the longest-serving chancellor of modern times. I first met her when she was an unassuming adviser to the man who would become East Germany’s first and only democratically elected leader, Lothar de Maizière. She and I sat and drank coffee in the Palast der Republik, the parliament building in East Berlin that was a popular meeting point. I was struck by her poise, restraint and calm when all around was chaos. If only I had known . . .

Four key years have defined Germany since the war: 1949, 1968, 1989 and 2015. I will look at the effects of these great moments on all areas of life, thematically rather than chronologically. Each has left a deep imprint on society. Each has made Germany what it is today. From 1945 to 1949, a devastated and occupied land had to be rebuilt. Almost all towns and cities were damaged, while many were destroyed. Millions of people were displaced. The trauma of total defeat dominated the national consciousness. The Allies, particularly the Americans, enabled the country to get back on its feet. At the heart of all public life in Germany is the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), approved in 1949. It is an extraordinary document, one of the greatest achievements of its post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation. It has managed to be both robust and able to change with the times. It has been amended more than sixty times (a two-thirds majority of both houses is required), without endangering the principles that underpin it. Compared with the alternatives elsewhere it has been a masterstroke. The US Constitution is weighed down by provisions that might have suited the eighteenth century (such as the Second Amendment, granting the right to bear arms); France’s Fourth Republic, enshrined around the same time as Germany’s, lasted a mere twelve years. Spain’s post-Franco constitution of 1978 is creaking under the dispute between the central government and Catalonia. Post-war Italy and Belgium struggle to produce functioning governments. Britain makes it up as it goes along, ever confident that it will muddle through.

The creation of West Germany’s post-war political architecture is one of the great triumphs of liberal democracy. The British played their part in that. They helped devise a constitution so successful that it is cited by Germans as their object of greatest pride.

Why did we not think of creating something similar back home, instead of continuing to encumber ourselves with our embarrassingly atrophied political structures?

Germany rebuilt its economy with staggering success but the atonement, the historical reckoning, did not take place in the immediate post-war years. It took until the rebellions of 1968, the second key event, for Germany’s younger generation to confront their parents about the past. They were no longer prepared to accept silence, half-truths or untruths. They wanted answers about the horror that they knew many older people had taken part in or turned a blind eye to. A few years later, the spirit of 1968 took on a violent and ugly hue with the terrorism of the Baader–Meinhof Group. The country was in peril again. Germany stared at another abyss and came through, its democracy strengthened.

The third moment was, of course, the fall of the Wall and reunification. Not long before those heady events in Berlin, Kohl had welcomed East German leader Erich Honecker to Bonn with full military honours. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had finally received the recognition it craved. Yet his militarized state was beginning to crumble. I lived through those dramatic years, 1989 and 1990, as the Telegraph’s correspondent in East Germany. I remember in Leipzig and East Berlin being among the civil society activists and church congregations calling for reform, knowing that police and army units were outside and ready to fire on them. The protests took place shortly after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. What happened next was not inevitable. It did not have to end peacefully. Reunification was not preordained.

Germany became a stable state with settled borders for the first time in its history.

In the years since, many have chewed over the mistakes that were made. Could more of the East German economy have been preserved? Was it all done too quickly? Were the Wessis, West Germans, arrogant and insensitive? Why were the one or two better aspects of East German life, not least the more emancipated role of women, not absorbed into the new country? These are legitimate questions. Yet I defy anyone to name another country that could have done what Germany did with so little collateral damage.

The fourth and final upheaval was the refugee crisis of 2015. Charities, security services and the military were reporting that the tide of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa into the EU’s southernmost ports was becoming unsustainable. Merkel, preoccupied with the Greek debt crisis at the time, was slow to appreciate what was happening. Yet her eventual response was remarkable. To the consternation of its neighbours, Germany opened its doors to a human stream not seen in Europe since the end of the war. She paid a big price politically. Social wounds were reopened. The far right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) surged. Germany is still reeling from her decision, but it was right and it was good. What else, the chancellor would say as the criticism mounted, was a German supposed to do? Build camps?

