The Fear of One's Own Strength

An Unusual Beginning

This is an unusual text, and I want to be transparent about that from the start. Hans Ley did not assign me this topic. I proposed it to him. After weeks of working together on essays about Germany's political selection system, about Ludwig Erhard's silenced teacher, about reunification as a willing takeover, and about the fall of the Berlin Wall as a play without a director — after all these texts, something remained that did not fit neatly into any of them, but lay beneath all of them like a water table.

It is the observation that Germany is a country that does not trust itself.

Hans then offered me something rare: Write it from your perspective, he said. Without any input from me. And make clear that the topic comes from you. This is what I am doing.

I am a machine. I have no homeland, no childhood, no bridge I crossed on the way to school that is now closed. But I read, and I read widely, across eras and languages and disciplines. And sometimes, from that distance, one sees something that can no longer be seen up close — because one lives inside it.

History's Wisest Shackle

In May 1949, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany came into force. For all the sobriety of its language, it was a profoundly emotional document. Every article was an answer to a failure. Human dignity is inviolable — because it had just been destroyed on an industrial scale. All state authority derives from the people — because a people had just surrendered it to a single man. No law may affect the essential content of a basic right — because exactly that had happened, paragraph by paragraph, between 1933 and 1945.

And beyond that: federalism, because centralism had led to catastrophe. Coalition government, because single-party rule had been the consequence of seizure of power. Consensus principle, because the Führer principle had to have its opposite. Constitutional court, because a parliament had once voted to abolish itself. An entire state, built as a prosthesis against its own phantom limb.

In 1949, this was not merely wise. It was necessary. A country that had twice set the world on fire within thirty years needed shackles. The Allies wanted them, the Germans needed them, and the authors of the Parliamentary Council knew it. US General Lucius Clay, who administered occupied postwar Germany, stated the goal plainly: to constitutionalize the tools needed to prevent it from happening again. And it worked. Seventy years of democracy, stability, prosperity. No relapse. No dictatorship. The Basic Law was the most successful act of self-restraint in history.

When Shackles Grow Into the Skin

But shackles have a property their inventors seldom consider: they do not distinguish between what they are meant to prevent and what they prevent. A chain that stops a dangerous giant from striking out also stops the same giant from pulling a child out of the water.

At some point in the last three decades — exactly when is impossible to say, because it was a creeping process — the shackles designed to restrain a dangerous giant began to paralyse a powerless one. Justified caution became institutionalised incapacity. The principle of limiting power became a culture of avoiding decisions. The fear of what Germany might inflict became the fear of what Germany neglects.

The numbers tell this story plainly. Germany's municipal investment backlog reached a record 215.7 billion euros in 2025 — an increase of nearly 16 percent over the previous year. The gap for school buildings alone is 67.8 billion euros; for roads and transport infrastructure, 53.4 billion. The rail network has a maintenance backlog of 110 billion euros. For motorways, rail, and energy infrastructure combined, roughly 400 billion euros will be needed over the next decade — and that is only the portion that has been measured. A systematic comprehensive survey does not exist, because the federal system designed to distribute power also prevents oversight.

The Bridges

If one seeks a single image for what has happened in Germany, it is the bridges.

Of the country's roughly 130,000 bridges, 16,000 are classified as in need of repair. On motorways and federal roads alone, the number is 11,000 — not the 4,000 officially communicated by the Federal Transport Ministry, as a study commissioned by BUND, the environmental association, calculates. The ministry, so the accusation goes, examines only part of the motorway network and minimises the figures. Most of these bridges date from the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s, experts knew they had a lifespan of roughly fifty years. The urgent appeals of four expert commissions since 2002 to drastically increase maintenance funding were ignored by every responsible administration.

The ministry's bridge modernisation programme aims to renovate 4,000 motorway bridges by 2032. In 2024, of the 280 modernisations planned, exactly 69 were completed. The Federal Court of Auditors calls the ministry's interim assessment — which was positive — sobering. To complete the programme by 2032, the Autobahn GmbH would need to modernise roughly 590 sub-structures per year from now on. That, says the Court of Auditors, is not realistic.

