GERMANY ISN'T WORKING

Andrew Gimson on the economic, cultural and political

failings of modem Germany. What the country needs is a constitutional monarchy

THE British monarchy is ridiculous and the Queen will probably be the last of her line to reign over us. For all her sense of duty, she has never known how to win her people's love, and she is disastrously resistant to change. She has lost her empire, and the younger members of her family are a catastrophe, unfit to succeed her because they are 'incompetent, unwilling or on drugs'.

It was in this somewhat disobliging tone that Der Spiegel, Germany's leading weekly magazine, chose to mark the Jubilee. The article was very long and was buttressed by comments from Christopher Hitchens, who described the monarchy as 'incurably absurd', and Norman Davies, who said its 'chosen way of life' — that of the British aristocracy — was nowadays seen as 'at best old-fashioned, at worst parasitic'.

On occasions like this it is virtually impossible to restrain the editor of this magazine from clambering into the cockpit of his Lancaster bomber and heading off across the North Sea to give the Jenies hell. He knows quite well that many Britons, including some readers of this magazine, will think it is an insufferable cheek for the Germans to attack our beloved Queen. Who saved the Germans from fascism? Who saved most of the Germans from communism? Who led them in the ways of justice and truth after the war? Who bought Mannesmann? Who beat them 5-1 at football?

Germany, in the opinion of many Britons, is an insufferably dowdy country, inhabited by perpetual students with bumfluff moustaches and satanic fetishes, who cannot even get out of bed in the morning, who are alternately hysterical and depressed, and whose layabout lifestyle is paid for by a dwindling number of diligent metal-bashers who, unfortunately for them, are expert at manufacturing heavy goods for which there is less and less demand. The Germans are the second fattest people in the world, and yet the food is poor, the service in restaurants is unbelievably slow, the shops are shut half the time, the schools are mediocre, asylumseekers are burnt alive in their hostels, the motorways are jammed, and only a few years ago one of their trains crashed killing 100 people, which makes Hatfield look like a tea party. German jokes are thin on the ground. As for that gangster Helmut Kohl, he was bankrolled by arms dealers and others who secretly handed his minions briefcases full of banknotes.

Far be it from me to seek to undermine the finest traditions of British journalism, or to disagree with much of the above, especially the bit about Mr Kohl, but I am an admirer of Germany and have many German friends, and what follows is written in sorrow rather than anger. It seems to me only fair to let us acknowledge that the Spiegel piece in no way reflects German public opinion, which looks on our monarchy with at least as much respect and affection as we do ourselves. Nor does Spiegel's effort reflect the generally high standard set by the German journalists who report on Britain, almost all of whom are perfectly well aware that in recent months this country has seen a revival, not a decline, in monarchist sentiment. Yet the article is still fascinating for the way it betrays, with an almost touching unselfconsciousness, the fears which members of the German intelligentsia have about their own democracy. It is a common human failing to accuse others of one's own worst faults — those, for example, who level the charge of 'snob' usually turn out to be raving snobs themselves — and seldom has this characteristic been more clearly visible than in Spiegers attack on the Queen.

For, as anyone who looks at the two coun

tries dispassionately ought to be able to see, it is German democracy that is ridiculous. It is there that we find the truly miserable triumph of duty over natural human inclinations, the outcome of a system of government that has never won the people's love. The absurdity of Germany's so-called democracy lies in the plain fact that it is astoundingly undemocratic. The same can be said of all so-called democracies, including our own, but it is hard to find a political class which has played the whole farce out with quite such solemn, self-deceiving thoroughness as the remote, complacent, selfserving cliques of Germans who gathered after the war in East Berlin and in Bonn.

When the easterners finally wanted to be free, on the night of 9 November 1989, they walked through the Berlin Wall. It was one of the few genuinely democratic moments in German history, but what the easterners found on the other side of the wall was in some ways a disappointment. West Germany was not quite the school of liberty and virtue that its propagandists proclaimed it to be. From the earliest years of the republic, the political parties received not only large amounts of state funding and many legal private donations, but also great amounts in illegal donations, a practice that has continued to the present day, the only rule being that one should try to avoid being found out. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats were only last week sentenced to a fine of about £300,000 (493,000 euros) for taking undeclared donations in Cologne between 1994 and 1999.

This sort of thing starts to undermine people's faith in democracy. They begin to think the whole thing is a fix, with politicians subject to the party machines rather than to the people. The political class, they observe, looks after itself more and more comfortably from a financial point of view, and prefers toeing the party line to performing the more awkward task of articulating the people's concerns. Professor Davies's term 'parasitic' comes in useful here, while Hitchens's courageous sense of the absurd is also needed.

But at least the West Germans made a success of their economy. This was incontestable, and was something of which ordinary Germans were justly proud. It helped to vindicate, or legitimise, the whole system. Here were no hyper-inflation and mass unemployment of the kind that helped undermine Weirnar. Within a few years the German mark rose from nothing to become one of the world's great currencies. Then Germany's politicians gave it away. The German people would not have voted for this, so they were denied a referendum on the subject. From time to time during my six years in Berlin I would find myself asking distinguished Germans whether they thought it in any way regrettable that this extraordinary project was being driven through against the people's wishes. To a man they answered no, and some of them maintained that to defy the German people showed how high-minded they were. Edmund Burke is not much read in Germany, but if he was they would have quoted his Speech to the Electors of Bristol at me.

