Germany is in dire straits—who would seriously deny it? And it will get worse before it gets better. Decline is rarely courteous enough to stop at the first warning sign. It prefers momentum. And right now, momentum is not Berlin’s friend.
If history is any guide, Germans possess a remarkable, almost baroque capacity for delusion. Then again, so do the British. It is difficult to decide where collective self-deception has been cultivated more carefully. One wrapped itself in moral grandiosity and regulatory fervor; the other still drapes itself in imperial nostalgia. Both have perfected their own styles of denial.
But should we be gloomy?
Germany has few realistic alternatives to the industrial manufacturing powerhouse it once was. Tourism will not carry a nation of more than 80 million people. Domestic soil resources are modest. Even agriculture, romanticized as some bucolic salvation, cannot sustain the population without imports. Feeding Germany requires more than German fields. And modern prosperity requires more than pastoral dreams and service-sector optimism.
That is the structural problem.
And yet—perspective matters.
Germany, like my home country Austria, has faced catastrophes of a magnitude that makes today’s malaise look almost comfortable by comparison. When the Second World War ended—literally within hours—people emerged from basements and cellars to discover a country reduced to ruins. Entire cities flattened. Bridges gone. Industries annihilated. Communications destroyed. Roads and railways shattered. The physical framework that makes modern life possible lay in splinters.
There was no heating. No reliable food supply. No clean water. Certainly no electricity. And no leadership with the magical ability to conjure these essentials out of thin air.
And yet.
Within a week of the fighting ending, order was tentatively reasserting itself. Rubble was being cleared—or at least sifted for anything salvageable. Improvised markets formed. Life reorganized itself with a kind of stubborn instinct for survival. A year later, the worst scars had been addressed. Two decades later, the Wirtschaftswunder was in full swing. Germany—alongside Austria—had clawed its way back into the top tier of global prosperity.
This is the paradox.
Germans are capable of staggering idiocy. History has demonstrated that beyond dispute. But they are also capable of disciplined reconstruction once reality becomes unavoidable. When illusion collapses, organization tends to follow.
I predict Germany will re-emerge from its current crisis faster than the United Kingdom will from its own.
Why?
Because Britain is still mentally inhabiting the Empire. The psychological adjustment to diminished status has never been fully completed. Reality has been playing a different tune for decades, yet the national soundtrack still echoes with imperial overtones. That mismatch between memory and material fact is debilitating.
Germany, by contrast, has already undergone total collapse before. It knows what ruins look like. It knows how to build from them. When the delusions finally burn off—and they will—the reflex to rebuild will assert itself.
Decline is not destiny. It is a phase.
The question is not whether Germany can recover. It is whether it will shed its illusions quickly enough to begin.
History suggests it eventually does.