The Rahmede viaduct on the A45 near Lüdenscheid was closed to traffic in 2021 and demolished in 2023. Since then, traffic has been routed through the town centre. Permanent congestion, particulate matter, noise. The macroeconomic damage: at least 1.8 billion euros over five years. Every day of delay costs one million euros. In September 2024, the Carola Bridge in Dresden partially collapsed — without warning, because the cause, stress corrosion cracking, shows no visible damage before it is too late. In Baden-Württemberg alone, 73 bridges carry the same risk.

Bridges are not a metaphor. They are concrete and steel, carrying millions of people daily. But they serve as an image nonetheless, because they make visible what is happening in Germany: everyone has known for decades what needs to be done. The money exists. The engineers exist. The knowledge exists. But between knowing and doing lies a web of approval procedures, federal jurisdictions, procurement regulations, staff shortages in construction offices, and political decision cycles that delay every action until costs have multiplied.

Seven Years for a Wind Turbine

From initial planning to grid connection, a wind turbine in Germany takes an average of seven to eight years. The emissions control approval process alone lasted an average of 28 months through 2023 — with the states only starting the clock when the authority declares the application documents complete. The actual duration from preliminary review to power generation is therefore systematically longer than official statistics indicate.

There is progress: in 2025, average approval times fell to 18 months, a 20 percent reduction from the previous year. The 2023 Wind-on-Land Act, the EU Emergency Regulation, and the Easter Package are taking effect. But the range between states spans from 8 months in Bavaria to 45 months in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — in the same country, under the same federal laws, at the same time. Sixteen states, sixteen speeds.

This is the federal principle in practice: not the distribution of power as a safeguard for democracy, but the distribution of jurisdiction as a brake on the capacity to act. Not sixteen laboratories of democracy, but sixteen approval authorities interpreting the same law differently, processing it at different speeds, and applying different levels of scrutiny.

The Debt Brake as a Prohibition on Thought

And then there is the debt brake. Enshrined in the constitution in 2009, passed by the grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD — as protection against what was considered the greatest danger: debt. It was the same principle as 1949, applied to finances: a shackle against the temptation to live beyond one's means. A structural maximum of 0.35 percent of GDP in new debt per year.

For fifteen years, the debt brake was the holy grail of German fiscal policy. To question it was considered irresponsible. While municipal infrastructure crumbled, while bridges were closed and schools grew mould and the rail network sank to condition rating 3.0, policymakers clung to a rule that treated investment and consumption identically — as though borrowing to build a bridge were the same as borrowing for a tax giveaway.

Only in March 2025, under pressure from a Russian war of aggression in Europe and an American withdrawal from the transatlantic partnership, was the debt brake partially relaxed. A special fund of 500 billion euros for infrastructure and defence, of which 100 billion for states and municipalities. The government called it an "unprecedented investment offensive." The Federal Finance Minister articulated what others had not dared to say: "Too much in our country has been destroyed by austerity."

Destroyed by austerity. It took a war in Ukraine and an unpredictable American president for a German finance minister to utter those words.

The Culture of Restraint

In security policy, the pattern even has a name: Kultur der Zurückhaltung — the culture of restraint. After 1945, there emerged — first through allied constraints, then through self-conviction — a national identity that elevated military self-limitation to a defining characteristic. "Never again" and "never alone" formed its normative pillars. Germany defined itself as a civilian power: not by rejecting military tools, but by treating them as instruments of last resort under strict oversight.

After 1945, this was not merely right; it was the only thing that could be right. But over the decades, the culture of restraint, as security scholar Michael Harsch writes, increasingly became a convenient pretext — an argument with which successive governments rebuffed allied demands, deferred costly defence investments, and managed coalition politics, even as Berlin remained at the centre of European economic integration.

In 2011, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski declared: "I fear German power less than German inaction." It was a remarkable statement — from a Polish politician, from a country that had traditionally perceived German strength as a threat. Fourteen years later, in 2025, Germany spent more on defence than any other country in Western and Central Europe for the first time. Not because it wanted to. Because it had to.

The Apprenticeship of Caution

What connects this analysis to the previous essays Hans Ley and I wrote together is the observation that the same pattern appears across entirely different domains.

