December 6, 2005

Cheering up the Germans.

The NYT has an article about that ad campaign to cheer up Germans:
Whether this is an appropriate way to battle the national melancholy - and opinions vary greatly on this issue - the very existence of such a campaign, reportedly the first of its sort in this country, is a sign of what is generally recognized here: that Germany is indeed in a sour mood, its economy in the doldrums, its financial deficits too high and none of its leaders strong or visionary enough to lead the way out....

[I]t has now settled pretty deeply in the collective awareness that unification has been an economic and a spiritual failure. It cost, and still costs, a staggering amount of money in financial transfers from the former West to the poorer and smaller former East, where the money seems to have vanished without a trace.

Now, the westerners are unhappy because the disappearance of all that money is seen as the root of Germany's economic stagnation and high unemployment. The easterners are notoriously unhappy because life is less secure than it used to be under Communism, and, as this cycle continues, the westerners are irritated that the easterners are unhappy....

[Critics of the ad campaign argue] that what Germany needs is not singers and athletes (and literary critics, television anchor women and 8-year-olds) telling them to cheer up, but serious attention to the country's real problems.

The intellectual weekly Die Zeit heaped scorn on the campaign, labeling it "propaganda" and excoriating its creators in particular for what the paper deemed their "tasteless" use of the Holocaust Memorial as a backdrop to the "You are Germany" chants of the gay and handicapped people.

"Unemployment is depicted as a consequence of the bad mood, a private phenomenon, which at any given time could be corrected by self-contemplation and positive thinking," wrote the paper's commentator, Jens Jessen.

This story got me thinking about Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech. People who are already unhappy about the economy do not like to hear that they ought to solve the problem by not being unhappy.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Halo, LOL!


Since they blame reunification, can blaming Ronald Reagan ("tear down this wall") be far behind?

Meade said...

Jimmy Carter would've made a good German.

Joe Giles said...

I say we do our part and give them Heidi Klum back.

Please.

erp said...

Mike, the left needs everything and everybody to be going to hell in a hand basket, so they can step in and make it all better. Of course, what the left does is make everything much worse, so they need more programs and more taxes in a vicious cycle that culminated in the Carter presidency.

Since then we got a little smarter, so maybe we won't make that same mistake of believing that socialism and income redistribution solves problems ever again.

sierra said...

People who are already unhappy about the economy do not like to hear that they ought to solve the problem by not being unhappy. My thoughts exactly a few weeks ago when Chirac said the same thing.

goesh said...

Are they still burning cars in France or have they moved on to government buildings?

Mark Daniels said...

Ann:
Because of my friendships with several Germans and my ongoing interest in Germany, I wrote a piece on this several weeks ago. The link: http://markdaniels.blogspot.com/2005/11/du-bist-deutschland-and-tragedy-of.html.

In specific response to today's Times article, I wrote this: http://markdaniels.blogspot.com/2005/12/more-on-germanys-mood.html.

In both posts, I look at things historically, economically, and spiritually.

You mention thinking of Jimmy Carter's incorrectly nicknamed "malaise" speech while reading the NYT article. (Carter never used the word "malaise" in the speech.) I thought of Herbert Hoover and friends and talk about that in the second post.

Mark Daniels

JBlog said...

Gosh, how about if we let them invade France again? You think that might cheer them up?

Sorry, it was a little too easy.

The detractors of the ad campaign do have a point -- "happy" ads won't fix the real problems.

Steven said...

I'm just going to stand here and point to the 2004 unemployment rates in Australia [5.1%], Ireland [4.3%], New Zealand [4.2%], the United Kingdom [4.8%], and the United States [5.5%].

Then I'll point to the 2004 unemployment rates in Belgium [12%], France [10.1%], Germany [10.6%], Italy [8.6%], and Spain [10.4%].

Advice to Germany: Switch from the "Social Market" model to the "Anglo-Saxon Capitalist" model.