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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: The worst of both worlds – Germany’s coronavirus policy pleases no-one

Germany was meant to lift most Covid measures on March 20th. Instead, politicians and many residents are still gripped by Covid panic even though other countries have found ways to move forward, writes Brian Melican.

Published: 29 March 2022 16:28 CEST
Updated: 2 April 2022 09:02 CEST

OPINION: The worst of both worlds - Germany’s coronavirus policy pleases no-one

A sign at a restaurant/bar in Stuttgart says the 3G entry rule applies, meaning people have to show proof of vaccination, recovery or a negative test. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Marijan Murat

For those of us who work in the media, taking a proper holiday can be difficult. Things that other people do with their time off – being given a tour, for instance, or reading the paper cover-to-cover over a leisurely breakfast – can easily end up feeling like work. So in that spirit, let me share with you some things I discovered while on holiday in Sweden last week.

Firstly, if you’re on a guided tour, you don’t have to prove your vaccination status or wear a mask. (I haven’t written “anymore” because I’m reliably informed that you never had to). What’s more, even if you read the paper from front to back, you won’t find out much about coronavirus: on the day I arrived, Saturday 19th March, there was precisely one story about it in Svenska Dagbladet – a short article on page 21 headlined “Death rates in line with flu season averages”; when I left a week later, there was another short back-pages article giving an overview of the Covid-19 situation in Europe. Seen from Sweden, Germany’s high rates of the disease are due to continued asymptomatic testing and our health service is well able to handle the case-load.

This view stands in marked contrast to that of our Groundhog-Day media outlets (“Today’s 7-day average of new cases is…”) and is particularly necessary at the moment because, from inside the fishbowl, it’s harder than ever to understand what is going in Germany. Many politicians and most of the general population are still gripped by Covid panic, and rather than some kind of end-date, milestone, or “Freedom Day”, the legislation of 20th March has actually proven to be a Rorschach test. I was, of course, away when it came into force, but also kept abreast of the news here (no, I’m really not good at being on holiday) – and even as a journalist, I’m confused.

How so? Ahead of 20th March, German weekly newspaper ZEIT ran a front-page op-ed welcoming the change. Yet the newspaper’s Hamburg reporters soon dampened any expectations I had of returning from holiday to a more relaxed environment: as it turns out, Hamburg’s Senate decided to avail itself of the transition period to retain all restrictions until 2nd April and will then declare the city a ‘hotspot’, allowing it prolong existing restrictions indefinitely – and introduce yet more at short notice.

A positive Covid test lies on a mask.

A positive Covid test lies on a mask. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Federico Gambarini

It’s not just Hamburg, either: the list of federal states looking to apply the hotspot exception is so long that it would be quicker to name the few who have opted not to. So when I returned to Germany at the weekend, entering via Schleswig-Holstein, everything was exactly the same as when I left: masks, physical distancing, one-way-systems, etc. Yet oddly enough, this week’s ZEIT carries another opinion piece bemoaning how Germany is loosening restrictions at exactly the wrong time.

‘Worst of both worlds’

There is only one possible explanation for what is going on: Germany as a body politic is suffering from a severe form of cognitive dissonance. In order to respect the constitution – which, although it has been stretched to breaking point since March 2020, still forbids curbs to basic freedom without good reason (see Art. 2) – the federal government has lifted restrictions in law, and so now considers the matter resolved. Opinion leaders, media-savvy zero/no-Covid types, and a majority of the general public take this at face value and think restrictions have been lifted – and lifted too fast – when, in actual lived reality, they quite patently haven’t.

The result is that we are now in the worst of both worlds. Those few of us who think it is time to ditch restrictions have been palmed off with an alternative legislative reality; meanwhile, the vast majority are now scared sick despite the fact that, objectively, nothing has changed and Germany still retains one of the highest levels of Covid stringency in Europe.