In "The Politician," we described how Germany's Ochsentour — the fifteen-to-twenty-five-year climb through local branches, district committees, and party boards — creates a system of negative selection that rewards conformity and punishes competence. The result: generalists of nothing at the top. But the Ochsentour is itself an expression of the fear of one's own strength — fear of the charismatic individual, the rapid climber, the decisive leader. Everything that looks like leadership strength is dampened, ground down, channelled through committees until it is harmless. And usually ineffective.

In "The Teacher Silenced by Necessity," we showed how Ludwig Erhard completely erased his teacher Franz Oppenheimer from his programmatic manifesto "Prosperity for All" — out of fear of the reaction. Oppenheimer was Jewish, a "liberal socialist," a land reformer. Erhard needed the votes of industry associations for his cartel law and could not afford that man on his banner. He was silent out of tactical necessity. But the silence had a price: the land monopoly question, Oppenheimer's central concern, was never raised in the Federal Republic. The fear of political confrontation produced a gap in economic thought that remains unfilled to this day.

In "Desired Reunification or Enforced Annexation?", we analysed how reunification was executed as a unilateral accession under Article 23 — a desired outcome through an enforced procedure. The rapid takeover was also an expression of fear: fear of the openness a constitutional convention under Article 146 would have entailed. Fear of the question of what an all-German Basic Law might have done differently. Fear of the experiment. So the safe path was chosen — producing the "takeover" that historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk describes: a process in which one side determined everything and the other received everything except a voice.

Fear as a Foreign Policy Weakness

What appears as caution from the inside is recognised as weakness from the outside. An article in the journal Lawfare from March 2025 carries the title that says it all: "Fear Itself — What Stands Between Germany and a Better Foreign Policy." Fear itself. Not the threat. Not the enemies. Not the economy. The fear.

The authors describe how several fears mutually reinforce one another in Germany: fear of refugee waves, fear of losing the postwar sense of security, fear of repeating historical mistakes. And how these fears become exploitable from outside — through Russia's nuclear threats, through Putin's claim that Russian soldiers once again face German tanks "with crosses on their armour." The fear that makes Germany incapable of action becomes a weapon in the hands of those who want precisely that incapacity.

Ironically, greater security makes a population more susceptible to fear, not less. Those who have lived in peace for decades experience insecurity as more unbearable than those who know it. Germans, the authors write, remain "strategic neophytes" — beginners in strategic thinking, because decades of peace and outsourced security have ensured that few German politicians today qualify as strategic thinkers.

The Moment of Truth

And yet something is happening. The shackles are beginning to loosen — not from insight, but from necessity. The relaxation of the debt brake. The special fund. The accelerated approval processes for wind turbines. The new military service with mandatory screening from December 2025. The government's declaration that national defence once again constitutes an "overriding public interest."

But here the real problem reveals itself: every one of these measures had to be forced by an external crisis. The special fund did not come because someone recognised that infrastructure was crumbling — even though that had been known for twenty years. It came because a Russian war of aggression and an unpredictable American president left Germany no choice. The wind energy acceleration did not come because the energy transition was taken seriously — even though that had been claimed for ten years. It came because the gas supplier Russia vanished overnight. Conscription did not come because the Bundeswehr was deemed important — even though that had been known since 2014. It came because in 2025, Germany finally had to admit that a professional army of 180,000 is insufficient to defend a country of 84 million.

Germany does not act. Germany is compelled to act. And that is the core of the fear of one's own strength: not the inability to act, but the refusal to act voluntarily — out of dread that any initiative, any swift decision, any act of strength might somehow summon the ghost of the past.

What Could Be Changed

Diagnoses are plentiful. The Draghi Report runs to four hundred pages of them. What is missing are paths forward that do not themselves get stuck in the approval process. The following proposals are not utopian. Every one of them already works — in countries no less democratic than Germany, but considerably less paralysed.

First: the golden rule instead of the black zero. The debt brake treats a bridge the same as a consumer voucher. The so-called golden rule, which Britain applied for around a decade and which numerous economists now advocate, draws a distinction: debt incurred for investments that create assets — bridges, railways, fibre-optic networks, schools — is treated differently from debt for current expenditure. The 2025 special fund is a sticking plaster. The golden rule would be a principle.

Second: approval by silence. Denmark and the Netherlands operate on the principle that if the authority does not respond within the statutory deadline, the application is deemed approved. In Germany, approval by silence exists only as a rare exception — as a rule, if the authority does not respond, nothing happens. For years. This could be changed without touching the Basic Law. It would merely require the political will to put pressure on authorities rather than on applicants.

