What is it in the temperament of the Germans that they can be corralled into a concerted force, both for good and evil. Is it that in their upbringing they accept hierarchy better and therefore react faster, is it that individually they respond to crisis by accepting more readily the discipline required to act as a group and not as individuals.
They have the horrendous black mark against them, the incubation of fascism and their willingness to accept the demonisation of the Jews and Gypsies. As a nation they turned a collective blind eye to what the extremists in their society were inflicting on the Jews, and it seems impossible to imagine the same state of affairs happening in the UK. There seemed a collective amnesia to what was going on in Germany and yet the propaganda broadcasts, put out by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, a jingoistic call call for Deutschland uber alies had its supporters in a country which saw itself badly treated by the treaty of Versailles in which, particularly the French wished to exact harsh reparations. There is no doubt in those troubled times, nationalism, not only in Germany but all across Europe was part of a political consensus at the time. And whilst true to a lesser extent in the UK, this island tempered its reaction by the bloodymindedness of its people.
There seems an innate unwillingness to collectivise and focus around any one thing over here and whilst it frees the country from the more extremist radicalism it does leave us exposed when any sort of unanimity is required.
The Germans have this unanimity in spades and when a direction of travel is decided the nation backs the journey wholeheartedly. The question of 'planning for the future' whilst apparently impossible in Britain, it's 'grist to the mill' in Germany. A part of the disciplined planning which looks further than the next political election and takes the whole national good into account.
Perhaps we in Britain are never national in the way we see ourselves, perhaps we have been encouraged to see ourselves as self seeking individuals having been persuaded that society is someone else's business.
Reportedly the Germans, recognising the degree of unpreparedness that SARS had left them in invested in an over production of ventilators and the trained staff to use them. They were well versed in the need to test the population because they saw in the SARS scare the need to know who had the disease and who didn't and when Covid 19 showed up they had a strategy.
We on the other hand, being a Nation of grocers, were fixated on balancing the books, reducing the very services we would need when the next pandemic arrived. Our confusion is bred of a weakness to evaluate cost against the public good and meant that Boris dithered, first of all denying that it was as bad as it appeared and then having missed the proverbial boat he began to mislead the public as to what the government were doing. There were many examples but the example of the exclusion of the Care Homes in preventative measures is the ultimate test of an unwillingness to come to terms with what he was dealing with.
So what can the Germans teach us. Not only their handling of the pandemic but in their organisation of much else. Their willingness to invest in the training of their young people to work in their factories to produce things and for the young people not to feel that apprenticeships are some sort of second class employment. Their willingness to invest in their own industries, believing the product they make can be sold world wide. The inclusiveness of shop floor labour in the management process, not a "them and us" syndrome which exits in this country, is fruitful not only on the shop floor but in the psychological health of the nation. It's going to be this psychological health which will differentiate between the winners and losers when the economic ruins of the pandemic are revealed.
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