News-Telegraph - How the sun set on Germany's pride
By Kate Connolly
(Filed: 03/04/2004)
A book tracing the nation's economic decline has fuelled its self-loathing, reports Kate Connolly in Berlin
This is how bad things have become in Germany: at the five-star Adlon hotel, close to the Brandenburg Gate, they dump the laundry into lorries every night and ship it 80 miles to Poland.
There it is washed and the following day it is shipped back to Berlin. Yet even after taking into account drivers' pay and fuel, doing the washing in Poland costs only a fraction of German laundering.
The Adlon is not just any hotel. It is a symbol. The building is Berlin's most prestigious establishment, the place for the wealthy and the powerful to stay.
The hotel is a facsimile of an older version built in 1907 and largely destroyed in the war. It was patronised by Kaiser Wilhelm II and inspired Greta Garbo's 1932 film Grand Hotel.
The story of the Adlon's laundry is just one example cited by Gabor Steingart, the author of a new German bestseller, Germany: Decline of a Superstar, which has the nation hooked with its withering portrait of a country on the brink of failure.
The book shot to the top of the bestseller list three days after its publication largely because, according to its 41-year-old author, he is the first German who has dared to break the taboo and reveal the truth.
"It is simply not profitable or viable to have German workers, who cost considerably more than they produce," Mr Steingart says.
"Our productive core is melting away and Germany is going downhill," he says, drawing on a cigar and leaning back in a leather armchair in his glass-panelled office in central Berlin.
"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."
He is concerned that Germans are unwilling to confront the issue: "It has not been politically correct until now to admit that we're in decline, that the Deutschland Modell is the wrong one."
The book argues with a brutal frankness that Germany needs to be completely restructured and that it has been poorly run since 1945.
The result, according to Mr Steingart, is a country where industry is on its knees, where the welfare state is deep in debt, whose inventive minds have been forced into exile, and whose citizens largely hate work.
Mr Steingart's book is part of a current trend. Germany has been wallowing for months in a deeply unattractive bout of self-loathing, with everything from performances on the football pitch to the low ranking of German schools in international education surveys attributed to an economic malaise.
One joke doing the rounds is that waiters in Berlin restaurants now ask diners which section they want to sit in: "Whingers or non-whingers?"
According to the author, there is little to laugh about. "The truth is," he notes, "we now have more debts, more social welfare recipients and soon very probably a higher number of unemployed (now at 4.5 million) than at any time in our post-war history."
Mr Steingart is not a sensationalist reporter with a chip on his shoulder. He is a political journalist with an economic background and is bureau chief in Berlin for the respected news magazine Der Spiegel.
The arguments in his book, which has sold 50,000 copies in two weeks, were garnered largely from interviews with Germany's senior managers, trade union leaders, economists and the head of research at Deutsche Bank.
His desk is piled with letters of response - mainly of praise - from captains of industry and ordinary Herr Schmidts. Government figures have come to him for advice.
Mr Steingart says a key reason for the problems lie in what he calls his "core-crust" theory.
The "core" consists of the innovators, the producers and the service providers, while the "crust" are those who contribute nothing to the economy.
At present the crust consists of the two thirds of Germans who are not in work. Germany, the land that produced people such as Einstein and Daimler and inventions such as aspirin, has for the first time been having to buy patents from abroad because it is insufficiently inventive.
"Since 1945 there has never been as small a core and as big a crust as there is today," Mr Steingart says.
According to the Federal Office of Statistics, the average German now spends only 13 per cent of his or her life in paid employment, while men devote 18 per cent to sport, television and visits to the pub and women 12 per cent to eating and personal hygiene. Britons work 250 hours more per year than Germans, Americans 350 hours more.
But the most important thing, Mr Steingart says, is to cut the punitive labour costs. Employers have to pay 42 per cent of a worker's wages in social costs, which has led to a huge increase in the number of illegal jobs.
It is for this reason that Germany is haemorrhaging jobs abroad at a rate comparable with no other industrial land. According to the Institute for Economic Research around 2.6 million jobs have been relocated. This week it was announced that the electronics giant Siemens was on the verge of moving 10,000 jobs to eastern Europe.
Surprisingly perhaps, Mr Steingart does not lay the blame at the door of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder whose personal popularity has sunk faster than that of any post-war leader as a result of the few economic reforms he has managed to persuade the country to implement.
Rather, he says the fault lies with Germany's post-war leader, Konrad Adenauer and his successors, who featherbedded the Germans rather than risk workers' protests and the return of an Adolf Hitler.
"Prosperity for all was the catchphrase not only of German politics, but also of British and US foreign policy towards Germany, to ensure that Hitler never returned," he said.
Now Germans' expectations are so high that generous benefits and social conditions are seen almost as a God-given right. A new £6 quarterly fee for visits to the doctor caused such outcry that the health minister, Ulla Schmidt, has been given no fewer than four bodyguards.
Despite the doom and gloom of his book, Mr Steingart says he is an optimist. "In its present state, Germany will not collapse but I'd say we have about two or three years in which to turn things around," he said. |