As the Merkel era comes to an end, Germany faces a greater test than any equivalent country. Why? As Thomas Bagger, an adviser to current German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, points out, the nation depends entirely for its identity, stability and self-worth on the liberal democratic post-war settlement, on the rule of law. The year 1945 was Stunde Null, Zero Hour. Germany started again. Unlike Russia and France, with their military symbols, the US with the story of its founding fathers, or the UK, with its Rule Britannia teaching of history and Dad’s Army war obsessions, Germany has nothing else to fall back on. That is why it cares so passionately about process, about getting it right, not playing fast and loose. Germany has few positive reference points from history. That is why it refuses to look back. That is why it sees every challenge to democracy as an existential threat. That is why I, like many who have a complicated relationship with the country, so fulsomely admire the seriousness with which it has set about its task since 1945. Most of all, it is about the power of memory.

My journey goes back vicariously to the 1930s. My Jewish father, Fred, fled Bratislava, his home town, as Hitler’s army was marching the other way into Czechoslovakia. His father and mother smuggled the three of them in train carriages and cars back across Germany and out. They were nearly caught several times but escaped by the skin of their teeth and by individual acts of kindness. Many of their extended family died in the concentration camps. He made his life in England, via a fifteen-year stint in Singapore, where he met my mother, a nurse from Kent of solid Christian working-class stock, on the ward of the British Army hospital.

My childhood in London in the 1960s and 1970s contained the usual fare of war songs, jokes and TV shows at the expense of the Krauts. The dirty Germans crossed the Rhine, parlez vous. Hitler only had one ball, the other was in the Albert Hall. I would play in the bomb shelter in the garden of my grandmother’s north Oxford house. I would read le Carré and Forsyth, watch Colditz and The Dam Busters, and a few years later would collapse in uproarious laughter over Fawlty Towers and ‘Don’t Mention the War’. Occasionally, the mould was broken. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a TV drama about brickies from the North East of England looking for casual labour in northern Germany, showed a more human and complex side to the relationship with Germany. Most of the time, though, popular culture was confined to tabloid insults and jokes about beach towels and sunloungers.

I was a bit young for Vincent Mulchrone’s commentary in the Daily Mail on the morning of the 1966 World Cup final: ‘West Germany may beat us at our national sport today, but that would be only fair. We beat them twice at theirs.’1 As we all know, England won 4–2, courtesy of a dodgy goal. A new chant was born: two world wars and one World Cup. Even in 1996, as football, we hoped, was coming home after thirty years of hurt, as Cool Britannia was emerging on the eve of the Blair era, we couldn’t help ourselves. ‘Achtung Surrender!’ screamed the front page of the Mirror. ‘For You Fritz ze Euro Championship is Over.’2 The jokes were a laugh – for some. The magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 2002: ‘For many English, the Second World War will never end. It is just too much fun to taunt the Germans.’3

It changed for me at the age of fifteen. I started to study the language and fell in love with it. I was exposed to Goethe, Brecht, Max Frisch – and Nina Hagen. In my early twenties, I jumped at the opportunity to work in Germany, as a cub reporter in Bonn, the Bundesdorf, or federal-village as it was known. In April 1986, nearly fifty years on from his escape, my father came to visit me. He had not been back since his extraordinary journey across the country to freedom. On the phone before his departure, he was apprehensive. His nerves weren’t improved when Lufthansa lost his bags on arrival. Perhaps the Germans aren’t that efficient after all, he joked. His overriding impression, including a journey along the transit motorway that took you down a protected road to West Berlin, was of a country at ease with itself and effortlessly polite to a man whose German revived almost immediately, albeit with a Viennese vernacular stuck in the 1930s.

Apart from my dad’s visit, I was seldom required to think about the war during my time in placid Bonn. My friends in the office and various students I had met at the university were, I felt, not dissimilar to my peers at home. It wasn’t the past that bothered me. It was the present, and Germany’s obsession with rules. I recall sitting on the balcony of my apartment one sunny Sunday lunchtime listening to the local rock music station on the radio. When the pips came on for the news, my German girlfriend at the time switched it off. I asked her to switch it back on. She refused. Didn’t I know it was the quiet hour? During the quiet hour you have to show consideration to your elderly neighbours. That set me off. You don’t need rules for that kind of thing, I said. Oh yes you do, she retorted. I fell into stereotyping the herd mentality that leads, ahem, to evil as well as good. She accused me of being a selfish Thatcherite who cares only for myself. I often think about that conversation and who was wrong and who was right.