Speaking on public radio ahead of March 20th, Head of the German Medical Association Klaus Reinhardt summed up our societal split quite well when he said that he was worried about two kinds of mask-wearers: those not wearing them properly even in enclosed spaces like on the S-Bahn at rush hour on the one hand and, on the other, those wearing them impeccably while alone in their cars or out on bike rides in the woods.

As a medical man, Reinhardt is clearly worried not just about Covid, but about Covid-related harm – i.e. the psychological disorders now resulting from two years of constant haranguing about the danger of respiratory illness. Unfortunately for him, though, another medical man, epidemiologist Karl Lauterbach, is our federal Health Minister. And when Lauterbach speaks on radio, he doesn’t sum up the societal split – he embodies it. Long the poster-boy for hawkish Covid policy, Lauterbach now finds himself forced to take Justice Minister Marco Buschmann’s constitutional concerns seriously and, outwardly at least (and to the despair of his fans), tow the federal government line.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks in Berlin on March 28th.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks in Berlin on March 28th. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Christoph Soeder

So his recourse is now to keep on about how dangerous corona is, make various dark prophesies about the coming autumn, and delegate pressure down to the states, whom he repeatedly begs to go against the loosening of restrictions his own government has enacted. And to pull off this inside job, Lauterbach can rely on the systemic dysfunction in German federalism – a dysfunction repeated attempts to pass the buck upwards over the past two years have made clearer than ever. When the federal government wanted to tighten restrictions in 2020 and this proved unpopular, the Bundesländer blamed Berlin and argued for them to be loosened; now that loosening restrictions is proving equally unpopular, Berlin is once again to blame and the states are tightening them.

Germans ‘fear freedom’

Yes, the vote-winner in this year’s round of regional elections will be stringent coronavirus policy. Klaus Reinhardt’s rhetorical FFP2-cyclist stands for a majority of Germans now so utterly traumatised that they fear freedom. You can see this in the petrified look of outdoor mask-wearers dodging oncoming pedestrians; you can hear it in scraps of conversation overheard while waiting at traffic lights – like this one I picked up yesterday regarding one of the few restrictions to actually be dropped in Hamburg of late: “I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable going swimming now that you can just walk up like you used to. And no masks! No restrictions whatsoever!” This, by the way, from two young, healthy adults who went on to chat about when and how to get their fourth jabs…

Having just got back from Sweden, where, even on the Stockholm underground, you can count the number of mask-wearers on one hand (yes, both German tourists), this seems weirder than ever. And the continuous obsession with masks – the litany of “It’s crazy to get rid of such an effective tool like mask-wearing at a point like this” – is starting to beg the question of why, if the religious mask-wearing we’ve been practicing for so long is so effective, our death-rate is now rapidly approaching that of our light-touch Nordic neighbour, with our case-load soaring while Sweden’s stays stable.

Not that you’d hear much about this inside the fishbowl, of course. So if you take a holiday outside of Germany at any point, try reading the paper. If you’re not a journalist by trade, it might even count as genuine relaxation…

Member comments

Anonymous - 29 March 2022 at 18:35 CEST

Yes. It has been a nightmare living in Germany these last two years. Thankfully, we don’t typically have to wear masks on base and it is literally a breath of fresh air. Our rates of infection are on par with Germany’s as well. I hate shopping on the economy now because I have to wear a mask. My kids hate that we took them out of the American school so they could pick up German better. All their American friends going to base schools gave up mask a while back and are normal kids again. Meanwhile, my kids are tested daily and the school seems to think they should be happy they can sit at their desk with no mask, but everywhere else, wear one. The cognitive dissonance in this country is unbelievable. This asymptomatic testing is bonkers too. My eldest tested positive last week and has yet to show a symptom. It’s just insane.
Anonymous - 30 March 2022 at 06:20 CEST

Unfortunately the people so scared into compliance against something they can not see. They have suffered a great trauma to their psyche and will, from my experience. never recover from it. The damage done has far outweighed any damage the virus could have achieved. There will be people now who can no longer handle even the thought of freedom. Once restrictions are removed they will live with a crippling fear. Thats why they fight so hard to keep it all.

