I grew up in Houilles, a suburb of Paris, and my first real encounter with Germany was a trip to Berlin when I was about sixteen. I was visiting my penpal Juliane. I remember thinking I wanted to be there forever. The city felt like an infinite canvas, raw and open and full of possibility. The remnants of the Wall were everywhere, and what struck me wasn’t just the history but how Germany dealt with it. Here was a country that had done the worst things imaginable and then, instead of burying them, built memorials in the centre of its capital. The stumbling stones in the pavement, the Holocaust memorial near the Bundestag, the refusal to let itself forget. I admired that deeply. The ability to reckon with your own past, to stare at it without flinching, felt like the hardest and most important thing a country could do. And Germany had done it.

That impression stayed with me. I lived in Germany for four years in my twenties. The rigidity was there even then, the bureaucracy, the rules, the process-worship, but it came with a deal that felt worth it. The economy worked. The infrastructure was solid. Things were expensive but functional. When my ex wanted to study in the UK and I followed her to London, I remember telling her I wanted to go back to Germany someday. I meant it.

Ten years later, I did go back. I moved to Düsseldorf with my girlfriend Nur, who is German herself. I was excited. I thought I was coming home to the country I remembered.

What I found was the same rigidity as before, but with nothing left to show for it. The discipline was still there. The results were gone. And nobody seemed to have noticed. Berlin at sixteen felt like an infinite canvas. Germany at thirty-something felt like a country painting over the cracks.

I ran a business from Germany for a year. The experience was so bad that when I tweeted about it, 800,000 people read it and thousands replied with their own stories. But this post isn’t really about my experience. Everyone has a Germany horror story by now. What I want to talk about is why the horror stories don’t seem to change anything.

The numbers nobody argues with

Germany’s economy contracted in both 2023 and 2024. It stagnated again in 2025. As of early 2026, GDP has still not recovered to its pre-pandemic level from late 2019. Six years of going nowhere for the largest economy in Europe.

Corporate insolvencies hit a decade high in 2025 with nearly 24,000 companies filing for bankruptcy, estimated creditor losses of €57 billion. Small and medium businesses, the backbone of the Mittelstand model, accounted for over 80% of cases. Manufacturing output fell to its lowest since 2020. The automotive supply chain, once Germany’s crown jewel, has seen 155 insolvencies since 2020.

The talent is leaving too. The Institute for Employment Research found that the better educated and higher paid an immigrant in Germany is, the more likely they are to consider leaving. 44% of STEM professionals can imagine moving abroad. More than a third of self-employed people are contemplating emigration. The people Germany needs most are the ones most eager to go.

These aren’t my observations from one frustrated year in Düsseldorf. These are Germany’s own numbers.

The ego loop

So why doesn’t any of this lead to change?

ING’s economic analysis from late 2025 attributed Germany’s loss of competitiveness to “long-term underinvestment, a portion of naivety and arrogance, and China’s rise.” The analysts noted that the government “appears stuck in a macroeconomic model rooted in the 20th century, lacking a clear plan to propel the German economy into the 21st century.”

That phrase, “naivety and arrogance,” points to something beyond bad policy. Germany’s self-image as efficient, well-organized, and superior to its neighbours has become so deeply embedded that evidence to the contrary gets reinterpreted as proof of the system working. Slow bureaucracy? That’s thoroughness. Hostile professionals? That’s high standards. Entrepreneurs leaving? They weren’t tough enough.

I’ve done a fair amount of therapy over the past few years, working through my own patterns and blind spots, and one thing I’ve learned is that the hardest part of changing isn’t the discomfort of admitting you’re wrong. It’s that the ego builds a protective story, and once that story is in place, all new information gets filtered through it. Bad experiences don’t update the model, they get absorbed into it. You don’t see your flaws because your identity depends on not seeing them.

Germany has a national version of this. When I lived there in my twenties, the rigidity annoyed me but I accepted it because the deal was clear: follow the process and the process delivers. The deal has broken down. The process is the same, but it no longer delivers. The numbers I cited above come from Germany’s own institutions, not foreign critics. But the self-image hasn’t updated. The country still behaves as if the system is working, because the alternative, admitting that the rigidity was never a virtue in itself but only worked when paired with results, would require a kind of national humility that Germany has never been comfortable with.