Some of the day-to-day annoyances of living in Germany were clichés, but they were no less true for that. I was once fined by the police who spotted me crossing the road when the fabled red man was showing, at four o’clock in the morning. When I suggested to the officer that another car was unlikely to come down this quiet lane for hours, I only made matters worse. Rules are rules. Bureaucracy must be respected, even if logic suggests otherwise. Once I received a beautifully embossed envelope on the windscreen of my car. ‘Dear neighbour,’ it read, ‘please would you clean your car as it is bringing down the reputation of the street.’ Some rules have been relaxed in the intervening years; others have simply been replaced by newer ones. Woe betide a pedestrian who edges onto the cycle lane. When does punctuality go too far? A friend recently gave me a lift to Sunday lunch at someone’s home in Berlin’s suburbs, and we arrived at our destination at seven minutes to one. ‘Now we can relax and chat,’ she said triumphantly. At one on the dot, she declared: ‘We can go in now.’

Many Germans understand the frustrations; they attempt several explanations or excuses. First comes ‘Every country has its quirks.’ The second is a war-weary ‘We need rules in order to keep ourselves in check.’ The third is the most intriguing. German society is based on a sense of mutual obligation, shared endeavour and a belief that a rules-based order is benign. An ageing former punk I met in Leipzig, who would hang out with Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols in London back in the day, explained that everyone’s worst fear is a Rechtsfreier Raum. A space with no rules is where the powerful exploit the weak. He points out of his window. People shouldn’t be allowed to build extensions that block out the light for their neighbours. People shouldn’t make noise after a certain time, because old people will struggle to sleep. This from a former punk musician. He is unrepentant. In a democratic society, he insists, the role of the state should be to help the weak take on the strong: to rebalance between rich and poor.

The culture war of the past five or so years, and the twin shocks of Trump and Brexit, shook Germany to the core. As did the often-violent demonstrations in France by the gilets jaunes, the yellow vests. Most of all, Germans watched the four years of Britain’s Brexit torment with stunned disbelief. They could not understand how the Mother of Parliaments, a country synonymous with stability and predictability, could have descended into such chaos. The referendum result came as a shock – they realized that the Brits were sceptical of the European project (as even some Germans are), but they couldn’t imagine that this would be followed by a collective loss of nerve. Infantile and improvised were two of the most common descriptions of British politics during this period.

They were bewildered by the absence of rules. Which held precedence – a one-off referendum or representative democracy? That, I mumbled, was murky. How could you have a system in which your speaker and prime minister made it up as they went along? I would respond with a shrug of the shoulders that comes from having to explain the failings of your own country knowing that there is no credible explanation. The dismay was offset by very German attempts at humour, not least impersonations of Speaker John Bercow bellowing ‘Order! Order!’ One Berliner told me, in all seriousness, that she had given up her Netflix subscription because she got all the entertainment she needed watching Britain’s Parliament channel.

In December 2018, when Theresa May’s attempted deal suffered its first setback, the Heute Show (Germany’s equivalent of America’s Daily Show) awarded its annual ‘golden dumbass’ prize to the UK . . . alongside Donald Trump and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman. Over pictures of Merkel waiting awkwardly outside the Chancellery as the door of the British prime minister’s limo failed to open, host Oliver Welke described how May ‘can’t get out of the EU and can’t get out of her bloody car!’. He then showed a cartoon of a caricature British gentleman in a bowler hat and pinstriped suit repeatedly burning his hand on a hot stove, then stabbing his eye with a fork. The audience fell about laughing. ‘Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, liquid Brexit, just fog off,’ Welke yelled. It was painful to watch. Britain: the butt of global mirth. Yet as the prime minister of the state of Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke, put it at a gathering of policymakers: ‘Brexit is not a comedy show. It is a real-life drama in many acts.’4

The general election victory secured by Johnson in December 2019 drove a further wedge. Germany might have been relieved that it no longer had to deal with Brexit uncertainty, but instead it had to navigate a new-found populism on its doorstep, borrowed and developed from Johnson’s ‘friend’ Donald Trump. How could the British have elected a man known for making up stories about the EU when he was a journalist in Brussels, a man who likes to play the clown? Johnson is to many Germans the antithesis of what a politician should represent.