I feel so bad for these people, The fear they have is palpable. At the same time im so angry at them for keeping this going far longer than was ever needed. All for a virus with a 99.2% survival rate. Are we going to teach our children what freedom is. Or, what freedom was?
Anonymous - 31 March 2022 at 10:11 CEST

Great article, not enough like it since the start of this mass hysteria.

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OPINION: How bureaucracy is slowly killing Germany

In the summer of 2022, I attended a Q&A session that Olaf Scholz held with members of the public in the city of Magdeburg. Coming only a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the questions centred on sanctions, energy costs and Berlin’s response to the war.

But the response I found most revealing was on the dull topic of tax reform.

An audience member asked Scholz why the VAT rate on dog food is seven percent but on baby food it is 19 percent. Parts of the system “don’t seem very coherent to me,” the man said with obvious understatement.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who understands the list of VAT exceptions,” Scholz replied with a grin, adding that “at any rate I don’t understand it.”

“But I can tell you that all attempts to change it have ended in a massive disaster,” he continued. “If we were to lay an empty table today, we would definitely do differently. But the system is there now and I think we will have to live with it for a while yet.”

It was a fascinating answer. Essentially, Scholz admitted that there are some regulations that are so complex that no one really understands them anymore. But trying to simplify them just isn’t worth the effort.

It reminded me of a story I once heard about Cairo’s famously dysfunctional traffic system.

Legend has it that Egypt invited a group of Japanese planners to come up with a way to fix it. But the Japanese were so befuddled by what they found that they advised the Egyptians to leave things exactly as they were. The system was so confusing that any attempt to tamper with it might only make things worse.

A similar thing could be said of Germany’s regulatory system. It can be contradictory and infuriatingly slow, but open the can of worms of trying to simplify it and you will probably live to regret it.

private pension plans spain

VAT is just one more confusing piece of German bureaucracy. Photo: Mathieu Stern/Unsplash

Summer snow and other oddities of German red tape

VAT serves as a notorious example. But, wherever you look in German life, you will find egregious cases of sprawling and overlapping regulations.

A few amusing examples:

In August 2022, the town of Esslingen in Baden-Württemberg wanted to organise a summer fête to help local restaurants get back on their feet after Covid. The idea was to build temporary food huts that restaurants could rent cheaply. But planning authorities insisted the huts be built to take the weight of heavy snowfall – during a month with average temperatures of 19C. The fête went ahead, but the eventual costs were “exorbitant,” city officials said.

Last winter, the town of Tübingen acted on an appeal from the federal government to cut gas usage. They decided to switch off street lights between 1 am and 5 am, something that would cut energy costs by 10 percent. Shortly afterwards though, they had to backtrack. The measure contravened a regulation on providing light for pedestrians. In the event of an accident they could have been sued.

A landlord in Hanover recently recounted her efforts to turn an empty attic into student housing. Her planning application was first rejected by fire authorities who said that the branches of a tree were blocking an escape route. Their proposal to cut the tree back was then turned down by the city authority for green spaces, which argued that trees form “a vital part of the city scenery” and “must be protected at all costs.”

Flood of new rules

It is not as if politicians aren’t aware that over-regulation is having a stifling effect on society’s ability to function and adapt.

In its coalition agreement, Scholz’ ‘traffic light’ government committed itself to cutting bureaucracy 63 times. There is an entire section in the agreement on how they planned to cut down official paperwork.

But changing such a deep-seated German mentality is a different matter.

In a withering report published in November, the government’s own bureaucracy watchdog, the Normenkontrollrat, concluded that under the current government the costs of bureaucracy “have reached a level that we’ve never seen before.”

Far from cutting back paperwork, the traffic light coalition has loaded companies, administrators and citizens with a whole raft of new rules, the watchdog said. “Ever more regulations have to be observed and implemented in less and less time,” it concluded.

