Stereotypical German Efficiency

German efficiency: The roots of a stereotype: Germany has a reputation for getting things done in an efficient manner, despite evidence to the contrary. Efficiency has played an important historic role in Germany — though not always a positive one.

Efficiency can be defined as achieving the desired outcome with the least waste of resources. German efficiency is a persistent international stereotype. Efficiency is tightly intertwined with other German values, making it difficult to disentangle. The concept has historic roots and the perception of German efficiency has evolved. Germany's reputation for it stretches back centuries, and its roots are twofold:

Historian James Hawes, the author of The Shortest History of Germany, traces it back to medieval times when the western Rhineland became renowned abroad for commercial efficiency thanks to its production of highly specialized goods.

Prussia, the heavily Protestant eastern German state, was considered the source of a different type of efficiency: administrative and military. By 1750, under the rule of Fredrick the Great, Prussia had developed an efficient state bureaucracy and military power.

As Prussia expanded its control, eventually unifying the German Empire under its leadership in 1871, it spread these systems and practices. Its tax-based public schools and its professionalized army were also admired abroad for being organized and modern, with some foreign nations even seeking to institute similar models at home.

The 19th-century Prussian state also strategically cultivated a catalog of values for civil servants and the military, including punctuality, frugality, a sense of duty, and diligence, etc. While efficiency is not seen as having been a standalone value, the values that were espoused were aimed at supporting the desired efficient state.

These values came to be known as "preussische Tugenden," (Prussian virtues), though according to historian Julius Schoeps, founding director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Berlin, it took time for them to collectively establish themselves among the broader population — in the 19th century.

As British tourists began to visit Prussian-controlled Rhineland in the mid-19th century, they took back an image of Prussian wealth and expediency. According to Hawes, their reports often commented on how everything seemed to work: "The trains — the classic thing — the trains run on time. The customs man is quick. The hotels are clean, the water works," he said, summarizing their descriptions.

The dual strands of economic quality and an organized state kept the image of German efficiency alive into the 20th-century. By the 1930s, the idea of "Ordnung" — a mixture of rules and a no-nonsense approach that can theoretically contribute to efficiency — was Germany's international calling card. Time magazine placed then-President Paul von Hindenburg on its 1934 cover with the words "Ordnung muss sein" (There must be order,) while The New York Times had already called the phrase "world-famous" in 1930.

According to historian Schoeps, the Nazi party indeed co-opted particular so-called Prussian virtues, saying, "Confidence became arrogance, orderliness became mean-spirited pedantry, and the execution of one's duties became pure inhumanity". Ultimately, the so-called Prussian virtues may have helped maintain the totalitarian state under Nazi rule and its systematic murder.

Franklin Mixon, an economics professor specializing in labor and industrial organizations at Columbus State University, is the author of A Terrible Efficiency: Entrepreneurial Bureaucrats and the Nazi Holocaust. The book describes how efficient behavior was incentivized and rewarded within the large Nazi bureaucracy, often on a direct and informal basis — a contrast to the passive "just following orders" idea that still heavily dominates perceptions of how the Holocaust was carried out: "What they [the Nazis] were harnessing was incentivization, squeezing discretionary effort out of members of the bureaucracy, an above-and-beyond effort that is not part of the job description." 

Yet, although efficiency might be valued, it is far from reliably present in modern Germany. Examples of inefficiency abound, from the 9-year slog to build the new Berlin airport to a bureaucracy that is notoriously dependent on paper trails and fax machines to the country's recent struggles with sluggish COVID testing and a crawling vaccination process.

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