BERLIN LETTER:Germany is in crisis, but there is no sign of the condition that is so very German: angst
ON A SUNNY Sunday afternoon, Berliners lounge around the canal with beer and ice cream. A punk flings a tennis ball into the water and his dog plunges in after it. Someone strums a guitar.
Welcome to Germany in crisis. Months after the world economy went into meltdown, something strange has happened in Germany: no one is panicking.
After six decades of soul-searching, and 20 years of economic heavy-lifting to build up the east, Germans now face their future freed of the monkey on their back: angst. A condition so very German the term has made the leap into the English language, angst is a laming, non-specific anxiety about something that might exist and might be justified, but just as easily might not. Public angst reached its peak in the later Schröder years when Germany appeared paralysed by Roosevelt-style “fear of fear itself”.
The economy was a basket case and unemployment was at a post-war high, forcing swingeing cuts to Germany’s generous welfare system.
A virulently depressive public mood was reflected in the titles on the bestseller lists: Germany: Decline of a Superstar, How to be Happy, and Can Germany Yet Be Saved?These days, the mood is perceptively lighter. But no one is quite sure why.
When the Die Zeitnewspaper contracted a survey about attitudes to the economic crisis, it was handed back results that painted a picture of a people concerned but not panicked about the future. Some three-quarters of respondents said they didn't think the current economic crisis was going to have a major impact on their personal economic situation.
Nearly 80 per cent of respondents said they viewed Germany still as a strong economy. Consumer spending continues to rise.
A startled Die Zeitasked: Whatever happened to German Angst?The results are even more striking when you consider that Germany is far from immune to the world economic downturn. Unemployment is on its way up again and a worldwide collapse in machine and car orders has pushed Germany's export-driven economy off a cliff. And yet there is no panic. There are some Germany-specific reasons for the good mood in the gloom: the country didn't experience a property bubble, saving is still a common practice here, and personal debt levels are extremely modest by Irish standards.
Crisis-hit German companies are doing their best to put workers on short-time rather than letting them go, in the hope that things will turn around in the coming months.
Still, this lighter, brighter class of Teuton is a striking phenomenon – so new that people here can only speculate about its origins.
Brazilian-born man Erandi, living in Germany for a decade, is convinced that the 2006 World Cup was the turning point.
“It put an end to the self-flagellation that, I think, the Germans had begun to enjoy,” he says. “They got all this recognition from outside and, for a sunny month, Germany was just the happiest place on Earth.” Although the positive vibe appeared to vanish when the World Cup ended, the current mood suggests a longer-lasting positive effect.
Markus Waitschies, a Berlin journalist and lawyer, attributes the lighter mood to a generational shift in the country’s media.
“During the last economic crisis we had 50-something editors, 1968 generation, and very negative,” he says.
“But since then there’s been a shift in many newspapers and magazines to editors in their 30s and 40s who are more positive and less interested in shaping opinion in a negative way.” At the same time a series of anniversaries – 60 years of West Germany’s post-war constitution, 20 years without the Berlin Wall – have offered a chance to reflect on decades of remarkable achievement.
A recent poll showed that 83 per cent of people here now say they are proud to be German, up from 69 per cent in 1994.
"The Germans today are no longer any more neurotic or hysterical than other people. In that sense they are no longer really German, in the old, burdened sense," suggested columnist Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit. "They have gone back to what they originally were: a colourful, heterogeneous bunch."
