No one here (I mean in Britain, not perhaps in the columns of The Spectator) likes to read anything nice about the Germans. So I shall warn you that there will be some praise for Germany in this review, mixed with the usual level of bashing. If the very thought of this shocks or appals you, I’ll do that rare thing for any journalist and suggest you turn the page and move on to something more comforting.
In the last few weeks there has been one principal story told in several new books, most of the press and broadcast coverage, and even the material on the Tweets that have marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is that after all the euphoria and the street parties of 9 November 1989, something has gone badly wrong with the re-marriage of the Germanys.
It is an unequal relationship, apparently. One partner, the fortunate West, had all the money, the goods and chattels. The other, supplicant East Germans, the Ossis, had all the needs, the neuroses, the pollution. It is the type of unhealthy relationship psychotherapists call co-dependency, so some observers claimed. Cleverer and longer pieces quote reams of statistics: that after 19 years of reunification, Ossis are 35 per cent more likely to be unemployed; East Germany contains a rustbelt of empty factories near cities like Leipzig that are crumbling away; that there is widespread Ostalgie, a newish German word coined around 15 years ago meaning, specifically, nostalgia for the East, the former GDR.
This is a true story — up to a point — and easy to find without looking very hard. But the far bigger story, missed often because it is so glaringly obvious, not the one we want to be told, and frankly rather boring, is that the new Germany has been, and is, an astonishing success.
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