Germany, not so very long ago, was the example of how to do it. Shiningly spotless and effortlessly efficient – the country where they’d got it right. Today, with its economy doom-spiralling and levels of internal unquiet that look likely to see the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do very well in this Sunday’s federal election, alles is not looking quite so klar.
We must resist the temptation to take any pleasure in German misfortunes. I’m sure they don’t ever smirk at our very similar troubles, and surely don’t even have a word for such a thing.
Germany is being bossed about – and frankly ignored – by the US and Russia
Let’s turn our attention instead to the homegrown strangeness of British people who idealise Germany. The journalist John Kampfner, former Newsnight reporter and Chatham House bigwig, published a book in 2020 titled Why the Germans do it better – Notes from a grown-up country.
The title says it all – and the subtitle adds a little cherry on top. Here is a perfect example of a very odd obsession among a certain section of British elite opinion; that the British are truculent children.
Kampfner’s thesis was that the Germans run their country brilliantly, whereas we lurch from crisis to crisis, condemned to decline by our petty arrogance as a fading world power. There’s an element here of the condescension felt for their fellow countrymen by the people I suppose we must still, almost ten years since the referendum, call Remainers. In Kampfner’s world, Europeans sprinkle magical woofle dust like benign wizards, while British gnomes snarl in dank, cold caves. Kampfner’s tribe use this schtick as a status signal to each other, shaking their heads exasperatedly at the rest of us.
His book is positively weird in its stanning for Angela Merkel (‘the opposite of ostentatious … she goes to her customary hairdresser in Berlin and from time to time is seen grocery shopping’). But, the book is really all about Britain (‘mired in monolingual mediocrity’) not the broader world or Germany at all. Oh, how much better we’d be in Britain if only people like John Kampfner had everything their way!
It now stands as the very last moment anybody could possibly have made its claims about Germany – a seamlessly integrated multicultural paradise, and an industrial and economic powerhouse. Oopsy.
Kampfner was surely tempting fate. By 2023, Germany had the worst-performing major economy in the world. The questionable policy of shutting down their self-sufficient nuclear industry and relying instead on gas controlled by Putin for their energy began to bear its rotten fruit. The effects of mass immigration became very visibly apparent, hence the rise of the AfD. And now Germany, along with the rest of us in Europe, is being bossed about – and frankly ignored – by the US and Russia, who are carving up Ukraine over our heads. Because who cares what we think?
We recently experienced the strange spectacle of Christoph Heugsen, German career diplomat and chairman of the Munich Security Conference, bursting into tears while making the final address to said conference.
The moment was made even more surreal by the resemblance of Heugsen to Tony Hawks, comedian and stalwart panellist on Radio 4’s beloved I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue (which is ironic given the opening bars of its theme tune). In fact, it’s not merely a passing resemblance, they are absolutely two-peas identical. If I didn’t know, I would think it was Tony Hawks doing a bit. And that he was just about to burst into ‘Tears On My Pillow’ to the tune of ‘The Ode To Joy’. The same Heusgen can be seen in archive footage from 2018, laughing at Trump as he warned Germany about its reliance on Russian gas.
So, laughing and crying are the reactions of the grown-up, nobody-does-it-better Germans to the humiliating situation they find themselves in. Heugsen burst into tears because of J.D. Vance’s speech, upset that America no longer shared Europe’s values.
What are these values, exactly? We can take a guess from Heugsen’s proud boast before the waterworks began that the panels at the conference were ‘gender-balanced’. Such considerations are fine when things are running smooth and sweatless. In a situation of economic ruin, civil strife and likely war they look ludicrous, like the dinner party held under shellfire at the end of Carry On Up The Khyber.
Our own Prime Minister is doing much the same, keen to put British soldiers into Ukraine as peacekeepers. Are these the ‘values’ youngsters are being asked to fight and potentially die for? Gender-balanced panels? You might as well expect people to lay down their lives for the LGBTQIA+ section of their local Waterstones, or NHS Fife. A land fit for Drag Queen Story Hour, knee-taking, stabbings and migrant hotels! With the added prospect of being targeted by the PM’s lawyer mates if you ever even so much as think of opening fire. Good luck with the recruiting, Sir Keir.
It was rather tragic to see outgoing Olaf Scholz huddling with Starmer and other European leaders. The irony is that it was Brexiteers who were accused of being nostalgic for a lost age of empire. But now it is Remainers like Starmer and the EU – grown-up, do-it-better Germany in particular – who look incapable of acknowledging 21st century reality.
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