Ken Early: To travel by train for Euro 2024 is to see a textbook case of neoliberal capitalism’s endgame

In September 2023, Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) unveiled an unusual new PR campaign. The campaign was unusual because it was designed to acknowledge that everyone in Germany now hates Deutsche Bahn. “We cannot pretend that everything is great,” said DB’s marketing chief, Jürgen Kornmann. In the TV ad, an elderly passenger is shown screaming at a DB employee. “You’re angry – we’re angry too,” the voiceover says sympathetically.

The new slogan was “More rail for everyone!” but a better one in terms of expectations-management would be “Deutsche Bahn: Welcome to Hell”.

Being in Germany for Euro 2024 really is a lot of fun except the bits where you are getting to and from the games. That is unfortunate because on game days you can expect to be spending most of your day getting to and from the game.

The gridlock in Gelsenkirchen for England v Serbia last Sunday may now rank as the most-covered dysfunctional transport arrangements for any football match in history. You already know (or can imagine) the story – angry crowds unable to get on the tram on the way out, sweaty crowds packing the tram on the way up, soaking crowds standing in the rain outside the stadium on the way in, despairing crowds waiting at the stadium tram stop on the way back, exhausted crowds packing the platforms of the main station on the way home. In theory you should be able to get from the AufSchalke Arena in Gelsenkirchen to Düsseldorf in just over an hour. In practice, getting home after that match took me nearly five.

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The countries that host major sporting events are always sensitive to what is being said about them in the international media and Germany is no exception. When a Sky reporter did a video talking about how Gelsenkirchen was not a great tourist destination and visitors might find it difficult to find pubs and restaurants willing to accept credit cards, it became a two-day sensation in the German press.

But when foreigners complain about the terrible trains they’re not telling Germans anything they don’t already know. The tourists are only glimpsing the DB darkness, the Germans were born in it, moulded by it ... It’s a fact that the transport system in Germany compares badly to what fans encountered in Qatar in 2022 or even Russia in 2018, but the poor impression this has made on foreigners matters less to the Germans than the fact they have to live this nightmare every day.

In the simplest terms, the problem is that the German government has spent two decades congratulating itself on running balanced or surplus budgets while the essential rail infrastructure was rusting away, and now everyone in Germany is paying the price in the form of a rail system that doesn’t really work any more. A textbook case of neoliberal capitalism digesting its own supporting structures.

The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, in his 2014 book How Will Capitalism End?, observed that: “ ... systemic disintegration and the resulting structural indeterminacy translate into ... a life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skilful improvisation and good luck.” He was not specifically talking about Deutsche Bahn but obviously he might as well have been.

Streeck described four behaviours required of individuals who hope to survive in our post-capitalist, post-social “age of entropy”: “Coping, hoping, doping and shopping”. Shopping and doping (both performance-enhancing and mind-obliterating) we know about, and both remain as essential as ever.

The other two strategies already seem a little dated. Streeck defines “hoping” as “an individual mental effort to imagine and believe in a better life waiting for oneself in a not-so-distant, possible future, whatever writing may be on the wall” – the American dream and all that. But is anyone really doing this any more, even Americans?

“Coping”, for Streeck, is the perpetual willingness to adapt and improvise in response to a state of permanent emergency, propped up by the doctrine that life is “an ongoing test of one’s stamina, inventiveness, patience, optimism and self-confidence – of one’s cultivated ability to live up to what has become a social obligation to struggle with adversity on one’s own and in eternally good spirits”.

You can tell Streeck was thinking and writing before the age of social media. Today the number one strategy for dealing with the frustrations of life is not coping but venting: the socialisation of negative emotion via angry posts.

Is this a net gain for society? The venting individual gets to feel a little better, or they wouldn’t do it. The law of conservation of energy suggests a cost: their audience feeling a little worse. Epidemic anger and paranoia are real and the emotions people feel construct the reality they experience. Hamlet said it centuries before the first angry post about a delayed Deutsche Bahn train: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.

At least nobody can deny that there is a lot of amusement to be had from the one-star reviews venters post on Google Maps. Deutsche Bahn (overall rating 1.4 out of 5) has a world-beating collection of these.

User Iny G spoke for millions when she posted four months ago: “The most biggest trash in the world. Why I have to pay €49? You wasted my time & life, which cannot be calculated. I really want to file a class-action lawsuit for this ridiculous system and willing to see you die at the end. Do something, you don’t deserve anybody’s money with this garbage service. [One star].”

Iny G is no troll, she mostly posts five-star reviews. I hope (though doubt) she found satisfaction.

From a personal point of view, my attitude towards DB is one of passive acceptance. They’ll get you there in the end – probably. No point annoying yourself even more. German trains are a problem for the Germans to live with and maybe one day to solve. For me, the only lasting memory of a week’s dysfunctional train travel is the 40 minutes I spent staring out the window at the forested hills and cliffs and ruined castles of the Rhine Gorge, as my train sped south along the riverbank from Koblenz to Mainz. Coping? Maybe. Beautiful? Yes.