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As the year draws to a close, and as everyone scrambles around for last minute stocking fillers for their brother-in-law, we asked the IEA’s team of experts to reflect on the books they have read this year that might just be worth your, or your sister’s husband’s, time.
Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director
I am sometimes approached by journalists who write about German politics, and who hope that I will be able to share some unique insights with them. I always have to disappoint them. There was a time when I used to follow current affairs in both countries, but then around 2015, British politics entered the ‘Banter Era’ [ [link removed] ], becoming both chaotic and all-consuming.
So I usually have to tell these journalists that when it comes to recent events in Germany, I’m as much of a foreign observer as they are. No, I haven’t seen the latest polling for the state election in Saxony or Thuringia. No, I don’t know whether politician X prefers a coalition with party Y or with party Z. Ask me something about the 1990s or the 2000s.
Kaput – The End of the German Miracle [ [link removed] ] by Wolfgang Münchau – yes, with an “ü” – was therefore a good way for me to catch up with some recent developments in the Old Country.
The backdrop for this book is the fact that the German economy has been largely stagnant since 2017, and is falling behind others in relative terms. In 2017, German economic output per capita was about 94% of the US level. In 2024, it was down to 83%. This book is about how that relative decline happened, covering energy policy, industrial policy, foreign policy and much more.
I don’t know whether it was deliberately written as an antidote to John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country, but even if it wasn’t, you can’t blame people for reading it in that way. Kaput is quite clearly written for a British audience. The idea that Germany is some kind of model pupil who gets everything right was always the preserve of Britain’s Sensible, Respectable and Reasonable Centrist Dads: no German thinks that way. They know perfectly well that their trains don’t run on time. They know that their trains often don’t run at all, and when they do, they are horrendously overcrowded, and, as a perfect symbol of national decline, they don’t even serve draught beer on board anymore.
Münchau is well-placed to write this book. He is very much one of Britain’s Sensible, Respectable and Reasonable Centrist Dads, but he is also too German to have any romantic illusions about the country’s politics.
Münchau’s overall verdict is not that the country is going down the drain. Britain is not going to get swamped by German refugees crossing the North Sea in dinghies. But the days when Germany is held up as the all-purpose poster boy are over, and not before time, given that that image was never fully justified to begin with...
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