In praise of a wealthy, cultured and progressive country that makes Britain look bad and sad
Not long ago, my wife and brother-in-law, whose parents were born in the Weimar Republic, regained their German nationality. They were presented with brooches with the intertwined flags of Germany and the United Kingdom. My young son, who also received German citizenship, gave him Haribos to mark the occasion. The precision, thoughtfulness, and modesty of the rite were moving. The scene may have been taken from John Kampfner’s wealthy consultant to modern Germany, so much so that it illustrates his theme of a country that does things right and has accepted its history.
Kampfner’s fine, Why Germans Do Better, is part of a long list of appreciative British studies on Germany. For many Edwardians, the Wilhelmine Reich had the most productive military, the most serious universities and science, the most ruthless industrialists, and altogether it was a more complex nation. They gave it to him: only in the last 50 years has Germany taken the lead, and never more than today. But those Edwardians were the stark curtain of generations of declinistic stories that fooled the Anglo-German comparison, explaining differences that didn’t exist with explanations that didn’t work.
This long-shattered Decline still has its following in the comments on Britain, where its false assumptions are taken for apparent truths. Kampfner is not a declinist, and the things he calls us to appreciate are different from those we associate with Kaiser Bill’s Germany, let alone Hitler’s. Nor does it say that we all, like the Germans, deserve to get to the beach before them, or export to China like they do.
Like many British writings on Germany, it is also an e-book on Great Britain. We want to actually see the post-Brexit UK in a German mirror, not a global mirror. This mirror does not favor: Kampfner sees a Great Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity, its milestones extend to the United States and not much beyond. ” Borrow and buy, and live in a nostalgic dream world.
For the British readers to whom this e-book is directed, the implicit contrasts are striking. The German conservatism produced Angela Merkel, by far the most reputable democratic leader in the world, while the English variety produced Boris Johnson. Instead of demonizing refugees from the Middle East for the cause of Brexit, Germany has taken in a million Syrians. When the Covid-19 depredations came, Germany tested and tracked and kept its other people safe; England has recorded a record number of preventable deaths.
While Germany commemorated Victory Day as Liberation Day, Brexiter Britain used World War II, or an invented reminiscence of it, to make it difficult to understand the realities of a failed public health formula, probably without knowing that more people have died from Covid-19 than in the blitz.
Kampfner tells us that in an interview some time before she became chancellor, Angela Merkel asked what Germany means to her. She replied: “I am thinking about airtight windows. No other country can build such narrow and beautiful windows. German windows are something to be proud of. This revealing detail is testament to the fact that Germany is richer than the UK. It requires a bit more precision than Kampfner offers. Its consistent with the source of income capita is particularly higher. It is a much larger global player: it owns more than 6% of world production, compared to 2% in the UK. As an exporter, you also belong to another elegance of “global Britain” that surpasses the global one.
This economic good fortune was nothing like the leave-it-yourself ideology that has left the UK rotting so badly. Germany is a land of small and medium-sized companies of global importance, as well as national giants of corporations that the UK no longer has, such as Volkswagen of Wolfsburg or BASF of Ludwigshafen.
Germany has experienced some deindustrialization, especially in the former German Democratic Republic, which experienced a more brutal transition to capitalism in terms of destroyed industry and lost jobs than British industry in the Thatcher years. However, as Kampfner points out, despite constant complaints in Germany about a lack of progress on leveling, trillions of euros have been spent and GDP in line with capita in the East is now 80% that of the West. In this way, the difference between the GDP consistent with the capita of the north of England (which has more or less the same population as the former East Germany) and the rest of England is smaller than the existing one. Large portions of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland now have declining GDP consistent with capital than the former East Germany.
Kampfner’s Germany is not doing everything right. It has its scandals, like the new Berlin airport, which is still in use, and the Stuttgart exercise station, unfinished and over-budget. The railway formula no longer works on time as before, a sign of general neglect of the infrastructure. Its environmentalism (it has a very strong green party) is marred by the maintenance of coal-fired power stations. It did not cover itself in glory when, through the EU and other agencies, it bailed out its banks and crushed the economies of Greece and others. Its deep conservatism means that Germany has remarkably low employment rates for women with children, unlike the former GDR.
Kampfner’s Guide to a Mature Country is less economically oriented than the British outlook on Germany. Your Germany is not so much the land of Vorsprung durch Technik, but a soft, intellectual, cultured and progressive place, a society of clubs and societies, of social cooperation and social conservatism. One of the richest facets of this e-book is that it obviously shows that the new Germany did not come into being naturally from the year 0, which was 1945. For two decades and less shaken, much of the afterlife remained. secretly through the demands of the Cold War. Other countries played their component: when Hanns Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and assassinated through the Baader Meinhof group, the British press presented him as a mere German businessman, yet the perpetrators received him exactly because ‘he was a former Nazi’. However, Germany accepted Nazism through these demanding internal situations on the left, and with remarkable effect.
In this light, Britain looks bad and sad. It is true that in some parts of the British media a fantasy story about WWII is developed as stagnant smog, delighting in a cartoonish anti-Germanism that is loosely adapted to children’s comics of the 1950s. The sad reality is that Brexiters have intentionally undermined the British and the world to make Brexit possible.
Kampfner is right to ask us to create a UK with fairer politicians, a more serious press, a more mature understanding of its position in the world, more industry, smaller and indeed larger regional disparities. Windows. However, windows aside, Britain actually once had all of those things. Because one of the kinds of this e-book is not just that things are different in other positions, but that they reposition themselves over time and that things don’t necessarily get better.
But Brexiter Britain is not Great Britain, not even England. The younger generations in particular are not stuck in the past. Many are familiar with Europe, and perhaps even Germany, and that there is a Great Britain that is more similar and similar to Germany than it seems without delay.
• Why Germans Do It Better is published via Atlantic (£ 16. 99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop. com. Shipping fees may apply.