All of us agree with Burke that part of the point of a representative democracy is that the representatives are at liberty to defy their constituents. The problem in Germany is the motive from which the political class has chosen to do this. It is terrified of being German. Many educated Germans feel this fear, and one can understand why. Sebastian Haffner, a man of brilliant insight, decided in 1938 that he must leave Germany in order to keep faith with German civilisation, destroyed in his opinion by the 'poisonous' German nationalism which had first manifested itself in the liberation wars against Napoleon in 1813 and 1815 and had then triumphed in the unification wars of 1864 to 1870. Haffner's account of his life as a young man in Berlin as the Nazis took over, written in London in 1939, has only just been published under the title Defiling Hitler (Weidenfeld, £14.99), and in it he describes the Germany that he and others like him felt that they were losing:

It was characterised by certain distinctive attributes: humanity, openness on all sides, philosophical depth of thought, dissatisfaction with the world and oneself, the courage always to try something fresh and to abandon it if need be self-criticism, truthfulness, objectivity. severity, rigour, variety, a certain ponderousness but also delight in the freest improvisation, slowness and earnestness but also a playful richness of invention, engendering ever new ideas which it quickly rejects as invalid, respect for originality, good nature, generosity, sentimentality, musicality, and above all freedom, something roving, unfettered, soaring, weightless, Promethean.

Haffner sets a high standard, but the trouble with Germany's present political class is that in its panic-stricken determination to avoid sounding unduly nationalist, it has become incapable even of defending German civilisation. The baby is thrown out with the bathwater and ordinary Germans sense that this is happening. They know they are being betrayed by a political class which, far from representing, or at least respecting, all that is finest in the German tradition, is instead given over to a cowardly and venal flight from responsibility. The lavish subsidies paid to German artists in no way release the politicians from the charge of philistinism, for this money purchases a cringing conformity from the 'creative' sector and the universities, rather than any of the qualities enumerated by Haffner. Germany has no film-makers of any interest, no successors to Herzog and Fassbinder, and no rock music whatever. The pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and of some other German newspapers still transmit a knowledge and love of high German culture, but the political parties have long been in the hands of semi-educated brutes such as Kohl and Schroeder, To be sold out by them is humiliation indeed. At least Bismarck, the greatest brute of his age, knew how to write.

This is more than can be said for a growing number of German 16-year-olds, who came well below the average in a survey of the 31 OECD countries. British children were the fourth highest achievers in science, with the Germans 16 places behind. Britain came seventh in maths and reading, well ahead of Germany. These surprising results are attributed to the increasing German reliance on half-day schooling, caused by the expense of full-time employment. Nor is the economy quite the force it was. Schroeder promised to get unemployment below 3.5 million by the end of his first term in September this year, and he will fail. Unemployment has been stuck on 10 per cent in Germany, while it is 3 per cent in this country. Germany has the lowest growth rate in the EU, and has lagged behind France and Britain since the mid-1990s. Economic freedom is crushed in Germany by regulation and by a vast welfare state paid for by taxes on jobs. Unemployment is inevitable until someone has the courage to make free-market reforms of the kind once introduced by Ludwig Erhard, but the political system favours immobility disguised as endless debate about what exactly needs to be done.

The Germans are going to have to sort this out among themselves, for whatever they do will involve pain, some of which will be borne by the hypochondriacs who are bankrupting the health system, and some by the army of the old whose pensions are paid for by the declining proportion of people in work. Yet as long as the unthinking assumption is that Germany needs to be bound ever more tightly into Europe, how can the national task of sorting out Bismarck's conflict-suppressing welfare state even begin?

It is true that we might see a new chancellor in the autumn. An opinion poll has just given Schroeder and his Green allies only 39 per cent of the vote, while the coalition assembled by his Bavarian adversary Edmund Stoiber has 52 per cent. Stoiber likes to present himself as a traditionalist, and his fondness for being photographed wearing folk costumes exceeds the fondness of any Scotsman for the kilt, but like almost every other German politician he lacked the courage to keep the national currency. His junior coalition partners would be the Free Democrats, who are at present the subject of obsessive argument in the German press after their most gifted self-publicist, Juergen Moellemann (who plans to make 18 parachute jumps during the election campaign), accused a prominent member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany of encouraging anti-Semitism.

This was clearly an attempt by Moellemann to pick up nationalist votes by attracting Germans who feel angry that they are continually having to say sorry for Auschwitz. Rushing into the gap left by the German political class's inability to express an honourable and sober patriotism, Moellemann flirts with the politics of Haider and Le Pen. Once this sort of row has started in Germany it soon becomes wearisome, not just because of the dreadful history which casts its noxious light down the decades, but because the arguments, or debates, seem to go on for ever. You can go away for a few years and come back and find them still talking about exactly the same things. Hitler is back on the cover of the latest Spiegel (the issue after the Queen), with a lighted match billowing smoke round his chin and the headline 'Playing with fire: how much past can the present bear?'

The question for the Germans is how much of this pious mixture of pseudo-politics and pseudo-morality they can bear, Ordinary Germans yearn for a patriotism which is not the property of party politicians. This is not a question of trying to evade guilt for the horrors of 1933-45, but of trying to get on with life without recourse to the demeaning lie of pretending not to be German. A constitutional monarchy, deprived of real power but able to act as a focus for patriotism, would be one way to help reconcile the Germans — who, like us, take an innocent pleasure in hierarchy and ceremonial — to the tedium and humbug attendant on the operation of a pure democracy. This is, however, a suggestion which democratic theorists will take great pleasure in ridiculing, in order to hide from themselves how ignorant they are of the inclinations of the very people in whose name they presume to lecture us.