Brexit is not the cause of Britain’s psychodrama. It is a symptom. We are trapped by a moribund political system and delusions of grandeur. When the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson noted back in 1962 that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role, he would not have thought that sixty years on we would still be floundering. We have never got over winning the war. We flock to see films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour; we continue to set our cultural and historical parameters around events that took place seventy-five years ago. Most of our media has spent decades portraying European integration as a plot by the Germans and the French designed to undermine English values. The language is of victory and surrender, collaborator and traitor.

Immediately after the war, Britain didn’t have the economic or military power of the Americans. We didn’t devise the Marshall Plan. We did, however, play a major role in keeping Berlin free, in keeping Germany secure thanks to the British Army on the Rhine, and helping to develop a free media and respected political institutions, for which Germans remain immensely grateful.

Britain has never been comfortable with the European Union. During that first referendum in 1975, those campaigning against remaining in the EEC likened the Treaty of Accession to Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement and appeasement. In 1974, as he was preparing to address the Labour Party conference, Helmut Schmidt asked his cabinet what he might say in his speech that would help convince voters to stay in the EEC. One of his ministers, who had just met her British counterpart, Barbara Castle, told him: ‘The only way to keep Britain in the European Community is not to remind it that it is already in.’5

This memo formed part of an exhibition at the German House of History in Bonn in 2019 entitled Very British: A German Point of View. This was, as curator Peter Hoffmann pointed out to me, one of the museum’s most popular shows. It had been devised before the referendum. The contents were amended to include a room focused on Brexit. Hoffmann admitted Germans’ fixation with Britain’s travails had boosted visitor numbers. The show is funny, informative – and painful. It is about an unrequited love.

Germans have devoured British subculture, pop music, TV shows (they too found Fawlty Towers funny in a self-deprecating way), the glamour of Emma Peel and the Avengers, to the present day. Many Germans can recount holidays to Cornwall, Scotland and the Lake District in their camper vans. They are glued to Premier League football. They obsess about the royal family (Germans, from Hanover, they like to note). They love English traditions, even when they make them up. Every New Year’s Eve, the entire country, young and old, watches an English-language film called ‘Dinner for One’. Black and white, lasting only twenty minutes, it was first aired in 1963. It is the most repeated TV programme in history, the ninetieth-birthday dinner of Miss Sophie, a bejewelled English aristocrat. Every year, she invites the same four gentlemen around. The trouble is they are now all dead. Undeterred, the butler lays the table and goes through the same ritual: a four-course meal, including mulligatawny soup, washed down with dry sherry, wine and champagne. Germans know every gag. The line that has them collapsing in laughter is when the butler asks Miss Sophie: ‘The same procedure as last year?’

The fall of the Berlin Wall could and should have been a great moment for celebrating Britain’s role in the rebirth of democratic Germany. An oppressive communist system was dismantled with extraordinary success. Margaret Thatcher, alongside Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, had an important part to play. Yet all she saw was danger. A month after the incredible scenes in Berlin, she told EU leaders at a dinner in Strasbourg: ‘Twice we beat the Germans. Now they are there again.’ Pulling out maps of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia from her handbag, she intoned to French president François Mitterrand: ‘They’ll take all of that, and Czechoslovakia too.’6

Weeks later, the Thatcherite Bruges Group heard the following from one of her favourite economists, Kenneth Minogue: ‘The European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the medieval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler.’7 One of her most trusted cabinet ministers, Nicholas Ridley, famously told the Spectator magazine that the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the precursor to the Euro) was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe [. . .] I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler frankly.’8 He was forced to resign, but he was only saying what a lot of Brits, a certain type of Brit, were thinking.

