Since Berlin became the capital again 25 years ago, German ingenuity, once applied to solving problems, has been applied to finding excuses. No wonder national team manager Julian Nagelsmann decided to give the whole country a pep talk
That vanished country’s legacy of brutal militarism was something many Germans feared, exactly 25 years ago, was poised for a comeback.
The best diagnosis I’ve heard came a few months back from a young computer programmer on his way back to Leipzig after a frustrating day at a trade fair in Berlin. According to June figures from the Deutsche Bahn rail company, just every second German train is now punctual. In a changed world, of European wars and global climate change, a world in which Germany is struggling to secure its prosperity, the calls for a fundamental shift are growing ever louder.
People wait for a train to arrive under the roof of Hauptbahnhof train station on May 15th, 2013 in Berlin. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Put into storage, then discreetly dumped, this was the original sin of the Berliner Republik, a place characterised not by an embrace of militarism – but of pragmatic mediocrity.
This Berliner Republik Germany feels stuck – politically, economically, socially – in a windowless passage between the post-unification years and whatever is coming next. Compared with the moral certainty over the Russian-Ukraine war, however, Germany’s response to post-October 7th Israel resembles a moral maze.
Such radical shifts are now the exception rather than the rule in this age of uncertainty. And for all its real problems – in health, housing, transport – things just about still work in Germany and what doesn’t work can be fixed.
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