Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, here after a successful flight to China (archive)
Photograph:
Soeren Stache / picture alliance / dpa
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to start a conversation with strangers in Germany, all you had to do was complain about the railway. The common lament connects. Everyone could contribute experience, everyone had already experienced that the ICE on the open track or not at all, that the connection in Hanover, that the air conditioning and so on. And the train stations!
Today, the bourgeois resentment has spread from the railways to the rest of the infrastructure. The most consensual conversations ensue when topics such as energy supply, civil aviation, the condition of roads and bridges, health care, schools or digitization are touched on only very delicately. And the national football team! Even the women!
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The most recent example that "nothing works in this country anymore" is a trip abroad by the foreign minister that failed due to technical problems. A government plane can't fly a member of the government. It's hard to find a prettier metaphor for the decline of our nation, oh what, our whole efficiency-loving civilization.
It feels like the entire population is stuck in a symbolic telephone queue, where they let themselves be put off by a vending machine: "Unfortunately, all our employees are in conversation, which is recorded for quality purposes. Please have your tax number, IBAN and blood type ready and wait for the day of St. Never's Day while we play you »Eine kleine Nachtmusik« by Mozart. Dingedingelding...«
It's true. If you have to travel from Wiesbaden to Stuttgart, whether by car or train, you can get ready for an adventure. If you want to go on vacation, you could spend it at the airport. If you take your child to school, you are at the mercy of an ailing system. If you have to go to the hospital, let go of all hope.
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However, the claim that "nothing works anymore" implies that there must have been a time when everything worked, i.e. purred like clockwork exactly as it should. As for me, I can't remember such a time. Accordingly, this country must have been of paradisiacal reliability until about 1971 – before the corrosive anti-performance influences of the sixty-eighties gradually became noticeable. This is a narrative that is often cultivated by the right.
A more left-wing explanation for the noticeable decline of everything seeks the reasons for this in the squandering of state or municipal silverware – energy, transport, health, education, housing – in the "no alternative" neoliberal privatization auction mania of later decades. Even then, critical dooms said that this would hurt us in the future. Now it's the future and it just hurts.
Where efficiency is a national fetish, it also tips over more quickly into hysteria. Then, curiously, in the grumbling about deplorable things, grandiosity and pettiness are combined in an unpleasant way. Addiction to grandeur, because Germany should be a global role model, or at least a pioneer – and apparently it is not. Pettiness, because the sideways view of foreign countries and "what people think about us" can hardly be distinguished from the thought of the neighbor and "what she might think about us again".
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The point is not that any Belgians, Czechs or Italians are "wondering about us". The point is that the German has made himself comfortable in the conviction that he and his clean country will be looked up to with admiration – to the same extent as he himself looks down on Belgians, Czechs or Italians. The point would be to say goodbye to our chauvinistic broad-leggedness as a first step towards improvement.
To do this, we Germans would first have to say goodbye to the pinched pride in perfection that we always carry with us in our luggage. Trains also run in Spain, and there are also bridges in France. Perhaps there will be more improvisation in Romania and more reform in Lithuania. But the people there, at least to me, don't make a more unhappy impression in principle. Which is why, listening to consensual conversations, one in Germany could sometimes get the impression of living in a "failed state" – just because what should be going on is stuck. We should not allow ourselves to be persuaded to do so.
It would be necessary to try to get beyond the whining – however justified it may be at times. It would be important to take a look and learn how the others did it with watching and learning. Seems to have worked here and there. And it could also work in this country.
At the price, however, that we would no longer be able to lament so casually with strangers. Unless, of course, we miss another connection. And the train stations!