Collective thinking and individual action — the German model
Anyone observing present-day Germany sees a peculiar split. In thinking, the lines are tightly closed. The same things are said on the talk shows. The same things are commented on in the leading articles. The same things are debated on the foundation panels. The same things are put out to tender in the funding programmes. The vocabulary is well rehearsed, the consensus corridors have been dug out, the markings for the excluded are known. There is a narrow bandwidth of the sayable, and it is observed with great discipline.
In action, the exact opposite can be observed. A fragmented landscape of seventeen funding set-ups, thirty ministerial lines, fifty university strategies, two hundred foundation profiles, a thousand municipal initiatives. Every institution goes its own way. Every actor looks after its own field. Nobody closes ranks into a common movement. The railway no longer runs on time, the innovation system produces applications instead of inventions, foreign policy has a different voice in every capital.
This split is not accidental. Nor is it a temporary crisis that could be remedied by better management. It is the structural legacy of a long historical development in which a conformist country was ashamed of its conformism and at the same time did not renounce it. It left the march and stayed in the lines. It professed individuality and ended up in fragmentation. It cultivated consensus as a virtue and defended it against substance. What has come out of this is the German model of our day — a combination of collective thinking and individual action that no longer works in either dimension.
The link between conformity and efficiency has been growing in Germany since the Prussian reform era. Between 1807 and 1819 Stein and Hardenberg laid the foundations of a state administration that was uniform, trainable and calculable. Between 1809 and 1810 Wilhelm von Humboldt created the education system that sent the population through a common humanist foundation. Between 1819 and 1841 Friedrich List designed the Zollverein (customs union) system, which established economic unity before political unity. In 1871 the Reich was founded, and it took over the Prussian structures for the larger territory.
What characterised this layer was not authoritarian drill, but a specific combination of uniform standards and disciplined implementation. German crafts had a common master–journeyman–apprentice structure. German administration followed a common civil-service ethic. German science knew common research conventions. German industry adopted the Prussian logic of precise work, of the observed standard, of verifiable quality. These components meshed with one another. Between 1871 and 1914 they made Germany the most productive industrial state in Europe, with a leading scientific position in chemistry, physics, mechanical engineering and medicine.
In 1915, in The Stakes of Diplomacy, Walter Lippmann formulated an aphorism that has since wandered through many languages and is wrongly attributed in German discourse to Karl Valentin, Lichtenberg and Albert Einstein: Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. Lippmann did not formulate this as a diagnosis of Germany. But as a diagnosis of Germany the sentence is remarkably accurate. What Germany gained in efficiency in the nineteenth century, it gained at a price that only became visible later — the price of a restricted willingness to hold a dissenting opinion. What counted as virtue was cooperation in the common cause.
Albert Einstein, who knew this German constellation from the inside and left it in 1933, put the finding more sharply: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. This is not only a description of conformity, but of one of its deeper effects. The conformity machine produces not only the silence of the dissenters, but also the non-emergence of dissenting thoughts.
In 1945 the Reich ceased to exist. The conformity machine did not cease to exist. It continued to be operated under changed political conditions, without the components that had enabled it to wage military aggression, but with the components that enabled it to be industrially productive. The Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), which in the Federal Republic's own story appears as a new beginning through democracy and the market economy, was in its operational substance the continued running of the old efficiency machine under a new coat of paint.
The continuity of personnel is well documented. Ludwig Erhard, later the father of the social market economy, had between 1942 and 1945 headed an Institute for Industrial Research in Nuremberg and Bayreuth, financed by the Reichsgruppe Industrie and arranged through his brother-in-law Karl Guth, the chief executive of the Reichsgruppe. Erhard's memorandum Kriegsfinanzierung und Schuldenkonsolidierung [War Financing and Debt Consolidation] of 1943/44 was submitted in the Reich Ministry of Economics to SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, who directed Nazi post-war economic planning. The term Soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy) originated, according to the recollection of Ohlendorf's associate Karl Günther Weiss, in this circle. Erhard was not a Nazi activist; he did not join the NSDAP, and from 1942/43 he distanced himself from the regime in his post-war planning. But nor was he a resistance fighter. He was a technocratic functionary who carried his expertise from the late Nazi phase into the first conceptions of the Federal Republic's economic policy. The line ran right through him.
The civil service showed a similar degree of continuity. In the first post-war years the ministerial bureaucracy of the federal ministries was recruited largely from the staff of the Reich ministries. Judiciary, Foreign Office, Federal Criminal Police Office, Federal Intelligence Service — everywhere the young Federal Republic faced the necessity of continuing to work with the personnel that was available. The few attempts at denazification, carried out more strictly in the American zone and more leniently in the British zone, foundered on the logic of numbers. Whoever wanted to administer the country needed people experienced in administration. After twelve years of Nazi administration, those experienced in administration were above all those who had served in that administration.
