FINDING GERMANY PART 7:The Germans have created a remarkably fair society but one that is averse to risk
BY THE look of it, Thomas and Sabine Müller have just stepped out of their living room.
There’s a peach-coloured corner sofa, a glass-topped coffee table, pine shelves and wood-chip wallpaper, painted cream.
For Germans there is an air of familiarity about the room that is entirely justified even though Thomas and Sabine don’t actually exist.
Their living room is a mock-up created by a Hamburg advertising agency to get inside the head of the typical German.
In a land of 82 million people stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Alps, with a history that for some meant monarchy and others socialism, is there such a thing as the “typical German”? Statistics show that the average German gets up at 6.23am, spends 25 minutes in the bathroom and works 30.3 hours a week for an average monthly gross salary of €3,700.
The average German has one child, drives a six-year-old metallic silver VW Golf, spends three and a half hours daily watching television, goes to bed at 10.47pm and has sex twice a week. But what is typical German?
“The true German is a middling thing,” wrote author Wilhelm Heinse in 1779. “He prefers to travel the middle road . . . he believes, neither too much nor too little, when he is good-natured. His intelligence does not extend to subtlety.”
Indeed. This week’s series visited places that have shaped Germany’s cultural and historical identity. Some ideas didn’t make the final cut, such as the deep connection many Germans feel to nature – the forests and mountains – going back to the romantic movement of the 19th century.
Then there are the country’s 600,000 Vereine – clubs and societies of which nearly every third German is a member. Whether for athletes or hunters, pigeon breeders or beard fanciers, there are clubs for all, reflecting a cultural interest in social contact that doesn’t primarily revolve around alcohol and pubs.
One last German place of note are the trains I used to criss-cross the country for the series.
Trains bring out the best and worst in Germany: though they are travelling in perfectly engineered comfort at 250km an hour, passengers complain incessantly about short delays and worry they won’t reach their destination.
While we’re on the topic of cultural cliches, many about the Germans are true to a point. Engineering is a German strength; humour is not. This is a risk-averse society that thinks more in terms of systems than people. There is, too, a culture of Rechthaberei – the need to be right – which breeds a need to correct others if they are wrong. On a positive note, the Rechthaberei culture has bred a society of remarkable, dogged fairness – the opposite of cute hoorism.
There is a congenital blindness in Germany to thinking on one’s feet and responding instinctively to new situations. An example was the panicked Brussels negotiations earlier this year to bail out Greece and, later, create a euro-zone rescue fund.
While Berlin insisted that terms of the European treaties it dictated did not permit bailouts, EU neighbours were unsure whether the Germans were just being tough negotiators or whether they were blinded by a pedantic Rechthaberei – the need to be right – regardless of the consequences.
The mystery persists because while Germany is a country on the move, on EU matters, it feels like a ship adrift.
“Germany is more ‘normal’ now in that doesn’t differ in many ways from other European countries,” said Dominik Hierlemann, European analyst at the Bertelsmann Foundation. “But German politicians have no answer to the question of where Europe should go and what role Germany should play.” For Alan Posener, columnist with Welt am Sonntag newspaper, the lack of debate on the German national interest or EU and foreign policy results from having a political class that is no longer willing to go out on a limb.
“Instead they throw their weight around in public, in a way Helmut Kohl would never have done,” he said, “and when they don’t get their way, as on Greece or the EU bailout, they only go along with poor grace.” German leader Angela Merkel is respected across Europe as an honest broker but she has yet to demonstrate any significant European vision.
Rather than risk anything for the EU, her political instinct is to concentrate on chasing the votes of Thomas and Sabine Müller, the average Germans with the peach-coloured sofa who don’t exist.
In its long, chequered history, fortune has never smiled in Germany as it does today: a beautiful, united, prosperous country at peace with neighbours, who in turn are increasingly curious about their European sibling.
A new generation of German leaders and thinkers have emerged, conscious of but not crippled by their country’s history. Where is Germany headed? Someone tell them we’re waiting for the answer.
Series concluded