Quite a lot, as it turned out. His ordeal began with a delay in Berlin. He missed his connection, the next ICE train became stranded somewhere along the route and the replacement train crawled toward its destination while falling ever further behind schedule. The brave traveler from the Far East reached the departure gate at the last minute after running all the way.

What surprised him most, he later recounted in the video, was the stoic calm of his fellow German passengers. There was no swearing and no grumbling, only silent, desperate glances at mobile phone screens. The scientist had perhaps expected such chaos in a supposedly orderly society to provoke a collective outburst of anger.

Only 60% of Trains Arrive on Time

There is a reason for the resigned passivity that fascinated him. It also captures the state of Germany rather well. In 2025, only 60% of trains arrived on time, compared with 75% in 2015. One train in 20 is canceled altogether, which, incidentally, also removes it from the delay statistics. Locals therefore know exactly what they are in for.

At this point, some practical advice for anyone who knows the German rail system only from the old days: passengers in urgent need of the toilet should set off in good time. On some long-distance trains, they may pass three or even four broken and locked facilities before finding one that actually works. There is usually a queue.

Then there is Stuttgart station. Reconstruction began in 2010. After a generously calculated nine years, trains were supposed to be running through the new underground terminal. By then, however, all that existed was an enormous construction pit. The company later named 2026 as the final, definitive completion date. That deadline, too, cannot be met. To be on the safe side, the management of the state-owned company has stopped announcing new ones.

The picture is much the same with almost every major construction project today. Work on the replacement for Dresden’s Carola Bridge, which collapsed on 11 September 2024, will begin in 2028 at the earliest, with the opening scheduled for around 2032. The complete renovation of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, begun in 2013 and officially due to finish in 2037, will probably drag on until 2043. Anyone in the prime of life today may not see it again until retirement.

A brief comparison: workers built Leipzig Central Station, long considered the largest of its kind in Europe, in six years between 1909 and 1915. At the time, such a pace was not regarded as remarkable. It was simply normal.

There was also once a phenomenon in Germany known as winter. In January 2026, every tram in Berlin was out of service for two days, despite the absence of exceptionally low temperatures or extreme snowfall. In northern Germany, a blizzard temporarily brought rail traffic to a halt and, with it, all delays.

In Lower Saxony, 18,000 electronic documents from the judicial administration, including urgent cases, were left unprocessed. The reason was that many officials were working from home during winter storm Elli and the ministry’s antiquated server collapsed under the strain of remote access.

The Resigned German

Perhaps this by no means exhaustive list explains why Germans now endure train delays and far worse with resignation and appear almost sheep-like to foreign observers. Today, they are simply pleased to arrive anywhere at all. They regard the construction of a new bridge or station as a minor miracle, regardless of when it is completed.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” Germans now apply that thought to the most prosaic parts of daily life. They rejoice when only part of the infrastructure collapses in winter rather than all of it. They breathe a sigh of relief when, after months of waiting, they finally hold an official document in their hands.

The author of this article intends to get married. To do so, he needs a birth certificate, which he applied for in September 2025. In January 2026, he cautiously asked about the status of his application and received a reply politely requesting that he not press the matter. The office was still processing mail from August of the previous year.

People no longer expect improvement. They are satisfied if things do not get much worse. In other words, the country no longer expects anything of itself.

From a Country of Engineers to a State of Bureaucrats

How did Germany arrive at this point? There are only partial answers. Everyone must piece together the full picture for themselves.

At the end of 2025, the Federal Statistical Office reported a decline in the labor force for the first time in many years, despite the arrival of several million immigrants since 2015. A closer look is even more revealing. The number of industrial workers and self-employed people has been falling since 2016. Over the same period, the number of public-sector employees rose from 10.74 million to 12.38 million. Of those more than 12 million people, only 7.25 million now work in industry and 3.67 million are self-employed.

The country of engineers has successfully transformed itself into a state of bureaucrats. The bureaucracy protects and sustains itself, chiefly by producing an endless stream of new rules and regulations.

That is one reason construction projects now take decades. With the help of artificial intelligence and digitization, official documents could, of course, be issued within 24 hours. But that might come at the expense of public employees, who display a highly developed form of natural intelligence when defending their own positions.

In this area, the state still functions surprisingly well. Someone recently posted a letter from the local tax office on X informing him that he owed 37 cents in back taxes and had been fined a substantial amount. The letter arrived with remarkable speed. Here, officials do not begin with last August’s correspondence. When money is to be collected, the XXL state apparatus suddenly acquires the agility of a young tiger, along with the same appetite.

The Cult of Incompetence

A second problem is the country’s cult of incompetence. Green Party politician Robert Habeck, who had never shown any particular interest in economics, nevertheless became economy minister of Europe’s most powerful country in 2021. He then explained to the nation that companies whose businesses were collapsing were not going bankrupt, but were “just ceasing production”.

His party colleague Annalena Baerbock declared the electricity grid to be a storage facility, published a book in 2021 that consisted largely of plagiarized passages, recommended a “360-degree turn” to Putin while serving as foreign minister and referred to South Africa as a “bacon of hope” rather than a “beacon of hope”.

Habeck, Baerbock and others of their caliber could get away with almost anything, and still can, because most German journalists fawn over them anyway. In today’s newsrooms, the guiding principle is no longer “tell it like it is”, the motto of Spiegel founder Rudolf Augstein, but “write what feels right”.

Lower Saxony Education Minister Julia Willie Hamburg, Bundestag Vice-President Omid Nouripour, Bundestag member Katrin Göring-Eckardt, sometimes mentioned as a future federal president, and many other politicians share one biographical detail: they have no professional qualification. Nor do they have any experience in the private sector.

Incompetence at the top eventually trickles down. It used to be said that Germany was mediocre at governing itself but excellent at administration. Today, neither is true.

The Pioneer Falls Behind

Added to all this is contempt for entrepreneurs, expressed, for example, by Social Democratic Party (SPD) chairwoman Bärbel Bas, who believes her party should fight business owners.

There is also contempt for general education. In the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a global ranking of pupil performance in mathematics and science, German fourth-graders ranked 12th in 2007. Sixteen years later, they had fallen to 21st place, far behind Turkey, England, Romania and other countries.

Finally, any country that repeatedly tells itself it is a “pioneer” for the entire world, particularly in an energy transition that no one else is actually copying, eventually stops asking itself difficult questions. Perhaps present-day Germany is simply suffering from what American anthropologist Louis Kroeber once called “cultural exhaustion”.

Is anything left of the famous German thoroughness? Certainly. It survives not only in minor matters such as collecting 37 cents in tax arrears, but also in the larger picture. If the aim of Germany’s present leaders is to bring down a country that once functioned at least reasonably well, then they will at least do it thoroughly.

There is, however, still a glimmer of hope. At the beginning of 2026, it emerged that dismantling the decommissioned Brokdorf nuclear power plant would probably take 50 years because thousands of regulations had to be observed. Perhaps the process will move so slowly that the next federal government, or even the one after that, will contain enough reasonable people to decide to put the plant back into operation.

The contract will then go to Chinese engineers.

By fax.