Questioning Germany’s economic model, I mean. Everything is sacrosanct here, nobody rocks the boat and nothing ever changes for the Germans. Not even (or especially so?) when everything else around them appears to be changing faster and faster all the time.

„The questions go to Germany’s future. Simplified, they ask: Can its economic model, the so-called social market economy, survive a crisis in which some of its assumptions and conceits have been devastated? Or: What does the country do about re-establishing or refashioning its dependence on exports, which are imploding as the Great Recession drags on?

The issues are essentially political because both mainstream parties spoke for months with a single voice in offering Germans and the world a fib (kind hearts might call it a misleading misjudgment): the idea that the German economy and its banking system were robust, oblivious to the implosion of American-led speculative schemes and a model of regulated, state-supervised capitalism that Chancellor Angela Merkel said the planet should follow…

The social market economy was an empty shell, Wolfgang Münchau wrote in The Financial Times Deutschland, referring to it as a “discontinued, one-off model. Its network of social protections is sanctified. But trade-offs among its interest groups, he said, have taken over the system’s fulcrum of power.“

“I think we’re in a kind of tape delay, cushioned by our welfare state.”