Is Germany really such a role model?

The British romance with Germany has always been an on-off affair.

At the turn of the century, Kaiser Bill enjoyed brief popularity, based on dynastic ties, until his bombastic militarism set Germany on a path to war. Thirty years on, as Tim Bouverie reminds us in his book Appeasing Hitler, many in the English ruling class favoured Nazi Germany over revanchist France. After the war, Rhenish capitalism, Germany’s social contract between management and labour, appeared to offer a soothing alternative to strike-torn Britain. Then Mrs Thatcher arrived with stiffer medicine.

John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do It Better is a beguiling title because the British have undoubtedly hit a bad patch. Three prime ministers in five years; a resurgent separatist movement in Scotland; a political class unmoored by Brexit. Germany, says Kampfner, is a grown-up country, while Britain is characterised by ‘hubris, monolingual mediocrity, a moribund political system, delusions of grandeur, infantile and improvised politics, and an absence of rules’. Phew!

Germany, anchored in the EU at the heart of Europe, does look like a model of stability and prosperity by comparison. Angela Merkel’s calm professionalism contrasts with Boris Johnson’s fumbling response to the Covid pandemic. On a host of issues — apprenticeships, export-driven medium-sized businesses, high culture (Merkel goes to the opera, we hear, Cameron watches the telly) — the Germans score more highly than the UK, just like their metronomically successful national football team.

Kampfner roams widely in Germany and has a reporter’s ear for the telling anecdote. He knows his history too, having first served as a foreign correspondent in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. He cites four post-war achievements for modern Germany: rehabilitation and economic recovery, seeing off Baader-Meinhof terrorism; reunification and the two trillion euro absorption of the former communist east, and Merkel’s grand gesture welcoming more than one million refugees in 2015.