A continent led by donkeys

Europe’s independence from the US will be hard and expensive

I always love visiting Germany. This time I took the luxury of going by rail, in part because I was curious to see just how bad the trains had got. Everyone I know who lives or visits the country says they are constantly late, and my mind found such a stereotype-defying fact difficult to process.

The Deutsche Bahn service from Brussels to Cologne was indeed over an hour late; the subsequent train to Berlin was so delayed that everyone ended up changing platforms at Hanover to get on a different one. I felt so at home. On one of the few trains which was on time, from Dresden to Berlin, I got up to explore and noticed that all the writing was in Czech, which explained the punctuality (sadly, I was just too late to experience the dumpling express). It’s not just anecdotal, either; Germany’s trains are less punctual than Britain’s, although the carriages are much better, spacious, clean and cutting edge; in the corridors are impressive screens where you can keep up to date on all the connecting trains you will miss.

Everyone I met in Germany talked the language of despair, of how things are getting worse in every way and politicians have no answers. How sad it must be to live in a country where energy prices were unbearably expensive, where public services were falling apart, and uncontrolled immigration was leading to the polarisation of politics, I reflected.

One resident mentioned how the collapse of the Carolina Bridge in Dresden last September was viewed as a metaphor. Bridges normally collapse in badly-run and corrupt states, and it’s now been several months and the authorities haven’t even finished tearing it down. Germany’s reputation for efficiency – in fact, it’s more meticulousness than efficiency, and often the former hampers the latter – has collapsed like an, er, metaphorical bridge.