Germany, a country that is now less ‘ahead through engineering’ than behind through bureaucracy

In the bustling dining car of the Leipzig express, I ask a young man occupying a four-person table if there is space opposite him.

“So far,” comes the curt answer. Minutes later, when he gets his toasted ham and cheese baguette, he nearly weeps with relief. Christoph is more hangry than impolite and, as I learn over the next hour, he has every reason to be.

His software company specialises in what German government urgently and desperately needs: customisable software to digitise its analogue procedures. But not even two exhausting days of trade fair speed dating in Berlin has brought him any new deals.

Christoph’s tale is not unusual in Germany, a country that is now less “ahead through engineering” than behind through bureaucracy.

‘I don’t think the West really understands’: A Ukrainian writer on his journey from torture camp to the front line

---

Putin praises Xi Jinping’s proposals for ending war in Ukraine ahead of two-day visit to China

---

Even David Attenborough couldn’t save the Tories now

---

‘We’re police – it’s simply our job’: Ukraine’s ‘White Angels’ help people flee Russia’s advance

---

“It feels like this country is run by men who all have two or three years left to retirement and don’t want to complicate their lives,” says Christoph between bites. “For them there are only benefits, and no costs, of sitting things out. But the problems they postpone are growing every year for the rest of us.”

The French invented the term bureaucracy in the mid 1700s to describe an unelected group of officials carrying out specialist tasks of state. The German Reich renamed it Bürokratie and perfected it in the 19th century with standardised hierarchial workflows and innovations such as the ring binder, invented by Louis Leitz in 1871.

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a leading light in this modernisation, chastened by his days as a harried court official in Aachen, dealing with a bureaucracy he described later as “cancerous to the head and limbs”.

What is remarkable is how much Bismarck and Leitz would still recognise about German administrative offices today, 150 years on, with their piles of paper, walls of folders and cupboards of hanging files. The fax machines might puzzle them, too, though in a different way to how they puzzle the rest of us.

Each country has its own localised, underlying bureaucratic malaise. In Germany it is the analogue inertia that comes from a cross-pollination with the country’s decentralised federal system.

A nod to older kingdoms and principalities, federalism gives everyone a say in everything and, too often, responsibility for nothing.

Take the crumbling bridge across the River Rhine near Cologne, blocked to heavy goods vehicles since 2012 because of rows between local and federal government over construction funding and competences.

Or the eastbound A44 motorway: under construction since 1991 and trapped in federal planning hell, it ends in a field two hours northeast of Frankfurt.

Clinging to paper files and analogue processes help compound turf wars. As do how state and federal ministries ignore digitalisation targets set by their own ministers by ignoring and extending deadlines – or by moving the goalposts. Some inventive German bureacrats have redefined the term digitalisation to include printing out documents and scanning them in again.

When everyone and no one is responsible for digitalisation, the results are no surprise: a 2023 digital competence index placed Ireland in second place in the world behind Denmark – and Germany in 22nd place.

So why does Germany cling to its bureaucratic and analogue ways like an alcoholic to the bottle? Some point to its two 20th century dictatorships, their secret police and a resulting obsession with privacy. A 2020 survey found that 89 per cent of Germans fear that digitalisation increases the chances of being spied upon. (At the same time, one in two privacy-obsessed Germans also have customer loyalty cards, collecting vouchers and trinkets by allowing retailers spy on their purchases.)

Researcher Markus Lindqvist points to the cultural comfort many Germans derive from planning and process, regardless of whether they work – and a fear of improvisation if they don’t.

Improvisation might lead to success but might also lead to failure and in Germany, he points out, the question of blame often weighs heavier than improvised initiative.

A final, crucial reason is Germany’s centuries-old love of hierarchy, at odds with a new world where hoodied 20- and 30-something tech employees know more than their CEOs.

“Firms and countries that allow an exchange of ideas from below,” writes Lindqvist, “are likely to be more successful in a time where knowledge is coming from below.”

For young German coders like Christoph, his German homeland is reaching a tipping point. It has to decide soon between embracing digitalisation or clinging to what he mockingly calls deutschitalisation.

“The problem is that these ageing managers don’t know what they don’t know,” says Christoph, finishing his baguette. “Or they do know what they don’t know – but don’t care. Which is perhaps even worse.”