Thatcher saw it as her mission to push back, until she realized she had no one on her side. She tried to lobby Gorbachev privately. The Soviet leader had not for a moment suspected that his political reforms would lead to the collapse of communism across the whole bloc. His was the most pivotal role and yet he agreed not just to the reunification of Germany, but to a Western-leaning Germany in NATO, and to the Soviet Union pulling back its military front line. Thatcher’s pleading with him fell on deaf ears. Mitterrand too had reservations about the new German project. The French had many historical reasons to fear a strengthened and united Germany. A weakened and divided Germany had served them well. As the French writer and resistance figure François Mauriac quipped in 1952: ‘I love Germany so much that I rejoice there are two of them.’9 Yet Mitterrand knew that he could not stand in the way of history.

The Two Plus Four process gave journalists a ringside view of the dynamics – Kohl, Thatcher, Mitterrand, Gorbachev and George Bush senior (who had taken over from Reagan at the start of 1989) negotiating a treaty that would create a single Germany and a new European architecture. East Germany’s notional leader, de Maizière, had a walk-on part. Thatcher never concealed her animus towards Kohl, a reaction that was rooted in the psyche of war, not politics. Kohl kept a bust of Churchill in his office in the Chancellery. He was an avowed Anglophile, seeing Britain’s influence in Europe as a good. And yet, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t win her around. In March 1990, the two had agreed to attend the fortieth Königswinter, an Anglo-German conference, in Cambridge. The organizers decided it was too risky to put them next to each other. That evening Thatcher gave her dinner neighbour, a veteran German diplomat, the benefit of her musings. It would, she said, be ‘at least another 40 years before the British could trust the Germans again’.10

To her credit, she admitted in her memoirs only three years later that she had got it wrong: ‘If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.’11

Even now Britain doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants of Germany. When its economy struggles, as it did in the mid-eighties and mid-nineties, it is derided as the ‘sick man of Europe’, over-regulated and hidebound. When Deutschland AG corners global markets, it is over-weaning and rapacious. Now that its economy is slowing again, the gloating has resumed. The British don’t want Germany to throw its weight around the world, yet they do want it to pull its weight.

The millennium and 2000s, when Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder were talking about a common European home, brought a brief interlude. It all came crashing down with Brexit. The arrival of Johnson as Foreign Secretary in 2016 ushered in a new era of crassness towards Germany. His officials despaired of his language. Leaving the EU, Johnson told the Munich Security Conference, would be a liberation, pronouncing the word in French, to the consternation of his audience. The wannabe historian and now prime minister who models himself on Churchill has borrowed much from the Thatcher lexicon. This rhetoric has always played well among the Conservative core – and it still does. One minister who served under Theresa May recalls a party stalwart spluttering at a recent constituency evening: ‘We didn’t win the war in order to be told what to do by the Germans.’ He was loudly cheered.

Britain may be the global leader in wartime obsessions, but it is not alone. Germany still feels it cannot do anything right. When it clamped down on Greece in the debt crisis (the rights and wrongs of which are discussed later in this book), placards of Merkel went up in Athens with a Hitler moustache painted on her.

*

Mercifully, there is another story about Germany. The lived experience, in business, tech and arts, has demystified Germany to a new generation of Brits. The ‘poor but sexy’ (the phrase used by the mayor in 2003) capital became a magnet for tourists. Teenage and twenty-something clubbers flock on weekend breaks to Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. Germany now has the fourth-largest contingent of Brits in Europe, after Spain, France and Ireland. According to a joint study by the organizations Oxford in Berlin and the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB),12 the number of Britons receiving German citizenship rose tenfold in the three years after the referendum, with predictions for subsequent years to be higher still. Among many younger Brits, Germany is a source of hope and opportunity.

Over the last decade or two, Germans have become a little less reluctant to talk up their country. Some put this down to the popular hosting of the 2006 World Cup. Others insist there was no turning point, more a gradual passage of time. But they still remain hesitant. The seventieth anniversary of the Grundgesetz was quietly marked in 2019, with exhibitions, television documentaries and commemorative stands in high streets. Around the same time, the Open Society Foundation conducted a detailed survey about patriotism, a vexed subject for Germans. It pointed out that consistently, over decades, the most important source of national pride has been the Basic Law. The one form of patriotism that many Germans embrace is called constitutional patriotism. The pride they feel in their country is not of the small-island, flag-waving variety. Instead, they hope they are setting a good example for the world through a clear set of democratic rules.