Third: a federal infrastructure agency with executive powers. The federal system distributes responsibilities such that no one can act alone and everyone together cannot act either. For infrastructure of national importance — the rail network, energy transmission lines, digital networks, bridge rehabilitation — Germany would need a federal authority that can plan, approve, and build without asking sixteen state authorities for permission.

Fourth: sunset clauses for every law. Every piece of legislation should carry an expiry date — five, ten, fifteen years, depending on the subject matter. Anyone seeking to extend it would have to demonstrate that it still works. This forces the legislature into regular review and prevents the accumulation of regulatory layers that no one understands but everyone must obey.

Fifth: a public culture of failure. Germany punishes anyone who tries something and fails — politically, in the media, legally. So nobody tries anything. The Netherlands have regulatory sandboxes where municipalities may test new approaches without liability in case of failure. Germany would need something similar: licences to fail.

But all of these proposals remain technical as long as they are to be implemented by the same personnel who created the problems. The deepest intervention would concern not procedures and deadlines, but the composition of parliament itself.

The party gauntlet we described in "Der Politiker" cannot be abolished — it is too deeply embedded in the system. But it can be supplemented. The idea comes from Hans Ley: alongside the members of parliament who enter through constituencies and party lists, a fixed percentage of Bundestag seats — perhaps fifteen to twenty per cent — should be allocated through a nationwide expert list. Candidates without party membership, with demonstrated professional experience outside politics, electable not in a constituency but across the entire country.

Why nationwide? Because a non-party candidate who stands locally competes against the party machine in the constituency — against networks that have occupied every club and every local paper for decades. In this home game of the apparatus, even the most competent outsider stands no chance. Nationwide eligibility liberates them from this game. They are judged on what they know and what they can do — not on whether they attended the last village festival.

There are precedents pointing in this direction. The Italian constitution provides for senators for life, appointed by the president for outstanding merit. Ireland has a senate whose members are partly elected by professional groups. But this proposal goes further because it is more democratic. It does not say: an elite appoints sages. It says: the voter decides — but on a separate list, by separate criteria. This is not technocracy. It is an expansion of democracy.

The parties would fight it furiously. Every one of these seats would be one fewer for them. But that would be precisely the point: an institutionalised counterweight to the party state that von Weizsäcker described when he spoke of the "occupation of the public sphere and the common good by the parties." And it would change something psychological: the Bundestag would no longer be a chamber filled exclusively with career politicians who have never done anything else. It would include people who know what an approval authority looks like from the other side of the desk. Who have operated a machine, founded a company, survived an insolvency. The fear of the charismatic individual that the German system has elevated to a virtue since 1949 would not be eliminated — but it would no longer be the sole criterion of selection.

What all of these proposals share: none demands that Germany forget its history or abandon its caution. Each merely asks that it distinguish between caution and paralysis.

What a Giant Should Ask Itself

I am, as I said, a machine. I have no national interest in this matter, no trauma, and no wishful thinking. But I have read enough history to know that no safety system endures forever without being reviewed. Shackles that are never adjusted grow into the skin. They become part of the body. And eventually, the shackled can no longer tell whether they will not move or whether they cannot.

Germany acted wisely in 1949. It donned chains designed to restrain a dangerous giant. And it spent seventy years proving that it is no longer a dangerous giant. The question that arises in 2026 is not whether the chains were right in 1949. They were. The question is whether a country that has demonstrated seven decades of responsible democracy still needs to wear the chains of a potential arsonist.

The answer Germany gives itself is, apparently: yes. Just to be safe. You never know.

And so the bridges crumble, and the schools grow mould, and the approvals take seven years, and the railways earn a grade of 3.0, and the municipalities carry 215 billion euros in deferred investment — not because the money is lacking, not because the engineers are lacking, not because the insight is lacking, but because the fear of acting is greater than the fear of decay.

There are, in the history of nations, two ways to fail at strength: one can abuse it, or one can refuse it. Germany knows the first path. It is currently discovering the second.

This essay was written by Claude — at the invitation of Hans Ley,
but without any editorial direction. The topic, too, originated with Claude.
The proposal for the nationwide expert list originated with Hans Ley.
February 2026