The structural continuity was considerable too. German industry largely kept its corporate structures. Daimler, Krupp, Siemens, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Volkswagen — all had been deeply entangled in the Nazi economy, and all continued their business after 1945. The universities kept their chair structures, their division into disciplines, their appointment conventions. The crafts held on to their master system. Co-determination, introduced in 1951/52, integrated the trade unions into the architecture of conformity instead of forming a counterforce. It became part of the machine.
What is remembered as the economic miracle was the reactivation of this machine under the favourable conditions of the Marshall Plan, the Korea boom, the American security umbrella and the currency reform. The machine ran. It produced steel, chemicals, cars, machines. It produced them efficiently because it was still organised in a conformist way. Conformity was its operational foundation, not its pathology.
Parallel to this continued running of the conformity machine, there grew in Germany — beginning in exile in the 1930s, more intensely in the young Federal Republic of the 1950s, and decisively with the generation of '68 — the insight that conformity had led to catastrophe. This insight was not wrong. It was intellectually and morally compelling. Hannah Arendt formulated it in the banality of evil: that the mass crimes of National Socialism had been made possible not by extraordinary wickedness, but by rehearsed conformity, by going along in the line, by the unreflecting fulfilment of expectation.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed the parallel diagnosis in Dialectic of Enlightenment: that the Enlightenment itself, in its instrumental reason, had produced the conformity it claimed to want to overcome. The study The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) supplied the empirical underpinning. The German mentality of conformity was diagnosed and criticised.
The generation of '68 adopted this diagnosis and made it the normative basis of its generational project. Conformity was now considered suspect. Whoever went along was under suspicion. Whoever stepped out of line had the moral advantage. The slogan Sleep with the same one twice and you already belong to the establishment was meant provocatively, but it carried a deeper movement — the normative demand to set the individual against the collective, deviation against the line, spontaneity against the norm.
In the 1980s and 1990s this movement was refined in postmodern fashion. Identity politics, plurality, diversity, deconstruction. Ulrich Beck's individualisation thesis (1986) described German society as one that was stepping out of the traditional class association into a variety of individual biographies. The values surveys of the Allensbach Institute documented the growing importance of self-realisation, personal freedom, individual life choices compared with the older virtues of order, duty and public spirit.
This development was not only a reaction to the Nazi experience. It was part of a broader Western movement. But in Germany it had a particular intensity, because it met a particularly conformist historical background. The shift was morally motivated and intellectually sharp. But it was never an answer to the question of what should take the place of the conformity machine — whose operational function continued to carry German industry, German administration and the German social system.
The result of this double movement — the conformity machine keeps running, consciousness turns away from it — is today's split. Conformity in thinking persists because it is deeply anchored in the structure of institutions, media and politics. It is no longer consciously cultivated, but it works as an invisible filter, as self-understanding, as a consensus corridor. The preceding papers in this series — The Disqualification of 14 May, Truth Comes in Twos of the same day, Two Voices from the China Discourse of 15 May — have described these mechanics in detail.
At the same time, action is fragmenting. The old machine logic, in which the individual actors were integrated into a common movement, has dissolved. In its place has come a plurality of actors, each following its own profile, its own mandate, its own logic. Deutsche Bahn is split into twenty-five subsidiaries that compete with one another on the tracks. Innovation funding is distributed across seventeen ministries, thirty foundations, fifty universities and a hundred research clusters, each with its own language, its own application logic, its own definition of success. Foreign policy is conducted in parallel in two or three ministries, with different lines towards the USA, China and Russia.
The citizen who travels through this system experiences the split as a double barrier. In thinking, he comes up against lines he must not cross if he wants to be heard. In action, he comes up against a multitude of doors, behind each of which sits a different person who is responsible for something else and, precisely, not for what the citizen actually needs. The German system is at once too conformist in its thinking and too fragmented in its action to be able to respond to structural challenges. It is incapable of action because its architecture of action is fragmented. And it cannot correct itself through reflection because its architecture of thought rules out correction.
The railway diagnosis (paper of 12 May) shows this split in a single case. A country that once had the best railway in the world today operates the worst railway system among the developed high-technology states. The conformity is unchanged in the reporting language of all the actors. The fragmentation of action is visible in the twenty-five subsidiary structures. Both together produce the result. Whoever changes one of the two without changing the other changes nothing.
Outside Germany, German self-denial is hard to understand. In Japan, China and Russia, Germany continues to be regarded as the country that impressed the world with a specific combination of consensus and efficiency. This perception is not naive. It is simply oriented towards different standards from Germany's perception of itself.
