Are Germans too rational?
A 6-minute read
Three Things
As of Thursday Germany has simplified the rules for entering the country. People arriving from risk areas (7-day incidence >50) now only need a negative antigen test done in the last 48 hours, or a PCR test from the past 72 hours. “For pandemic control, a test result in black and white is much better than a quarantine that is only sporadically checked, if at all,” said interior minister Horst Seehofer in a surprising show of candour about the old policy. The new ruling also means that Germans can cross into the Czech Republic for 24 hours without needing a test. Good news for chain smokers and lovers of cheap petrol!
Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have abolished the priority list for vaccinations at GPs. That means that doctors can now give appointments for any vaccine they have excess stocks of. More states are likely to follow.
At an unregistered demonstration in front of a synagogue in Gelsenkirchen (NRW) participants chanted “Scheiß Juden”. In Bonn and Münster Israeli flags were burned in front of synagogues, while in Mannheim the windows of a synagogue were smashed in. Jewish organisations have reported a rise in anti-Semitism as escalating attacks between Israel and Hamas threatens to turn into a war in Gaza.
Was Tolstoy right about Germans?
It was early in the century and Europe was on its knees. Hundreds of thousands were dead and ancient political orders had been turned on their heads.
Not surprisingly, the leaders of 19th century Europe wanted answers. What had just happened? Why had the Napoleonic conquests turned from a series of apparently inspired victories in central Europe into humiliation, death and starvation on the Russian front?
Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general who fought Napoleon first for Friedrich the Great and then in the Russian Imperial Army, thought he had the answer. In the book On War, Clausewitz laid out a series of principles based on his experiences fighting Napoleon. Intended as a sort of user’s manual, his book described war as merely another arm of state policy, which needed to be systematized and perfected.
He is perhaps the most influential military theorist ever to have lived.
Not everyone was a fan though. Leo Tolstoy gave Clausewitz a less than flattering cameo in War & Peace as “one of those German gentlemen who won’t win the battle, they’ll only muck things up as much as they can, because all there is in a German head is reasoning, which isn’t worth a tinker’s damn.”
Tolstoy thought that strategy and leadership were overrated. For him, Clausewitz was trying to crowbar systems into a messy and unpredictable world. As he saw it, strategy counted for little on a battlefield where seemingly insignificant events could have momentous implications while military orders would go ignored in the heat of battle. Rest assured though, on the occasions when plans and outcomes did coincide, the generals would take the credit.
Anyone who has studied International Relations can tell you that Clausewitz’s name is high on the reading list. Tolstoy is left to literature students. Apparently, concluding that politicians and generals are driftwood tossed around by the rapids of history doesn't prepare you for a job with a policy institute after you graduate.
‘Breaking the wave’
In 2021 governments haven’t been asking what it takes to defeat an enemy state, but what they need to do to defeat a hostile virus. In Germany, the question has been phrased as “how do we break the wave?” - thus implicitly lifting executive action to the level of primary agency.
I imagine that if Clausewitz were alive today he would have spent the past few months sitting on the sofas of evening talk shows explaining his theories on what measures the German government should take to subdue the coronavirus.
If there is a modern day equivalent it is perhaps Dr. Viola Priesemann, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute who uses complicated equations to forecast the rate of infection over the coming weeks. Dr Priesemann is a regular interview partner for the media, who want her to tell them what the virus is about to do, or to explanation why it just did the thing no one was expecting.
Back in December, Dr Priesemann’s calculations led her to believe that Germany needed to follow a strategy of total suppression. Writing to the Lancet Medical Journal, she and several colleagues proposed following China’s example of lowering cases to under 10 weekly cases per million inhabitants. Just how this was to be achieved in Germany at a time when the case rate was 200 times higher, she left to the reader’s imagination.
Unfortunately, her forecasts (and those of other colleagues) have struggled to match real world outcomes. Anyone interested can browse through the forecasting on this website to see just how hit and miss they seem to be.
Journalist Olaf Gersemann, who writes Die Welt’s daily Covid report, has taken a look at the predictions over the past few months and concluded that they rarely foresee changes in the trend. He even argued that his uncle Egon would do just as good a job.
The rational German mind has its defenders though.
Der Spiegel journalist Julia Köppe says that the modellers have been misunderstood. Her point is that the public and policy makers read the forecasts and change their behaviour accordingly, thus nullifying the predictions.
“It’s true, models are not perfect,” Köppe admits. “But they function reliably as an early warning system. The fact that they helped to prevent the scenarios they predicted during the pandemic is not their shortcoming - on the contrary - it is their great strength.”
The implicit potency of forecasting makes it a double-edged sword, though. For, if scary predictions are capable of driving infections down, reassuring ones will surely drive them back up, which in turn will lead to new scary forecasts which will drive cases back down... Models and actual outcomes are thus trapped on opposite sides of a paternoster lift, fated never to meet.
But perhaps this explanation simplifies reality just a bit. Even Dr Priesemann concedes that the vagaries of human behaviour have a habit of messing up her sums.
“We are dealing with massive uncertainty… …like how people's behaviour and political decisions will develop over the next few weeks,” she told Deutschlandfunk in March. “If you tell me how people’s behaviour will change, then I can give you much more precise predictions.”
So all the modellers need for their sums to work is someone who can tell them which side of the bed 83 million individuals are going to wake up on next week. I know a Russian writer who might have some thoughts on that.
Rest assured though, as cases have dropped in May (due to the weather perhaps?), government ministers are the credit belongs to them - “the wave has been broken,” announced Health Minister Jens Spahn last week. Meanwhile the modellers must be thinking: “just as well they listened, otherwise our sums would have been correct!”
J.L.