Fear of the future is the real election issue for gloomy Germans as they go to the polls tomorrow, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
On a sunny Thursday afternoon, chancellor-hopeful Angela Merkel draws a crowd onto the small square beside the grand facade of KaDeWe, Berlin's answer to Harrods and Germany's highest temple to capitalism.
Despite the cheery weather, doom and gloom rain down on the crowd from the stage for 40 minutes: mass unemployment, high labour costs, misery and despair.
"We're bringing up the economic rear in Europe," says an indignant Merkel. The crowd cheers and claps.
Merkel, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU), has been performing the same speech twice a day for a month, but that "bringing up the rear" line is still fresh. Rather than causing uncomfortable silence, it always goes down well with crowds. Uncomfortably well.
Germany gave the world Schadenfreude, the deep pleasure at another's misfortunes, but it's easy to get the impression on the campaign trail that Germans have turned their Schadenfreude on themselves and their own misfortunes.
The misfortunes are many: nearly five million Germans - more than 10 per cent of the workforce - have no job. Those with jobs are afraid of losing them and save rather than spend, squeezing consumer demand. That in turn hits growth, which has averaged out around 1 per cent in the last year, while debt rockets.
Europe's economic giant has been trapped in this vicious circle for years, and the effects reverberate throughout the eurozone. Given all that, and the positive reaction to Merkel's economic dirge, voters should be following the CDU leader's economic liberalisation tune like the children after the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But they're not. Her economic reforms are tough but they're hardly Thatcherite. Yet final opinion polls show the CDU falling just short of a majority, with a hung parliament likely to emerge from tomorrow's election.
Franklin D Roosevelt roused Americans out of the gloom of the Great Depression with his slogan: "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself."
"Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance," said FDR in 1933, words that could describe the atmosphere in Germany today.
Fear, it seems, is exactly what many Germans are afraid of.
Zukunftsangst, fear of the future, is the real election issue. The real campaign hasn't taken place on the town squares, but in Germans' heads. This election isn't so much politics as mass therapy. And the one man who understands that best is Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Another sunny day, a different square, in the Baltic port city of Rostock. The chancellor gives a bravado performance as always, sweating, growling and hammering home his message: economic renewal at home through social solidarity and peace abroad without German involvement in military misadventures.
The CDU wants to decouple the rich from the poor, he says, andMerkel supported the US on the war in Iraq.
Never mind that his own future economic plans amount to little more than wait and see if and when his own reforms kick in. In more than 100 sweat-soaked election appearances, Schröder has sown just enough angst among voters to reduce the CDU's double digit poll lead to a few percentage points.
After a confident performance in a recent television debate, less than half of voters think now is the time for a change of government, compared to three-quarters of voters in May.
Schroder has tapped into his people's Zukunftsangst: that the end of social solidarity as he defines it will give rise to social unrest. Merkel argues that social unrest is much more likely to arise from continued mass unemployment than the CDU reform plans.
This has been called Germany's "directional" election. Germans are at the crossroads but they certainly aren't dancing.
German Zukunftsangst was dripping from a survey released last week by a leading insurance company. Every second German, twice as many as in 1991, has "great anxiety" about the future, the survey found. Some 70 per cent of Germans are seriously worried about the economic situation, the cost of living and unemployment, while two-thirds fear serious illness. Every second German fears that they will live the autumn of their lives in squalor and that their children will become drug addicts.
"The general atmosphere of depression makes me furious, the utter idleness, this uptight existence," raged theatre director Christoph Schlingensief in Die Zeit newspaper. "It seems to me that the whole of Germany is sitting on the toilet, groaning. You know exactly what has to happen for things to get going again but the German sits there cursing that there's no toilet paper left and that's why he can't do it. That's Germany."
This paralysing angst is the subject of The Great Depression - A Comedy, a witty documentary film by German film-maker Konstantin Faigle. He toured the country searching for clues to the German love affair with gloom.
One expert suggested it might lie in a conflict between the rational and the romantic sides of the German character and exacerbated by globalisation.
Another blamed Germans' predisposition to seize every new scare or scandal, lose all proportion and forget everything else. A third attributed the depression to Germany's Neidkultur - culture of jealousy - wonderfully illustrated in the film by a visit to a long-term car park in southern Germany filled with Porsches. The owners keep the cars here to stop the neighbours getting jealous and come round occasionally for a quick spin.
"In Germany, it's always the others who whinge, never yourself," remarks Faigle. "Just like only the others are to blame for the problems. Just like only the others can solve your own problems."
The most insightful remark came from a self-labelled "dropout and reformed alcoholic". "Germans have forgotten to trust themselves and take responsibility for themselves," said the man, clutching a bottle of Bitter Lemon.
Surprisingly, the film didn't touch on the man who might be most to blame: Arthur Schopenhauer. It's nearly 200 years since the German-born philosopher developed a whole philosophy of pessimism based around the "primacy of will".
All individual will is in fact universal will, he said, a blind, irrational pursuit of evil and the source of all human suffering in a world of endless strife. He believed that the only way of achieving wisdom is by denying this will and living a life of poverty, chastity and fasting.
Try telling that to voters.
Another look into the German soul comes with a visit to any large bookshop. The tables inside the door that Irish bookshops reserve for the diet books are filled here with happy and unhappy books.
The most popular book in this growing market segment is The Happiness Formula - Where Happy Feelings Come From, a DIY guide to elation that has been in the book charts for three years. The other growing market segment of recent years are books with titles such as Can Germany be Saved?, The Destruction of Social Justice and Germany: Fall of a Superstar. This last book makes particularly grim reading and is from the publishers of Der Spiegel magazine, the Gradgrind school of German journalism that is obsessed with fearful facts.
Der Spiegel floors its readers once a week with 15-page reports about Germany's imminent demise, researched with typical teutonic thoroughness.
Merkel's campaign speeches had a similar Chicken Licken tone at times, and she has a tendency to give voters a little more honesty than perhaps they can handle.
She is not a charismatic speaker and doesn't even try. But there is a pedagogical earnestness to her arguments that Schröder lacks. Merkel might not be as good at playing the chancellor as Schröder but perhaps she might be a better fit for the office. Her approach is less pragmatic than Schröder's and more analytical, solving problems backwards, a talent that her maths teacher spotted in her as a child.
Schopenhauer suggested that truth passes three stages. "First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident," he wrote.
Perhaps if Germans embrace Angela Merkel tomorrow, it's a sign that they have at least accepted the need for further change, if not change itself. Germany, by Schopenhauer's rule, will have moved onto stage three.
And if Merkel can't banish Germany's gloom, there's always the World Cup next year.