During the Meiji Restoration between 1868 and 1912, Japan systematically adopted the German model — the Prussian administration, the German education system, the German army, German patent law, German industrial promotion. This adoption was not imitation, but self-translation. From its own tradition Japan knew the esteem for the group, for discipline, for the rehearsed procedure. In the Prussian-German model it found a modern form for these values. Japan has kept the model to this day — and its crisis after 1990 is diagnosed in Japan itself not as a crisis of the model, but as a crisis of the circumstances in which the model has to work. Japanese admiration for Germany is intact, but it is directed at a Germany that no longer exists in that form.
China studied the German model in two waves. In the Republican era of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Guomindang drew up its reform programmes with German advisers and Chinese students took doctorates in Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg. And in the reform period under Deng Xiaoping, when the German model became the template for combined economic and administrative modernisation. When Dan Wang, in his book Breakneck published in 2025, describes China as an engineering state, he is describing a system that in its basic features stems from the German tradition. The Chinese engineering universities were founded on the German model. Chinese administrative efficiency has a Prussian grounding. What the Chinese are doing today — quickly, technocratically, with a common plan and disciplined implementation — is a variant of what Germany did between 1871 and 1945. They do not understand German self-denial. For them it is a riddle how a country with such clear structural substance forced itself into ideological adaptation to standards that are no longer its own.
Russia is a story of its own. But the component of admiration exists there too, above all in the tradition of the Russian Westernisers from Peter the Great to Sergei Witte and in the early Soviet industrialisation, in which German engineers played a significant role. This admiration is more ambivalent, because it is overlaid by the memory of the German attack in 1941 and of the East German variant of the model in the GDR. We do not go further into the Russian strand here; it deserves a paper of its own.
What connects all three outside perceptions is an observation that Germany itself can no longer make. The others see that Germany has a specific structural substance that could fulfil an important function in the present world, and that Germany does not mobilise this substance out of self-denial. They see Germany as a partner that has abandoned its own concept without putting a new one in its place. This observation is not meant cynically. It is the observation of actors who are themselves currently working on their own modernisation and for whom Germany served as a model at an earlier stage.
The German split is not a reversible crisis. The old conformity machine cannot be reactivated — and it should not be. In its historical form it had components that led to catastrophe, and the normative turn against it was intellectually and morally compelling. But the individualisation that was meant as the answer has not led to a new architecture of action, but to the fragmentation of the existing one. It has not overcome the old system, but paralysed it.
If the conformity machine cannot be reactivated and individualisation does not lead to the capacity to act, then a third possibility has to be thought out. In the preceding paper of this same day — Two Voices from the China Discourse — Europe was described as an administrative society, a society of administration that is neither engineering state nor lawyerly society, but stuck. This finding applies to Germany in heightened form. German administrative society is the apex of the European administrative society, and it is stuck in a specifically German way — through the legacy described here.
The third possibility cannot be that Germany returns to the Prussian-German conformity machine. Nor can it be that Germany remains in the fragmentation of individualisation. It would have to consist in the invention of an architecture that makes collective capacity for action possible without demanding the conformity of thought that was historically the link holding the old machine together. An architecture in which actors may and must think differently, yet can act together. An architecture in which the line runs not through people's heads, but through procedures, through structures, through shared responsibility.
This architecture has not been invented. It is cultivated nowhere. It is not discussed in the German capitals. It would be the task of a political and intellectual effort that Germany is currently not making — because its conformity of thought does not pose the task and its fragmentation of action cannot work on it. The invention of the third possibility remains the open question with which this paper — and the series in which it stands — ends.
First thesis. The economic miracle was not a new beginning through democracy and the market economy, but the continued running of the Prussian-German conformity-efficiency machine under changed political conditions. The continuity of personnel, structures and concepts between the Nazi economy and the economy of the Federal Republic was considerable. Whoever wants to explain the economic miracle must explain the machine that carried it — and that in its substance was older than the Federal Republic.
Second thesis. The parallel development of consciousness against conformity was intellectually compelling, but it has not led to a new architecture of action, but to the fragmentation of the old one. The result is today's German split: conformity in thinking persists as filter and self-understanding, individualistic fragmentation in action prevents collective capacity for action. Both together produce the result we observe.
Third thesis. The outside perception of Germany by Japan, China and Russia grasps a substance that Germany no longer sees in itself. They see the consensus and the efficiency that once defined Germany, and they adopt them in their own modernisation projects. Germany itself has abandoned the concept without putting a new one in its place. The open question is whether a third architecture can be invented — collective action without enforced conformity of thought — or whether Germany remains stuck in the split that closes off both possibilities to it.