New York Times - LETTER FROM EUROPE
Listen to the Germans: Oh, What a Sorry State We're In
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, March 23 — "Does nothing work out here besides the separation of garbage?" the weekly Der Spiegel asked in a recent issue, whose cover article carried the legend, "Germany: A Joke."
"Even the separated garbage is often mixed together again in the end," the article continued, going on to complain that at a time when many people, including senior government officials, speak in terms of national decline, the German Parliament is spending its time passing trivial legislation — subsidies for commuters, for example, or new rules for deposits on cans.
Countries experience malaise, as Jimmy Carter once put it of the United States (not to his advantage in public opinion), and Germany is quite clearly in that state now. No less a figure than Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democratic chancellor, said in a recent interview with the weekly Die Zeit, "There is almost no area where Germany stands out with its achievements."
Mr. Schmidt was accused of undue pessimism by Horst Köhler, the departing president of the International Monetary Fund, who is almost certainly going to be elected president of Germany in elections in May. But Mr. Köhler himself, speaking in the same interview, seemed hardly more optimistic. "German culture, German poets and music are always present," he said. "However, when you talk about the future, about future technology and future knowledge, nobody thinks of Germany first."
That is probably true, though it is also probably true that few think of France or China or even Britain in that vein either. Yet those countries do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?
"Germany is still the No. 1 exporting country in the world; this hasn't changed," Johannes Rau, the country's departing president said a few weeks ago in an interview that caused a great deal of comment. "We don't have any reason to complain."
In a country where unemployment has remained at 10 percent for several years and up to 25 percent in some cities and towns (mostly in the former East) there certainly are, Mr. Rau acknowledged, people whose lives are very tough. "But," he said, "many people are whining despite having a very high standard of living and a secure source of income, and I don't think that's right."
Indeed, a casual observation of daily life in this country supports Mr. Rau's complaint about all the complaining. Berlin, where the cafes are crowded, Philharmonic Hall is always sold out and parades of the larger model BMW's and Mercedes-Benzes take place continuously on the opulent Kurfürstendam and the splendidly refurbished Unter den Linden, does not convey the impression of decline.
Yet the mood, clearly, is bad. The left-of-center coalition government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has about the lowest poll results of any recent chancellor. If a new election were held now, the opposition conservatives would be swept into power in a landslide. If that does happen in 2006 when elections will be held — and many political experts believe that it will — Germany could potentially be following the pattern of the United States after the Carter malaise and Britain in the depressing years before Margaret Thatcher in opting for a conservative revolution.
Indeed, the leader of the main conservative party, Angela Merkel, is sometimes called Angela Thatcher or Maggie Merkel, reflecting her advocacy of far greater economic reforms than Mr. Schröder has been proposing (though, in fact, Mrs. Merkel does not seem to be as radically free-market oriented as Margaret Thatcher was).
In the meantime, as President Rau's remark indicates, at least some believe that things are not that terrible and that the danger is that Germans will succumb to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
But if other European countries seem less kvetchy than Germany, it could be that they have less to complain about. There are experts here who contend that the pessimism is actually a reasonable response to an objectively bad situation. "The economic situation is really more of a problem than in other countries because so many shocks have come together," said Hans-Werner Sinn, the director of the Institute for Economic Research in Munich.
Among the shocks: the reunification of the two halves of the country, which was enormously expensive for the West but has not created an economically viable eastern half; the realization that the country just cannot afford the social-welfare spending that has been among its greatest achievements; and, perhaps most lastingly, the fear that with the imminent enlargement of the European Union, a lot of far cheaper countries to the East — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states — are going to draw industries and jobs away from Germany.
In other words, Germans are gloomy because there is a general realization that the formulas that have worked so well for this country in the decades after World War II are not working anymore, and nobody knows exactly what to do. It is in that mood of semiparalysis that a conservative revolution seems possible.
Of course, it is far too early to see if that will happen, and, if it does, it will happen despite a palpable public aversion to Thatcherite reforms. But among experts especially, there is a growing feeling that Germany needs some strong medicine if it is to overcome its difficulties, and strong medicine in Germany would mean something genuinely historic for Europe: a dismantling of the elaborate welfare state in the Continent's biggest and economically most powerful country that would surely reverberate in the other welfare states of Europe.
"Germans have awakened from their dreams of the eternal welfare state," Mr. Sinn said, explaining the gloomy national mood, and giving it an objective basis. "They've been confronted with reality, and that is never nice."
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