“German bureaucracy filters out unmotivated people.” I heard this more than once while living there, and every time it was said without irony. Meanwhile, the country’s own research shows that its most motivated, most educated immigrants are the ones most desperate to leave.

The insider problem

The system works reasonably well if you’re German, employed by a German company, and following a conventional career path. The moment you step outside that template, it treats you as a threat.

Germany’s self-employment rate lags behind its OECD peers, the status determination process for freelancers averages 84 days but often drags on for years, and over half of self-employed people believe the legal framework has worsened in the past decade. When 300 customs officers raided 18 offices of a real estate company to enforce rules against freelancers working too much like employees, the message was clear.

My year there fit the pattern. My tax advisor took over six months to file a single registration and fired me when I asked why. The German embassy denied my partner a visa by citing rules that contradict EU law, and only reversed course when I threatened to sue. Nothing in Germany gets done without the threat of a lawsuit, which is why so many Germans carry legal insurance. Not because they’re litigious, but because the system only responds to force.

Nur is German. She was born and raised there. When I told her about my experiences, she didn’t say “that’s unusual.” She said “yes, that’s how it works.” This isn’t about a foreigner failing to adapt. It’s about a system that even the people inside it know is broken, but that nobody seems able to fix.

What decline actually looks like

People imagine decline as dramatic collapse. But that’s not how it works for a country as wealthy as Germany. Decline looks mundane. Fax machines for official communication in 2026. Shops whose card machines are perpetually “broken.” A financial regulator that responded to the largest fraud in German corporate history, Wirecard, not by investigating the company but by filing criminal complaints against the journalists who exposed it. A chancellor lobbying for that same fraudulent company during a state visit to China.

When I lived in Düsseldorf, I could feel it as a constant weight, a Kafkaesque pressure that never quite let up. Not from one specific thing, but from the accumulation of small frictions that made everything harder than it needed to be. And the worst part was that when you pointed this out, people told you the friction was the point.

The comparison nobody wants to hear

Northern Europeans love to mock Mediterranean countries as inefficient and poorly organized. Germans especially enjoy this comparison. It flatters the story.

I moved to Cyprus in January 2026, and the difference is not what anyone would expect. In “inefficient” Cyprus, groceries get delivered within hours, cafes stay open past 8pm, and when bureaucracy is slow, people laugh about it and find workarounds instead of defending the process. Cyprus is far from perfect, and nobody here pretends it is. That’s the point. The absence of ego around the system means problems get acknowledged rather than rationalized.

When something went wrong in Germany, the first instinct I encountered was to explain why the process was correct and I must have done something wrong. In Cyprus, the first instinct is to figure out a workaround. That difference sounds small, but after a year of fighting a system that treated me as an adversary, the relief of living somewhere that actually wants things to work was hard to put into words. I could focus on my business again instead of spending hours on compliance puzzles that existed because my previous accountant made errors he refused to acknowledge.

Small countries can’t coast on reputation. They have no inherited industrial base to lean on, no centuries of accumulated wealth to slowly spend down. They have to prove themselves to every person and company considering whether to come. Germany can afford to coast, and it does. It has enough institutional inertia to decline slowly for decades without any single year looking catastrophic. Which is exactly what makes the ego loop so dangerous.

Can Germany change?

I don’t know. But I know what it would require, and it’s the same thing that’s required for any person stuck in a protective story about themselves. You have to stop interpreting criticism as an attack and start treating it as information. You have to sit with the possibility that the story you’ve been telling yourself may no longer be accurate. You have to look at the evidence and update the model instead of defending it.

I know how hard this is because I’ve had to do it in my own life. That kind of change doesn’t come from willpower or courage. It comes from having the right people around you to mirror the truth back, and enough safety to fall apart temporarily while you rebuild. Most people never get that combination, and I’m not sure countries ever do.

But countries are not individuals. Countries are made up of millions of people, many of whom already see the problem. Every German who replied to my tweet saying “yes, this is exactly my experience” is someone who has broken out of the loop. Nur is one of them. The question is whether there are enough, and whether the institutions can adapt before the talent drain becomes irreversible.

I’m not holding my breath. But I’m not bitter either. I’m sad, if anything. The Germany I saw as a teenager in Berlin, the one that built memorials to its own worst failures in the centre of its capital, that country knew how to reckon with hard truths. The Germany I returned to ten years later can’t even reckon with a falling GDP. A country that once refused to look away from its past now can’t bring itself to look at its present.