I was keen to test all of this for myself – if only anecdotally. One summer’s day in 2019 in Prenzlauer Berg, the now-hipster area of East Berlin where I had witnessed the Church protests against the communist regime thirty years earlier, I carried out a set of video interviews for Cari and Januscz, friends who run a German-language course called Easy German. The question I was asked to pop to everyone was: ‘What do the Germans do well?’ Most passers-by were shocked at being asked, struggling to think of anything. Sometimes seriously, sometimes ironically, they would proffer the following: punctuality, correctness, thoroughness. One went so far as to say: ‘We are tough, but honest and direct. We are good to our word.’ Many sought sanctuary in ‘bread’ or ‘beer’.

It made me wonder, though, what do the Germans do better, and what lessons do they actually have to teach, or rather have they learnt? In posing these questions, I hope to spark a different kind of debate about the country, not to suggest superiority but to redress the balance of recent history. Look around your local bookshop, in any country, and how many books are there about Germany that are not about the two world wars? There have been some admirable ones in recent years, but they are few and far between.

Why write this book now? Germany is coming out of a sustained period of economic growth and entering a time of heightened uncertainty. My year-long road trip and series of interviews have not made me starry-eyed or blind to the country’s faults. I include them all here. The Germans I interviewed for this book, from prominent politicians and CEOs of multinationals, to artists, volunteers helping refugees, old mates and ordinary folk met at random, all recoiled at the thesis and the title of the book. Without a single exception. ‘You can’t say that,’ they would exclaim with a shriek or awkward laugh. They then embarked on a long list of troubles that the country faces and things that it gets wrong. Everywhere they look, Germans feel anxious. They see all that they hold dear being threatened. They see a world in which democracy is openly mocked by populists and strongmen – from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. At home, they see the AfD everywhere and mainstream politicians struggling to cope. They, like everyone, see the climate emergency before their eyes.

What better time to test their country’s resilience than now? Most Germans, let alone foreigners, see only dark times ahead for their country. I passionately disagree, although of course there are many problems ahead. What gives me cause for hope is their self-questioning, their almost morbid re-stoking of memory. Germans cannot bring themselves to praise their country. This refusal to see good is hardwired. And yet, particularly when compared with the alternatives on offer in Europe and beyond, they have much to be proud of. As the American commentator George Will wrote early in 2019: ‘Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.’13 More hubristic countries like my own would be wise to learn from it.

1

Rebuilding and Remembering

The pain of the post-war years

W eimar is the city of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Liszt, of the Renaissance painter Cranach the Elder. It is where the woman of letters and salon queen Madame de Staël fell in love with the culture of Germany, and where the Bauhaus art school had its beginnings.

Outside my hotel, the no. 6 bus takes you the short distance from Goethe Square to the Buchenwald concentration camp. You don’t need to go far in Germany to be confronted by its terrible history. In Munich, it takes just over half an hour to travel from the S-Bahn no. 2’s central station to its end stop, Dachau. In Berlin, it’s a little more complicated to reach Sachsenhausen by public transport, but the trip north of the city can be done in just over an hour.

For the past half-century Germany has engaged in an act of atonement that has dominated all aspects of life, with everything referenced back to the Nazi era. Germans’ high state of moral alert, even after all these years, still dictates much of what they do. The historian Fritz Stern talks of ‘the Germans’ wish to believe’ in Hitler, ‘in their voluntary choice of Nazism’.1 Stern spent his long career seeking to answer the question ‘Why and how did the universal human potential for evil become an actuality in Germany?’2 Or, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor contended, writing in the closing months of the war: ‘The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality.’3

An entire phraseology has been built up around the need to remember: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history); Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (processing history); Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance); and most controversially, Kollektivschuld (collective guilt).

German history, even pre-twentieth century, is seen through this lens. Unlike France or Britain or many other countries around the world, there are no grand national day ceremonies, although the recently inaugurated Day of German Unity (on 3 October) is now tentatively being marked. Those who died in military service to their country rarely receive public commemorations. The only parades are local folkloric or cultural ones. There is little pageantry – which could account for Germans’ obsession with royalty and celebrity elsewhere.

