Germany’s proficient handling of coronavirus has made it the envy of much of Europe. Its consensual political culture, decentralised government, well-funded public services and mighty industrial base have all gained new lustre during the pandemic. Angela Merkel’s dispassion — decried as ponderousness, even complacency — has served the country well during a medical emergency. In April, a social media clip of the German chancellor’s pedagogical explanation of the meaning of the viral reproduction number became an instant hit. So John Kampfner’s book Why the Germans Do it Better is both well-timed and well-aimed.
Kampfner, a former foreign correspondent as well as a one-time editor at the New Statesman magazine, delivers a paean to postwar Germany and its extraordinary success. “It has established a new paradigm for stability that equivalent countries, such as the US, France and my own, the UK, are for different reasons struggling to achieve.” This he attributes to Germany’s “emotional maturity and solidity” born from the traumas of its 20th-century history, which contrasts favourably with the “make-it-up-as-you-go-along hubris of those in other countries who think they know better, but do not”. Unlike France or Britain, Germany cannot take refuge in past glories.
Langsam aber sicher. Slow but sure. It should be Merkel’s motto. But Kampfner contends that a “punctilious, deliberative approach” has been essential to Germany’s deft handling of four key points in its postwar history: economic reconstruction and the entrenching of democracy in a 1949 basic law or constitution; the protest movements of 1968; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and the migrant crisis of 2015.