"Does nothing work out here besides the separation of garbage?" the weekly Der Spiegel asked in a recent issue, whose cover article carried the legend, "Germany: A Joke."
"Even the separated garbage is often mixed together again in the end," the article continued, going on to complain that at a time when many people, including senior government officials, speak in terms of national decline, the German parliament is spending its time passing trivial legislation -- subsidies for commuters, for example, or new rules for deposits on cans.
Countries experience malaise, as Jimmy Carter once put it of the US (not to his advantage in public opinion), and Germany is quite clearly in that state now. No less a figure than Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democratic chancellor, said in a recent interview with the weekly Die Zeit, "There is almost no area where Germany stands out with its achievements."
Schmidt was accused of undue pessimism by Horst Koehler, the departing president of the International Monetary Fund, who is almost certainly going to be elected president of Germany in elections in May. But Koehler himself, speaking in the same interview, seemed hardly more optimistic.
"German culture, German poets and music are always present," he said. "However, when you talk about the future, about future technology and future knowledge, nobody thinks of Germany first."
That is probably true, though it is also probably true that few think of France or China or even Britain in that vein either. Yet those countries do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?
"Germany is still the No. 1 exporting country in the world; this hasn't changed," Johannes Rau, the country's outgoing president said a few weeks ago in an interview that caused a great deal of comment. "We don't have any reason to complain."
In a country where unemployment has remained at 10 percent for several years and up to 25 percent in some cities and towns (mostly in the former East Germany) there certainly are, Rau acknowledged, people whose lives are very tough.
"But," he said, "many people are whining despite having a very high standard of living and a secure source of income, and I don't think that's right."
Indeed, a casual observation of daily life in this country supports Rau's complaint about all the complaining. Berlin, where the cafes are crowded, Philharmonic Hall is always sold out and parades of the larger model BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes take place continuously on the opulent Kurfurstendam and Unter den Linden, does not convey the impression of decline.
Yet the mood, clearly, is bad. The left-of-center coalition government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has about the lowest poll numbers of any recent chancellor. If a new election were held now, the opposition conservatives would be swept into power in a landslide. If that does happen in 2006 when elections will be held -- and many political experts believe that it will -- Germany could potentially be following the pattern of the US after the Carter malaise and Britain in the depressing years before Margaret Thatcher in opting for a conservative revolution.
Certainly, some of the gripes that you hear -- on radio talk shows, say -- seem petty. In line with a series of economic reforms legislated in recent months, for example, people now have to pay the equivalent of US$12 every three months to cover their visits to doctors under the national health plan. Many people are griping about that expense, while others are griping about the fact that so many are griping.
But if other European countries seem less kvetchy than Germany, it could be that they have less to complain about. There are experts here who contend that the pessimism actually is a reasonable response to an objectively bad situation.
"The economic situation is really more of a problem than in other countries because so many shocks have come together," said Hans-Werner Sinn, the director of the Institute for Economic Research in Munich.
In other words, Germans are gloomy because there is a general realization that the formulas that have worked so well for this country in the decades since World War II are not working anymore.
"Germans have awakened from their dreams of the eternal welfare state," Sinn said, explaining the gloomy national mood, and giving it an objective basis. "They've been confronted with reality, and that is never nice."
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