Editor's Letter: Germany's virtuous about face

last updated 8 January 2015

What’s so bad about thrift, diligence, and punctuality? To many of the young Germans I studied with in the 1980s, plenty. They considered those “secondary virtues,” worthy almost of scorn. Maybe they had heard too often from their elders that Hitler, whatever his other failings, had at least gotten everybody working and the trains running on time. In my Munich neighborhood, being hip meant being sloppy; conformity and obvious ambition were fatally uncool. And the thing to do, whenever money and time allowed, was to head southward, to Italy, Greece, the south of France. There you could soak up the sun and live for the moment, unencumbered by shallow Teutonic standards of rectitude. In a way my friends were following the famous example of their country’s greatest writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who rekindled his creative fires in 1786 by stealing off to Italy, “the land where the lemon trees bloom.”

Now those once-young Germans run the country, and guess what? They’re frightfully efficient and industrious. And when they look to the south, what they once praised as freedom looks more like lassitude. As the European Union’s richest country, Germany is being asked to pony up more to keep Greece’s debt-laden economy from undermining the euro (see In-depth briefing and Business: The news at a glance). The parliament will probably approve the change, fearing a financial Armageddon otherwise. But a poll this month found that 76 percent of Germans oppose any more favors for those happy-go-lucky southerners they once admired. So much for all those Germans trying not to express their German virtues. Some standards may be bred in the bone after all.