Like so much British writing on Germany, this is also a book about Britain. We need to see, in effect, post-Brexit Britain in a German mirror, not in a fantasy global one. This mirror does not flatter: Kampfner sees a Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity, its reference points extending to the US and not much further”. It borrows and it shops, and lives in a nostalgic dreamworld. [...]
Kampfner tells us that in an interview shortly before becoming chancellor, Angela Merkel was asked what Germany meant to her. She replied: “I am thinking of airtight windows. No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.” German windows are indeed something to be proud of. This telling detail speaks to the reality that Germany is richer than the UK. This requires a little more spelling out than Kampfner gives it. Its income per head is substantially higher. It is a far larger global player: it has more than 6% of the world’s manufacturing, compared with 2% for the UK. As an exporter it is also in a different class from the “world-beating”, “global Britain”. [...]
Germany has had some deindustrialisation, particularly in the old German Democratic Republic, which had a transition to capitalism more brutal in terms of industry destroyed and jobs lost than British industry in the Thatcher years. Yet, as Kampfner notes, despite continued criticism in Germany of the lack of progress in levelling up, trillions of euros were spent and the GDP per capita of the east is now 80% of that of the west. That is, incidentally, a smaller difference than there is between the GDP per capita of the English north (which has about the same population as the former East Germany) and the rest of England. Large parts of England and Wales and Northern Ireland now have a GDP per capita lower than the old East Germany.
Kampfner’s Germany doesn’t do everything right. It has its scandals such as the new Berlin airport which cannot yet be used, and the unfinished and over-budget Stuttgart railway station. The train system no longer runs on time as it once did, one sign of a general neglect of infrastructure. Its environmentalism (it has a notably strong Green party) is tarnished by keeping coal-burning power stations going. It did not cover itself in glory when, through the EU and other agencies, it bailed out its banks and crashed the economies of Greece and others. Its deep conservatism means Germany has remarkably low rates of employment of women with children, in contrast to the old GDR.
