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Several years ago I was traveling in Europe with a relative who, like many Americans, understands the world as divided between the United States and everything else. Contact with “everything else” is limited to what little trickles through the hegemonic filter of Pax Americana. In this context, while chatting about Germany, I mentioned Frankfurt.
“What is Frankfurt?”
The question was striking not only in its simplicity, but also its framing. Not where, but what — suggesting a lack of the most basic awareness of the nature of the subject of the question. It was easy to mock and dismiss, yet upon reflection in the time since, I have come to appreciate a deeper, albeit subtler, layer embedded in the question. I see now its brilliance, however unintended, as it relates to unpacking the strange country of which Frankfurt is the financial capital.
What is, exactly, Germany?
Unhinged from the course of western European tradition and going to painstaking lengths to distinguish itself from its eastern neighbors, Germany is neither really west nor east. Centuries before Henry Kissinger famously noted that Germany is “too big for Europe and too small for the world,” its erstwhile, then abandoned, and once again reinvented political capital could never compete with the grand metropoles of London, Paris, or New York, but has always overshadowed Warsaw, Krakow, and Prague. Cold War division between American protectorate on one side of the Iron Curtain and Soviet puppet state on the other sealed Germany’s fate as an unwieldy barge adrift on the curving river of political time, lacking the rudder of Weltanschauung needed to set a course for itself.
That legacy makes itself felt on a daily basis, playing out in a thousand ways big and small. One of the more counterintuitive consequences is Germany clinging to the idea of Europe while simultaneously giving the impression that it is completely detached from it — and often undermining it in the process. Whether it’s cars, supply chains, or climate (and don’t get started with the euro), Germany’s size and wealth allows it to dictate terms in ways smaller countries can’t.
Yet Germany’s overtures of European fidelity persist, as a way of signaling that it means no harm — anymore, at least — not unlike a big dog play bowing to a smaller one. At the same time, its loyalty oath to Brussels stands in as an ersatz that tries to answer the aforementioned question, because history forbids finding its own answer.
What is Germany? Er, um, well … it’s Europe. Ach so!
Except it isn’t. What defines “Europe” is fuzzy at best, but you know it when you see it. The Balts, the Low Countries, and the Scandinavians all have it in different measure. You can detect subtle similarities when you travel there, peeking out from under respective layers of national identity. Even Italy and France — comparably large countries with no shortage of nation-state hubris and constituencies of Euroskepticism — feel more tethered to the supranational collective to which they belong. Germany, despite sitting in the center of the politically defined continent, feels like a closed-loop system.
That is by design. Since the age of empire, Germany in its many iterations has seen the need to define itself against whatever surrounded it — the duck or the rabbit, as necessary. As the perennial ambiguous figure of the European community of nations, Germany is whatever the other is not. How, then, can it succeed in its contemporary effort to become something else? Ultimately, to Europeanize is less about how much your culture has to offer than how much it can absorb without losing its sense of self. Germany can do one or the other — or neither — but not both.
What is Germany? Er, um, well … not the other thing. Ach so!
Except it is becoming the other thing, only imitating the worst parts. With the German economy stagnating, its infrastructure sagging, and its politics radicalizing amid the fraying foundation of consensus that its postwar policymaking is built on, Germany is starting to look increasingly like the many places around Europe that it has regularly snubbed its nose at — without few of the upsides those places bring.
Germany has probably never had the efficient, functioning, well-engineered system of Teutonic lore, but it has also never been challenged quite like it is now. Set up to be Switzerland — small, homogenous, self-sufficient, unmolested by the pesky affairs of the outside world — it is no shape to handle the inconsistencies and inequities of a major power with myriad foreign pressures and competing domestic demands. Yet a deeply ingrained conviction that it can undermines the sort of solidarity and initiative you find elsewhere, as people and communities acknowledge the macro fallibility they are part of and come up with workarounds to get by nonetheless.
If neither your neighbors nor your nobility are there to catch you or keep you moving forward, what are you left with? Germany fancies itself a social democracy and is presently governed by an ostensible social democrat, yet for months the country has been mired in labor strikes of all kinds as workers demand fairer pay, better benefits, and more conducive working hours.
There was a time when strikes were a thing more commonly associated with France or Italy. Germany is home to the famous Betriebsrat and other mechanisms that inject worker interests into corporate boardrooms. These measures have helped ensure a more harmonious and less disruptive means of sorting out disputes between management and labor. At the same time, Germany has long kept a dirty little secret of harboring a substantial low-wage sector. That is one way it can maintain its export edge. When you don’t pay your workers, it’s easier to sell your products for cheap.
That tacit understanding seems to be coming undone. Inflation, energy uncertainty, a ballooning pension population, and cost-of-living shocks that are driving up poverty, income inequality, and housing scarcity are good reasons to take to the streets. There are so many people now living on the streets, and even more who seem simply lost in and by the system.
Schools, pharmacies, planes, and trains are some of sectors that have been hardest hit. Special attention goes to the last of those. Deutsche Bahn is essentially a public company that gets to act like a private one. The executives driving the company can enjoy annual salary and bonuses exceeding two million euros, while the folks driving the trains may take home less than €50,000. Colleagues in other roles earn even less, in a country with a per capita income of around €60,000. Meanwhile, the Bahn needs billions over the next several years to play a massive game of catchup, following a long period of infrastructure neglect. As a result, more trains are reaching their destinations ever later.
At least President Joe Biden had the decency to make a political show out of his country’s auto worker strikes. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose younger socialist self might not recognize the aloof politician his older self has become, has not stood in the way, but he hasn’t exactly stood in the picket line, either. A more class-conscious politics might have rendered labor unrest to this degree moot from the get-go. If Germany’s contents matched the packaging they were wrapped in, many of these demands would already be law.
But Germany is neither a welfare state nor a capitalist playpen. So it’s difficult to get by on a basic job and a reasonable social net, as it is to get rich on your own. It seems wise to aim for one or the other because if you’re not going to help your citizens much you might as well let them try to help themselves. Otherwise, you’re again left with the same question — not to mention a recipe for political disenchantment.
What is Germany? Er, um, well … weder Fisch noch Fleisch. Ach so!
The deal you make when living in Germany is trading cultural charm and social warmth for political and economic certainty. If Germany’s fast approaching future, however, is one of Italian dysfunction and Spanish malaise, but without the more attractive features those societies tend to offer, it is unclear what else Germany has to give.
It’s the kids, to whom the future matters most, who seem to get that more than most. Overall, people in Germany might say they are happier than in corresponding European countries, but the spread between ages is more striking than elsewhere. Lay that over youth unemployment data — of which Germany has the lowest and Spain has the highest — and the picture that develops is not a pretty one. A 35-hour work week might be just the start of what’s necessary to fulfill a one-time CDU promise of becoming the “Germany in which we live well and happily.”