The frustration is being felt most acutely by local administrators, who say that they just don’t have enough staff to cope anymore.

An open letter sent to Scholz by town councils in Baden-Württemberg pleaded that “things can’t go on like this. Ever more laws and regulations, all too often containing mistakes …are simply resulting in an unmanageable flood of tasks.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s revered Mittelstand, or small and medium sized family businesses, has warned that over-regulation is the single biggest threat to their future viability. A survey among middle-sized companies last year showed that they were far more concerned about regulation than energy prices. Other surveys have shown that a majority of companies don’t understand the regulations they are expected to follow, while two thirds say they make no sense.

“Enormous bureaucratic burdens are combining with labour shortages, lengthy administrative procedures, permanently high energy prices and high taxes in a blow to the future of our business location,” warns Marie-Christine Ostermann, head of the association of family business.

Stuck in the analogue era

For some though, the problem isn’t the regulation itself, it is the fact that there are not enough bureaucrats to deal with it all. After all, they argue, the rules are there to ensure that everyone’s concerns are accounted for.

“An unbureaucratic administration would be a nightmare,” protested economist Georg Cremer in a recent article for Die Zeit. “Sure, there can be too much of a good thing… (but) a prosperous social life is absolutely dependent on the government and administration being bound by law.”

Germany’s welfare system, Cremer points out, requires an army of bureaucrats who assess each claimant’s case based on things like the age of their children and their specific rental needs. “Undoubtedly, the welfare system is over-regulated”, he admits, but we also shouldn’t forget that any attempt to simplify it would make it less fair.

The Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaft, a left-wing economic think tank, has therefore argued that the answer to Germany’s woes is not to strip back regulation, but to employ more staff and push on with the digitisation of key services.

That sounds good in principle. But, when it comes to modernising Germany’s ossified public institutions, it is easier said than done.

A law passed in 2017 obliged local administrations to offer close to 600 of their services online by the end of 2022. A year past that deadline, just 81 of the services have been made available across the country.

The reason for the delays? Local governments are using software that is incompatible with the services developed by the federal government. Meanwhile bureaucrats often display a “grievous” lack of knowledge of how to use a computer, a recent analysis by consumer website Verivox found.

Bürgeramt

A man walks to the Bürgeramt, one of the many centres of German bureaucracy. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Martin Schutt

A German Javier Milei?

In September of last year, Scholz appeared to have finally recognised that things have gone too far.

Doing a good impression of an anarcho-capitalist then running to be president of Argentina, the chancellor gave a rousing speech to the Bundestag in which he called on the country to unite against the scourge of excessive regulation.

“Only together can we shake off the blight of bureaucracy, risk aversion and despondency that has settled over our country for years and decades,” he said. “It is paralyzing our economy and causing frustration among our people who simply want Germany to function properly.”

Two months later, Scholz announced he had reached a “historic” agreement with the federal states to speed up planning processes and to make life “palpably” easier for German citizens.

The agreement, since praised by the Normenkontrollrat as “having a lot of potential,” will mainly muzzle environmental agencies, thus allowing LNG terminals, wind turbines and motorways to be built through sensitive natural environments.

The jury is still out on whether it will simplify your everyday life.

At the start of this year more new laws came into force, including the government’s now notorious gas heating ban.

One that passed with less attention was a decision to abolish child passports. Under the old system you could take your child to your local Bürgeramt and they would give you a Kinderpass on the spot for €13.

Now, all children are required to have proper documents that are valid for six years. The hitch? The passport (which costs €40 and takes six weeks to arrive) is only valid as long as your child’s face remains recognisable.

“The new system makes absolutely no sense for children under six,” the lady at the Bürgeramt told me when I applied for my newborn baby’s first passport this week. “A baby’s face changes so much that you’ll have to get a new one after a year anyway.”

This article originally appeared in The German Review, a twice weekly newsletter full of analysis and opinion on German politics and society. You can sign up to read it here.

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