As the leading member of the European Union, an outrage of the kind that recently occurred in a French factory a few weeks ago would have once been unthinkable.  Those Gallic workers announced (to the world, too): “In our plant we have buried explosive charges. We will detonate them if the management will go ahead with plans to destroy our jobs.” The question is: why we don’t hear about anything similar in the Bundesrepublik?

After all, Germany is one of the worst-hit industrial countries of the present recession. Her economy has contracted more than the American, British or French ones. But left-wing activists have scant success when they try to organize strikes and protests in Germany. In fact, today things are really different in comparison with the Weimar period, where hate dominated all. Back then, Walter Rathenau, the leading minister and the chief of the giant AEG, was killed  in 1922 by a handful of young men which included a distinguished writer, the Nazi Ernst von Salomon.

A logical explanation for Germany’s current tranquility is that the national Welfare State is so good that being fired is not as traumatic as elsewhere. In addition, Germans are confident that their productive apparatus is masterful enough as to rebound soon. The Ostpolitik consistently conducted by chancellors Brandt, Kohl, Schroeder and Merkel alone assures so much business with Russia (nuclear, railroad, gas programs) that today’s doldrums will not last long.

The German Welfare State is the longest standing one in the capitalist universe. Prince von Bismarck initiated it almost 150 years ago, and did so in cooperation with Ferdinand Lassalle, who personified the democratic alternative to Karl Marx (the latter much deplored that the brilliant young social reformer would work with the feudal and domineering Kanzler). Bismarck and Lassalle are said to have met four days a week for months. Otto von Bismarck  was so disdainful toward the liberal bourgeoisie as to ‘invent’ the Welfare State in partnership with a Socialist. Lassalle died a few months later (August 1864) while duelling, probably over a woman.

The above factors largely justify the tranquillity of German workers. But an even more fundamental element is that, before Adolf Hitler perverted his nation’s minds and hearts, the German people was specifically virtuous, the most profound and ethically motivated people in Europe. The practice of serene discipline and rightfulness was ingrained in the collective character.

The famed Prussian miller who refused King, Frederick the Great, the possibility to buy his modest property, so expounded his self-assurance by stating that “There are judges in Berlin.” And Martin Luther had based his religious revolution on the belief that his imperial, half-German master, Charles V, had to respect the rights of the German soul. Four centuries later it was the inequitable Treaty of Versailles that inflamed the German anger to the point of opening the way to Hitler, the pitiless Avenger.

New Germans, after tragically learning the lessons of two World Wars and of Auschwitz, have gone back to their lofty heritage.

Massimo Calderazzi is an author and journalist.