Germany is the great pretender

A cynic, probably Mark Twain because it generally is, once said: “Give a man a reputation for rising early and he can sleep till noon.” At the heart of the aphorism lies a clever insight into how deceit can operate.Think management. Success in one environment does not guarantee success elsewhere. So one gets these unflushables who bob noisomely to the surface at club after club, business after business on the back of a reputation built on some increasingly distant achievement. As with people, so with nations. I’m trying to think of an example. Oh yes, Germany.

Surely the country Mark Twain had fathomed. Decades after the Wirtschaftswunder, Germany is still getting away with being characterised as efficient, productive, socially liberal. Mütti Merkel, the queen of soft power, German exporting industry the envy of the world, when I want to call Europe, I call… Berlin. 

Other reputations are available, of course. Once, as Blackadder had it, “The Teutonic reputation for cruelty was well-founded. Some of their operas last several days and they have no word for ‘fluffy’!” At which point, a duel-scarred, Iron-Crossed Prussian emerges, tapping his boot top impatiently with a riding crop and relishing the prospect of a bout of inhuman torture.

Post-war flip-side to the same coin was the emergence of a sort of über-liberal. A bicycling mütti, innumerable children fastened aboard her and the bike. Imbued with impeccable Leftist views she wore an “Atomkraft? Nein Danke!” patch on her denim jacket and took a domestic, lakeside nudist holiday.

And here was the beginning of the great German reinvention. Pacifist. Environmentalist. Soft Leftist. No threat here. A good global citizen, a better European one.

It was also the beginning of the great reputational con trick. Germany, of course, was not terribly environmentalist and its “Nein Danke!” to nuclear power only made things worse.

You see, it’s hard to be environmentalist when you live in an industrial state. One particularly devoted to turning out cars. Large, powerful cars. And one which therefore requires energy. Lots of it, like lignite, that dirtiest coal substitute.

As Bloomberg reported only last year: “Electricity generated in Germany from lignite, one of the most carbon-heavy fuels, has increased during 2021 spurred by higher power prices.

Even a rally in carbon emission permit prices to record levels hasn’t been enough to curb output from the dirtiest fossil fuel.”

Having spent the 70s and 80s browning the Schwarzwald with industrial acid rain – like all German products this was exported across Europe – Germany aims to close its last lignite power station in 2038.

Small wonder then that various NGOs report BMW, Daimler, BASF and HeidelbergCement as the most active lobbyists against emissions regulation while the WWF reports Germany running half of the “Dirty Thirty” power stations in the EU.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you turn to Russian gas. And we won’t even talk about emission cheat devices on all those cars. I owned a diesel Audi. And I want my money back!

All of which points in a rather unfortunate direction which recent events in Ukraine have revealed. Far from being the rather drab but ultimately efficient world citizen of which Angela Merkel was the personification and Frankfurt and Bonn the architectural and atmospheric manifestation, Germany is, well, a bit greedy, not terribly strategic and tends to act with its own short term interest in mind.

They have, as Donald Tusk recently put it, “disgraced themselves,” perhaps forgetting Germany’s central position in the EU he once helped run.

Even its moments of altruism seem misguided. Throwing the doors open to a million Syrian migrants, as then Chancellor Merkel did in 2015, managed to give impetus to the German far right, overwhelm neighbouring countries through which migrants had to transit and screwed any attempts by David Cameron to sway his increasingly Eurosceptic electorate. It was neither big nor clever.

Nor has the German efficiency myth born much examination. It never really did, either. Even during the war, German industry was prone to a short attention span which, in Britain, Lord Beaverbrook had taken in hand with focused production, particularly of aircraft. Moreover, the German tendency to do everything to disincentivise foreign workers encouraged sabotage while plants up-rooted and taken to the Reich never quite worked as well again.

Personal experience with various German-owned companies reveals that they are centralised, inflexible and hierarchical. Considerable effort goes into what Niall Ferguson described as “the European leisure tendency”. Statutory sick days are taken irrespective of health. Somewhere in Bonn there is always an unanswered phone ringing.

Nor has German take-over of UK companies proven an economic miracle. One in the leisure sector was astonished to find that its new German parent budgeted six times the food and drink allowance for its all-inclusive customers as the already generous British provision. Another in telecoms, referred to its acquisitions in the UK and Netherlands as “the escape committee”. A rare moment of humour but one, ultimately, that disapproved of independence of thought or action. 

Meanwhile Germany’s under investment in creaking infrastructure means the autobahns are crumbling, internet and mobile coverage is patchy and, oh the irony, the trains are increasingly late. As Germany slides down the competitiveness league, the Washington Post reports: “Peter Osse, a shipper in the port of Hamburg, said he increasingly reaches not for a timetable but a prayer book when he makes transportation plans.”

None of which should detract from the fact that the German economy is a powerful beast with admirable lines. Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that both it and the state it serves are not quite as advertised.

In fact, one might say that it specialises in making money at everyone else’s expense.

The ideology of the euro, which served to make its exports competitively priced, ultimately impoverished fringe nations. As Irish comedian Dylan Moran once put it: “We thought we were rich but we were just buying helicopter rides with photocopied Deutschmarks!” Greece still labours in poverty.

Germany weans itself onto Russian energy and only goes cold turkey in the face of international opprobrium. As Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock conceded to German TV: “We buy 50% of our coal from Russia. If we exclude Russia from SWIFT the lights will go out.” Atomkraft? Nein Danke!

Worse and most unforgivably, it has done all this in a secure environment for which it has never really got round to coughing up. This avoidance of paying its military dues is not a new phenomenon. In the midst of the 1970s British economic crisis, newly appointed Defence Secretary Frederick Mulley was asked a parliamentary question on the cost of maintaining the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR): “Does he not feel,” asked MP Gwilym Roberts, “that it is absolutely absurd that one of the weakest economies in Europe—that of Britain—should be subsidising in this way the wealthiest economy in Europe, that of Germany? Is it not time we told the Germans: ‘Either pay up or we get out’?”

A theme pursued by successive American presidents and a habit it has taught much of Europe. As American commentator Robert Kagan observed: “Europe’s military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn’t matter… Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil.”

Nor do either Britain or America get much gratitude. A friend spent some years as a pilot on an RAF squadron on the German/Dutch border. Its hardened NBC shelters were an informative look at the Cold War frontline. A Tornado was always on stand-by to head East with a load of what they called “instant sunshine”.

This involved a deal of low-level flying in which the RAF is particularly expert. Local cars bore stickers objecting to the noise. RAF crew cars bore stickers saying: “Jet noise – it’s the sound of freedom.” Quite.

Just like the country’s response to the Ukraine crisis, the stickers are revealing. The curtains have been tugged open. It’s well past noon. And Europe’s early riser is just waking up.