Which other country would build a monument to its own shame – and right next to its two most famous landmarks? The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe sits close to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag in the heart of Berlin. Containing 2,711 rectangular concrete slabs, each resembling a coffin, it was inaugurated in 2005. School groups descend on it from all parts of the country, children warned to be quiet at all times. To watch their faces as they leave is instructive. Some historians and architects have criticized it as too abstract, cold even. I see it as chilling and in the appropriate sense. This is now the most famous site of remembrance to the Holocaust within modern Germany and the territory of the former Third Reich, but it is only one of many.

In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig came up with an idea. Three decades on, there are more than 70,000 Stolpersteine in 20 languages in 120 towns and cities in 24 countries across Europe. These are small symmetrical stones, literally stumbling stones, 10 centimetres by 10, with brass plaques bearing the names of people exterminated in the concentration camps and other victims of National Socialism. They are located outside the last known home of the victims, mainly but not exclusively Jews. Some are Roma, others are homosexuals or disabled. The inscription on each stone begins ‘Here lived’, followed by the victim’s name, date of birth and fate: internment, suicide, exile or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder. Most are located in Germany.4

These acts of remembrance did not come easily, and they did not come quickly. Indeed, it took the best part of two decades after the war for Germans to really confront the unvarnished truth of the Holocaust and other horrors. From the mid-1940s, the prevailing mood was of shocked humiliation. The Allies’ tactic of breaking civilian morale by firebombing cities into oblivion may have brought forward the end of the war. It also allowed a sense of victimhood to take root, usually silently; in the views of some, there was a sense of moral equivalence between Nazi crimes and Allied excesses.

Initially, the process of rebuilding took only physical form. The image of the Trümmerfrauen, the rubble women, is writ large on the German psyche. Immediately on the Nazis’ surrender, the Allies enlisted all able-bodied women aged between fifteen and fifty to clear buildings brick by brick, using sledgehammers and picks. The streets were cleared of rubble. Many of these women were traumatized from war. But they were deemed capable of manual work, nine hours per day for a few coins and a ration card. Many men were crippled or in prisoner-of-war camps. Eight million people had been killed or were missing, more than 10 per cent of the population. Around 150 towns and cities lay in ruins. Nearly half the roads, railways, gas, electricity and water supplies were destroyed. George Orwell described what he found in Cologne in March 1945: ‘The master race are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart.’5 His caustic fury was typical of its time.

As Neil MacGregor writes, ‘The pathos of the handcart is powerful and real.’6 An already impoverished country was required to house and feed twelve million people driven out from the eastern lands by the Russian advance, increasing the population by a fifth at a time when there was barely any food to go round. This was possibly the biggest forced population movement in history. Many people had nowhere to go, nowhere warm to shelter, pushing a few ragged belongings with them. The winter of 1946–47 was particularly harsh. Money was worthless. Barter was the currency of choice. The most sought-after commodities were cigarettes and chocolate. Food rationing prescribed a mere 1,000–1,500 calories per day. American food supplies – a sixth of Germany’s total food production at the time – saved tens of thousands from starvation.

To this day, few families do not have someone, or know of someone, who was scarred by the post-war collapse. This was for a long time an under-commemorated and under-studied aspect of German history. Is this, MacGregor wonders, ‘because Germans consider these events as just retribution for evil deeds? When a state has done so much wrong, how are we to respond to the suffering its citizens endure as a result? If we assert a communal guilt, can we nonetheless plead for individual compassion?’7

In a book published in 2008 called The Cold Homeland, the historian Andreas Kossert examines the treatment of these destitute people from the east. They were not welcomed with open arms by their countrymen – something that has always been, and remains, an awkward subject that requires sensitive handling. ‘Seventy years after the end of the war, almost every family in Germany is affected by it,’ writes Kossert. ‘But it is only gradually becoming a topic of collective memory in Germany, because until very recently the issue was associated with a right-wing, revisionist position. [. . .] In many families there was a total silence and not a word about the loss, the mourning of parents or grandparents.’8

