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Why the Germans Do it Better by John Kampfner review – in praise of the powerhouse

Books about the contemporary state of a country are hard to pull off. They need to capture the sweep of recent history and sundry quirks of culture, while weaving in their author’s passions, aversions and contacts. Add to this the publisher’s requirements that anything currently written about Britain’s relations with Europe is framed polemically and the result is a title such as Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country.

John Kampfner’s polemic treads the accompanying line between curiosity and sententiousness. It taps smartly into the hunch that Germany has got a lot of things right that Britain has not, not least in the recent response to Covid-19.

A veteran newspaper correspondent in Germany during the Wendezeit (“time of changes”), after the collapse of East Germany in 1989/90, he is drawn to revisit the country and, as next month marks 30 years of reunification, it’s an ideal moment to take stock. Inevitably, Angela Merkel looms large, having been in power for 15 of those years. In essence, this is a hymn of praise to the Federal Republic under her leadership. For those unhappy about the direction of a Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity”, as Kampfner puts it, thriving on a TV diet of war documentaries and tone-deaf British politicians, it looks like a very attractive alternative indeed.

Merkel’s status as an icon is sealed by admiration for her bravely open-handed policy on migration in the refugee crisis of 2015, when the rest of Europe was parsimonious with its assistance. As a well-researched chapter here on those events and their aftermath concludes, this was the moment that created the view of Merkel as the high priestess of liberal values.

In other areas, more questionable assumptions abound. On a trip back across the old east, Kampfner praises the amount of money spent on trying to glue the two uneven parts of a country divided by war and superpower standoff back together and cheers the €2tn devoted to that endeavour. The successes are nicely evoked: we discover that Leipzig, the smog-laden city of the 1989 revolution, is so fashionable and popular for investors that it has been dubbed “Hypezig”.

Germany is placid, unshowy and diligent. It can also be smug

Yet the question that worries German policymakers is how vast the economic gap has remained. Its own annual Unity report flags up worrying gaps in pensions and earnings and how slowly these are closing, more so than was intended by the optimistic architects of reunification.

So, yes, Germany is placid, unshowy and diligent. It can also be smug, as underlined by the senior official whose analysis of populism is that “other countries have not learned the same lessons as we have”. In the shape of the AfD, Kampfner finds the resurgent far right peddling a “collection bowl of grievances” with a nasty racist edge to boot. Here is the paradox of German politics - the country that is lauded as the most consensual produces election results in which a large portion of the popular vote now goes to parties of the extreme right and left, and anti-vaxx and anti-mask demos happen on a large scale, even while the Covid-19 response is widely praised.

Being grown up means responsibility in the wider world and here the record is chequered. The laggardly approach to raising defence spending (the money matters less than the implied drift away from the western alliance), armed forces beset by interminable internal problems and a determination to plough on with the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project reflect a fragmented geopolitical outlook in Berlin. The price of the “grown up” – corporatism that powers the German economy – is also that a lot of dubious stuff gets swept under the carpet, as the saga of the car industry and the still unfolding emissions scandal shows.

So to Brexit, which, as Kampfner points out, has strained the “frenemy” relationship. Since 2016, it has not looked as if either side has much appetite to extend an olive branch and those of us who wince at the “you crazy Brits” preachiness must concur that there has been a breach in relations that urgently needs to be healed. Britain’s post-EU future will in no small part depend on rebuilding an affinity with the European powerhouse and rubbing along together in a fragmented world. Whether Brexiters like it or not, the heirs to Merkel will shape the next lurching chapter of our island story.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor of the Economist and author of The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life and Legacy

• Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country by John Kampfner is published by Atlantic Books (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15