When, in 2015, Angela Merkel opened Germany's doors to a wave of refugees bigger than any seen in Europe since the war, she divided opinion at home and caused consternation among her country's neighbours. Merkel would pay a big political price. She was forced to bring forward the date of her retirement.
She was attacked for showing naivete but also for the opposite: behind her act of compassion, her detractors claimed, was a cold political calculation that welcoming migrants from the east could help offset the long-term demographic problems presented by Germany’s ageing population while, more immediately, averting the irreparable EU split that seemed a real prospect in those tumultuous days.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), at the time riven by internal divisions, was revived by the refugee crisis. Within months of the first migrants arriving, the party made a breakthrough, winning double-digit support in regional elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, neither one a stronghold. Two years later, the AfD sent shockwaves through Germany's political system when it won 12 per cent of the vote in the general election and became the biggest party of opposition.
To many people, in Germany and across the world, the refugee crisis was Merkel's finest hour. In one move, a supposedly risk-averse chancellor rose to the moment and showed the moral leadership that was lacking among her western counterparts.
It's a perspective enthusiastically endorsed by John Kampfner. In Why the Germans Do It Better, the former editor of the New Statesman suggests that the crisis revealed something essential not only about Merkel but about modern Germany itself. He recalls the huge national mobilisation to welcome the migrants. Tent cities were built and volunteers offered language classes. In a video clip shared around the world, hundreds of locals lined up at Munich's central station with flowers, gifts and food to welcome the first trainloads of refugees arriving from Hungary, where they had been detained. Such generosity was unmatched anywhere. Many countries, many leaders, would have anticipated the benefit that would accrue to the far-right and retreated from doing the right thing, Kampfner suggests. It was, he writes, "one of the most extraordinary moments in Germany's postwar rehabilitation".
Though the title might imply otherwise, Kampfner's book does not make a case for German pre-eminence. The writer has what he describes as a "complicated" relationship with the country. His Jewish father fled Bratislava as the Nazis rolled into Czechoslovakia, and members of the extended family died in the concentration camps. A Germanophile since he was a teenager, Kampfner served as the Telegraph's last East Germany Correspondent and retains close connections to the country. He is not blind to its problems, from its deteriorating infrastructure or the growing strength of the extreme right to its social inequalities and slow embrace of the digital economy. But the measure of a country, he argues, is not the difficulties it faces, but how it deals with them. And by that standard, "contemporary Germany is a country to be envied".
What is it that the Germans do better? For the most part it means liberal democracy. Germany's model, he believes, is more mature, more resilient, better adapted to the modern world. He identifies four key years that define the country's postwar history: 1949, when the Basic Law, or constitution, was approved, setting the terms of public life; 1968, when the younger generation confronted their parents about the wartime past, and when the democratic state faced – and prevailed over – the violent challenge of the Baader-Meinhof Group; 1989, with the fall of the Wall and successful reunification process; and, finally, 2015, the year of the refugee crisis. All eight chancellors receive their due, but the dominant figure is Merkel herself. She personifies some of the defining characteristics of modern German life, Kampfner argues.
Those four dates help to frame a sweeping, largely familiar, account that closes in the present, with the country’s relatively assured handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a lively, affectionate portrait. While Kampfner splices useful original interviews with politicians, chief executives, artists, volunteers and others through the narrative, the aim is less to reappraise the postwar story than to introduce it to a mainly British audience whose ignorance of Germany troubles him. His task is to “redress the balance”, he writes, by looking beyond Britain’s obsession with the Nazis and its unrequited longing for rivalry and confronting it with the complex, multi-layered – and rather successful – neighbour it barely knows. “We have never got over winning the war,” he writes.
Notes from a Grown-Up Country is the acerbic sub-title. And, indeed, the book is almost as much a lament on the state of contemporary, growth-stunted Britain as it is a paean to Germany. When he approves of Germany's way of doing something, he is usually, directly or implicitly, drawing an unflattering parallel with his home country. He contrasts Germany's willingness to confront the Nazi past with Britain's inability to reckon with the darker pages of its own history. Germany's generosity to migrants in 2015 is juxtaposed with Britain's current hostility towards outsiders. For German self-denigration, read British hubris. He deplores Britain's subservience towards the United States and points to Germany's independent-minded dealings with the superpower, exemplified in its opposition to US-led military attacks in Iraq and Libya. He looks at the moral seriousness of Merkel and recalls that Britain is led by Boris Johnson. By that measure – is Germany better run that Britain? – Kampfner makes a persuasive case. Sadly for Britain, that's not setting the bar very high these days.
The Merkel era will soon draw to a close at a time when her brand of politics – and, by extension, postwar Germany's – are coming under severe strain. The US, Russia, Brazil and Turkey are led by men whose attachment to democracy is tenuous at best. At home, the AfD is thriving.
Merkel promised stability and she delivered it, Kamfner writes. “But as she leaves the world stage, her successor will have to convince voters that the comfort blanket will need to be removed; the end of history was a mirage, the survival of liberal democracy is no longer a given.”
