Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell.
I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality.
My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.
I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.
All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.
Funnily enough, the book goes into the anti-war thing a bit. The idea put forward in the book is that straight after the war there wasn’t a great deal of anti-war sentiment, just anti-losing sentiment. But after the Cold War started, and the major powers wanted Germany militarised again, to be on the front line of a battle against checks notes other Germans on the other side’s front lines, they developed an anti-war culture pretty quickly.
Germany's "rail network is falling apart" means you are delayed a few hours on a cross-country trip, which is unimaginable luxury to people from some regions, which I think proves the point.
As I see it, they're running the system at close to capacity, so it has long queue times [1] and little spare capacity to return to normal after a disruption. It's one of several valid ways to run a system. You can have fewer trains and fewer cascading delays, or more trains and more cascading delays. In some places, the trains are on time but they only run once per day; I think I prefer the German system to that.
This is about the long-distance system. Other systems have their own properties. The BVG has not infrequent disruptions but the next train is usually only 5-10 minutes away so who cares.
I'm not talking about whether Germany's rail network is better or worse than other people's rail networks, but rather whether it embodies the supposed national characteristic of being methodical and precise.
The problem with the German rail network is not that they are running too many trains (I mean, they're planning on shutting services down!). The problem is primarily that there has been a significant lack of investment in necessary repairs and upgrades to maintain existing capacity levels, let alone support the increased capacity that comes from a growing population. The two options here are not "one time but rare" or "not on time but regular" — you can have both things, and it is completely within the power of a properly-funded DB to implement both things.
> This is about the long-distance system. Other systems have their own properties.
The systems are also not completely separated, so delays and failures propagate. And if you are late for work or school almost every day, it's an easy way to get a bit cynical. Or maybe use a car, which incidentally my German colleagues do. And I think it's sad Germany didn't invest in the system in time.
why things are falling apart? isn't it mostly good old Baumol's cost disease (relative productivity decreasing) coupled with the lack of economies of scale (even more productivity backsliding) coupled with spending priorities (services, aging population, "green" and climate change stuff) coupled with NIMBY issues (which again put a downward pressure on scale, and thus productivity)?
our built environment suffers from the fact that there's no Apple Autobahn, manufactured in China at Foxconn, using competitive cutting-edge tech shit in the most cost-efficient way?
I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.