German efficiency? You’ve never lived there

There’s a type of adult – usually a Boomer centrist with Left-leaning pretensions – who just loves to praise Germany. To this person, Germany is the epitome of a grown-up, sensible, productive, humane and organised country, led by the saintly, reasonable and cautious Merkel, all in stark contrast to bombastic, disorganised Britain. Maybe it’s my annoyance with its fan club’s preening Remainiacism, but I have long found Germany worship difficult to swallow.

So I confess to a certain pleasure in observing, over the past month or so, Germany’s tailspin. Covid is raging, lockdown is being ignored, Merkel’s authority is in tatters, and the country has proved itself unable to cope with a vaccine rollout. In the admirably honest words of Steffen Bockhahn, the head of the social affairs department of Rostock, home of a mass vaccination centre: “We are the laughing stock of the world. Germany was supposed to be world champion at organising things, and look at us.”

The true extent of Germany’s hopelessness is apparent in Merkel’s plea that the country’s public administration make progress on digitisation – something one would have thought would have been cracked a decade or two ago.

I lived in Berlin for a year and was horrified by how dependent the exalted Germans were not just on mindless, sadistic bureaucracy but on actual physical paper. Getting membership of the state library took all my ingenuity. The trains were also terrible, with 90 per cent not on time. This was clearly not the most efficient country in the world, after all.

Germany-worship has taken a big blow, along with Remainiacism in light of Europe’s bitter flailing. There’s a word for the pleasure I can’t help but feel in this: Schadenfreude.