Germany Grappling With a Deflated Sense of Pride

Germany’s hero bin is nearly empty and the mood is sour.

Business and political scandals are making for a cynical public. The economy is stagnating for a fourth year. Welfare cuts are ruffling the utopian spirit, and German ingenuity seems like a ghost from another time. Outgoing President Johannes Rau says the nation has spiraled into a “collective depression” caused by an elite that runs on “egoism, greed and self-righteousness.”

One need only listen to the mutterings of cyclists in the Tiergarten here to realize that there are chinks the size of Volkswagens in the Teutonic pride. Germans are wondering how so much has gone wrong in a land full of promise. They are learning that past laurels and ideologies mean little and that reinvention, even for a nation that spawned some of the best minds of the last century, is necessary to thrive in the global marketplace.

“Germans are feeling like they’re in a trap,” said Hans Fleisch, an entrepreneur who bemoans the German bureaucracy he sees as hampering the capitalist spirit. “The future isn’t bright, and the solution isn’t visible. Hope has diminished, especially among businesspeople. They are angry and frustrated.”

Such sentiments represent more than a fleeting bout of malaise, but few are giving up on one of the world’s largest economies. Germany has become more prominent in world affairs -- opposing the U.S.-led war in Iraq and lobbying for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. The nation will be a leading player in the newly expanded European Union, and this year it helped defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear plants.

Yet Germans don’t feel inspired. The desire for a singular German accomplishment has reached such a pitch that an 18-year-old recently arrested for creating the “Sasser” computer worm has been quietly praised for his innovation. The daily newspaper Die Welt wrote that some Germans “could not help but harbor clandestine admiration for the effectiveness of the worm,” which disabled computers around the world.

“We’re starting to take a mocking, shoulder-shrugging view of ourselves,” said Rau, who leaves his largely ceremonial post July 1, in a recent speech.

He added: “Haven’t we perhaps talked ourselves down to the point that we no longer trust ourselves to do anything right?”

Walking near the German Parliament, known as the Reichstag, Carsten Voigt laughed and rolled his eyes at the notion of a German hero in the mold of Beethoven or Frederick the Great. “There’s only sports heroes,” he said, not dwelling on the German soccer team’s humiliating 5-1 defeat in April by Romania. “There’s no economic heroes. I couldn’t name a political hero.”

Cultural heroes?

Long pause.

“There’s no one these days like Goethe or Schiller,” he said, referring to the writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “We need leaders like that.”

Recent polls are a harsh barometer of the German psyche. With limping economic growth, dwindling consumer confidence, an unemployment rate of nearly 11% and a school system that ranks among the lowest in the industrialized world, Germans are downcast. They are also paying the costs of absorbing the former East Germany after reunification in 1990.

In a recent poll published by Der Spiegel magazine, 0% said they were “very satisfied” with the coalition government led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Fourteen percent said they were satisfied, leaving 86% disillusioned with the nation’s politics. Schroeder is lampooned daily and recently was slapped by a disgruntled constituent. His Social Democrats muster only 27% in the polls, well behind the 47% of the opposition coalition led by the Christian Democrats.

The chancellor’s unpopularity stems from his proposals to reform Europe’s most generous welfare state. Schroeder wants longer work hours and less labor protection and is intent on shrinking health and unemployment benefits and other social subsidies.

Most economists agree that the chancellor is on the right track. But unlike his predecessor, Helmut Kohl, Schroeder, according to many analysts, is more of a politician than a statesman and has lacked the ability to articulate why Germany must redefine the social principles the government was built upon after World War II.

Many Germans agree that change is needed to keep the country competitive, but they don’t have a clear understanding of the endgame, especially when they’re paying a first-time $12 hospital visit fee.

“There’s a lack of confidence in what can be done,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “Cynical reactions are now coming from German society. There is a sense of loss of social justice, and this goes deep into the soul of Germans. The government has not justified in the public’s eyes the need to reform the system and how far this reform will go.”

The public is sacrificing at a time of widening corporate and political greed. Germany is facing its first Enron-type trial over 57 million euros (at the time, $55.4 million) in bonuses and other benefits paid to executives overseeing a 154-billion-euro (then $149.7 billion) phone-company sale in 2000. Prosecutors allege that the executives, including Josef Ackermann, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, squandered funds from Mannesmann AG when it was taken over by Vodafone. The executives have denied the accusations.

In another case, Bundesbank President Ernst Welteke was forced to resign in April for allowing the private Dresdner Bank to pay his family’s nearly $9,600 bill at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. The Bundesbank is the arm of the German government that regulates banks such as Dresdner.

Germans pride themselves on integrity and fairness. Some fear such ideals are in danger of being stripped away, much like the hallowed German mark this nation was forced to relinquish to adopt the euro, the European currency.

History and a landscape dotted with Holocaust memorials make Germans careful about how they use the word “pride” -- a concept that can be misconstrued as nationalism. But younger Germans, when confronting their nation’s problems, say a newfound patriotism gives them hope.

“There’s a bad mood in Germany at the moment,” said Gregor Hutz, a film student in Berlin. “The economy has collapsed, and Germans have for so long not talked about German identity. But patriotism has been returning in the last two or three years. The old generation is skeptical about expressing this. But the new generation is finding it. It will help us get out of our slump.”

Manfred Neuert sat in front of the Reichstag recently. He watched tourists enter the spiral staircase in the glass dome -- built in the 1990s to symbolize the transparency of the German government. Seventy years ago, the Reichstag reverberated with the dangerous and sometimes secret ambitions of the Nazis. Neuert lived through World War II.

“There is a low mood in Germany these days,” he said, carefully choosing his words. “After the war, there was an upswing in spirit. Germany had to be rebuilt, and everyone was able to find work if they wanted to.

“But the upswing stopped. It wasn’t possible to keep that high standard. People were over-fat and they thought things would stay like that. Now there’s a recession, and Germans have to readjust.”