On Sunday evening in Berlin’s monumental Olympic Stadium, England soccer fans will get an overdose of a Germany that still fascinates many: fascist architecture, muscular statues and the ghost of Hitler’s propagandafest 1936 Olympics.
That vanished country’s legacy of brutal militarism was something many Germans feared, exactly 25 years ago, was poised for a comeback.
In the summer of 1999, the federal government packed the last of its boxes in Bonn and headed east to Germany’s new, old capital. The so-called Berliner Republik was born.
A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification, many were curious about the remodelled Reichstag and the sprawling modernist chancellery. Others were sorry to leave Bonn, however, a small town calling card for a more modest Germany. Returning to Berlin, some whispered, might reawaken old militarist megalomania.
The move came down to the wire in an emotional 12-hour parliamentary debate in April 1994. Swinging support in favour of Berlin – by just 18 votes – was the late Wolfgang Schäuble. After negotiating the unification treaty, he insisted the move to Berlin was “about our future in our united Germany, which has yet to find its inner unity”.
“Would we be really united without Berlin?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
Given that’s how the Berliner Republik started 25 years on, how is it going now? Much has gone right but, like visiting soccer fans, the natives do not like what they see.
The best diagnosis I’ve heard came a few months back from a young computer programmer on his way back to Leipzig after a frustrating day at a trade fair in Berlin.
Both of his trains were late and he’d made no sales because none of the managers he’d met at the trade fair were entitled to make any procurement decisions.
“This country feels like a company run by ageing managers with two years left to work,” he told me. “They would rather ignore all that needs to be done here so they can have a quiet life until retirement.”
If Euro 2024 have served any purpose for Germany, then it is as a rude awakening for the worst instincts – complacent, coasting-along – of the Berliner Republik.
“The championship has shown Europeans just how many things don’t work in this country,” sniffed Die Zeit weekly, hoping that the collective embarrassment will finally trigger improved performance on mobile phone coverage, card payments and, of course, the trains.
According to June figures from the Deutsche Bahn (DB) rail company, just every second German train is now punctual.
Everyone is annoyed, no one is surprised, yet few remember why things are this way. To balance its books, the Merkel administration squeezed DB for a €200 million annual dividend. Rather than pay to replace ageing trains, worn-out tracks and temperamental signal system, DB became a cash cow to help deliver Berlin’s so-called “black zero” of balanced budgets.
What some framed as sustainable public finances has, critics say, come at a cost. An IMF study of public investment in 14 leading economies from 2018-2022 placed Germany second-last. Last year Germany was the only G7 economy to shrink, by 0.2 per cent, with minimal growth forecast for 2024. In a leading world competitiveness ranking, Germany has slipped from 15th to 24th place since 2022 (while Ireland has jumped from 11th to fourth).
Olaf Scholz, who as finance minister wielded a debt-financed stimulus “bazooka” in the pandemic, is far more cautious as chancellor.
Rather than borrow to fix decades of neglected infrastructure, Scholz remains committed to the Merkel-era “debt brake”. This limits annual borrowing to 0.35 per cent of gross domestic product, a constitutional squeeze countercyclical to public investment.
The debt brake was designed to discipline politicians to present sustainable public finances but, by now, is as much a matter of faith as fiscal politics. It divides public opinion, too: 56 per cent back such debt limits, while 40 per cent want more flexibility.
In a changed world, of European wars and global climate change, a world in which Germany is struggling to secure its prosperity, the calls for a fundamental shift are growing ever louder.
This week the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily attacked the debt limit as a dangerously German fetish – one familiar to anyone living in Berlin – where “principled becomes obstinate”.
“If the world isn’t a fit with the debt brake,” the newspaper joked grimly, “then the world must change – not the debt brake.”
Scholz is as unpopular as his government, and his insistence that change for the better is coming is viewed as further proof of his autosuggestion style of leadership. A big package of small reforms his coalition unveiled a week ago has yet to excite anyone.
It was a different story back in 2006. After years of struggle, a shock-and-awe package of economic and social reforms had just kicked in. Germany was buzzing again and the world’s soccer fans, many of whom had never been to Germany, were impressed by the glorious weather, their relaxed hosts, the punctual trains.
Berlin’s gleaming new central train station, in particular, attracted many admiring glances. In hindsight, though, the station symbolises how the DNA of the old, reliable Germany was being replaced by the new strands of a more fickle Berliner Republik.
To finish the station in time for the 2006 World Cup, the Berlin builders decided to discard 130m of the station’s curved glass roof.
Put into storage, then discreetly dumped, this was the original sin of the Berliner Republik, a place characterised not by an embrace of militarism – but of pragmatic mediocrity.
Berlin is, for good and ill, Germany’s most un-German city. To live here is to accept the provisional as permanent: temporary traffic lights operating for a decade; building sites where no visible building takes place.
What’s interesting, though, is how the capital’s expensive taste for professionalised amateurism, going back decades, has, in the last 25 years, crept into the entire country’s bloodstream. German ingenuity, once applied to solving problems, is now applied to finding excuses for why problems persist, solutions fail and why someone else is always to blame.
In today’s Berliner Republik – and this cannot be repeated often enough – there is no equivalent for the English-language term “German efficiency”. You will learn this when you are the 14th person in a supermarket queue, shouting for a second till to open. That supermarket queue feeling – impatient impotence – goes some way to describe the general atmosphere here today.
This Berliner Republik Germany feels stuck – politically, economically, socially – in a windowless passage between the post-unification years and whatever is coming next.
Plenty has come in the last years, testing its pragmatic resilience and forcing the country to shed old certainties, particularly on energy and exports.
Scholz shredded old certainties by the dozen in his February 2022 Zeitenwende – watershed – speech, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After decades of cautious reticence, he vowed that Germany “fully intend[s] to secure our freedom, our democracy and our prosperity”.
With breakneck speed, Germany has trashed postwar taboos to become Ukraine’s third-largest supplier of arms and reinvest in its own military.
Compared with the moral certainty over the Russian-Ukraine war, however, Germany’s response to post-October 7th Israel resembles a moral maze.
Germany’s terrible Holocaust history has triggered public political declarations of support for Israel. Ask in private, though, and many of the same politicians express deep private doubts about Israel’s response in Gaza.
In public, too, Berlin is engaged in a painful, public pivot. Last month, foreign minister Annalena Baerbock told an Israeli audience that “we are strongest when we respect human rights and international law”.
Calling out Israel’s response in Gaza, she added: “This anger is not helping Israel to meet its security needs – to the contrary. It only serves Hamas’s cynical drive to provoke further escalation.”
Such radical shifts are now the exception rather than the rule in this age of uncertainty. And for all its real problems – in health, housing, transport – things just about still work in Germany and what doesn’t work can be fixed.
After swallowing the positive publicity about the 2006 World Cup, national football manager Julian Nagelsmann said there was no obligation to believe all the negative headlines about Germany during Euro 2024.
As his side bowed out, following defeat by Spain, he electrified the country with a speech urging people to pull themselves together and take after his young, diverse national team. Germany was at its best, he said, when people “simply support each other, integrate everyone together”.
With an eye on rising political extremism, particularly in eastern German states, Nagelsmann urged people to see the strengths of the country in its pragmatism and diversity.
“You can always see problems, and we have problems in the country, but you can also talk about solutions,” he added. “Just complaining all the time but not feeling responsible yourself doesn’t help.”
A century ago, a local wit joked that Berlin, that restless interwar German capital, was doomed: too busy trying to become than to be. The opposite danger faces the Berliner Republik on its 25th birthday: a complacent country that is still too comfortable with being, and afraid of becoming.
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