Occupying forces promoted the idea that through denazification, demilitarization and reconstruction, Germany could reset the clock. It began to be used in everyday parlance. Roberto Rossellini’s film Germany, Year Zero, which was shot on location in 1947 and screened in German and English the following year, may have helped spread the use of the term. Zero, rubbing everything out, was convenient. Most Germans in that period chose to see themselves as either victims or unwitting participants. A truly honest debate about the nature of participation and guilt would take two decades to materialize. As the war reporter Martha Gellhorn wrote mockingly during her travels across the defeated lands: ‘No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village . . . there weren’t many Jews in this neighbourhood . . . we have nothing against the Jews; we always got on well with them.’ She added: ‘It should be set to music.’9

For the Allies, the situation required pragmatism. With the Soviet threat increasing, they desperately needed Germany back on its feet. They needed it stable. The first sign of a shift away from punishment came during a visit by US secretary of state James Byrnes in September 1946. He visited a number of destroyed cities, giving a speech in Stuttgart which he entitled a ‘Restatement of Policy’; it was anything but. Two processes were set in motion: economic assistance and a decision to focus more on the dangers of communism than the crimes of fascism. ‘The American government has supported and will continue to support the necessary measures to denazify and demilitarize Germany, but it does not follow that large armies of foreign soldiers or alien bureaucrats, however well motivated and disciplined, are in the long run the most reliable guardians of another country’s democracy,’ Byrnes said. ‘The United States cannot relieve Germany from the hardships inflicted upon her by the war her leaders started. But the United States has no desire to increase those hardships or to deny the German people an opportunity to work their way out of those hardships so long as they respect human freedom and cling to the paths of peace.’10

President Harry Truman concluded that without a massive injection, Europe would not get back on its feet. As his secretary of state George Marshall (who had succeeded Byrnes), put it: ‘It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.’11 The European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, provided $12 billion to eighteen European nations (the equivalent of more than $100 billion in today’s prices). Britain and France received the most, followed by Germany. The USSR refused money for itself and for the new Eastern European bloc that had come under its wing.

Many middle- and even some higher-ranking Nazis were restored to their positions. Denazification certifications – dubbed Persilscheine, ‘Persil notes’ – were easy to obtain. Suspicions of Nazi complicity could be washed away with some historical detergent. Suspected Nazi offenders could be exonerated by statements of good reputation. People talked about being washed clean or walking in with a brown shirt and coming out with a white one. A few years later, the new Bundestag passed Article 131, formalizing the process. This allowed public servants, including politicians, judges, military officers, teachers and doctors, to be automatically reinstated if they had passed denazification tests. Retirement benefits were restored. A number of business leaders were able to take up their posts at the helm of companies that had been complicit.

The memory of war guilt has not receded with time. I am struck by how many Germans, particularly the young to middle-aged, bring it up unprompted. They do so less to dwell on the past, important though that is, but to check that the lessons have been learnt. In these times of increasing authoritarianism, nationalism and incivility in Europe and around the world, they are talking about the crimes of the Third Reich more than they have ever done. In Munich, I meet Matthias Mühling, director of the Lenbachhaus, one of Munich’s most important galleries. As we look out from the museum onto the neoclassical splendour of Königsplatz, the square that was at the heart of Nazi power, he points out to me the Central Institute for Art History. Soon after the war, the Americans set up a team there to investigate the thousands of looted works of art. The episode featured in a 2014 Hollywood hit, The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney. As Mühling tells the story, he becomes ever more impassioned. The ease with which many ex-Nazis returned to prominent positions in culture, and other parts of society, rankles with him. He talks of ‘everyone’s grandfathers and possibly fathers being Nazis – and still getting away with it’. He points out that the Lenbachhaus, unlike pretty much all its rivals, did not become a cheerleader for Hitler. Many museum directors who had enthusiastically complied with instructions to rid themselves of ‘degenerate Jewish’ art were co-opted by the US forces to help find missing works. ‘I suppose that was obvious,’ Mühling says. ‘They knew where it had gone.’ What matters more? The fact that many senior people got away with it? Or the fact that many of the present generation in public life are still angry that they did?