One day, I will certainly write a post about jokes and humor in Central Europe. Coming from a nation that Reinhard Heydrich himself called lachende Bestien1, I’d be a bad blogger if I never ever touched that topic. If there is one thing that authoritarian regimes really loathe, it is being laughed at, even behind closed doors; and every secret police out there has a well-funded department collecting and analyzing all the new jokes that emerge constantly from the seemingly docile crowd in the streets.
Nevertheless, today I need just one joke, the one fit to illustrate my wider point, coming straight from the early 1990s:
“What do the optimists learn?” - “German.”
“What do the pessimists learn?” - “Russian.” (An insinuation that some next "brotherly help" is in the making.)
“And what do the realists learn…?”
“The realists learn to shoot!”
When the Brotherly Tanks Arrived
In the West, the year 1968 is strongly associated with the rebellion of leftist students in Paris: an abortive microrevolution which was visually attractive and indeed televised by a dozen journalistic crews. This microrevolution didn’t achieve much, but it was the shape of things to come. The staid, mostly conservativ…
This was a joke reflecting the deep uncertainty of those times. We saw a formerly peaceful and (relatively) developed Yugoslavia - a country where plenty of people had taken vacations - disintegrate into gory mayhem, as if the locals decided that they, too, needed their own Nuremberg Tribunal2. There was a certain uneasy understanding that the Yugoslavs were basically the same people as us, and that potential future war criminals may be taking the same bus as you every morning. Every country had at least one loud-mouthed nationalist movement that yearned to expand the national borders by any means necessary. Fortunately, peace held and the worst that happened was a clear uptick in violent crime. Still undesirable, but much better than the mass graves of Bosnia.
“German”, in this case, represented the optimistic future. To be honest, the above joke existed with “English” as well, and I heard both variants equally often. But still. Learning German was, back then, synonymous with the optimistic future.
As of 2026, it no longer is. English won that match by knockout and flattened its opponent. One of the stories that framed my life is the slow, but unstoppable decline of Germany.
Ah, German, the language which gave us the Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft and the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz! The first is probably an urban legend; the second was an actual law in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a German federal state located in the northeast of the country. Of course, today, such long words are no longer in fashion and the pendulum swung in the other direction, sometimes quite decisively so:
Yet that fact does not explain the former popularity of German, nor its current not-quite-as-popular status. After all, in English, you can ask How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? and it hasn’t stopped English from expanding to every corner of the world.
There were two reasons why German was considered as useful as English in the Central Europe of the 1990s. First, there used to be East Germany once, which meant that German was one of the languages of the Socialist Bloc, and thus politically non-problematic. Which also meant that there were many more teachers to teach it, as the study of German was never as restricted by the usual Communist paranoia as English was, and thus the language was available to more people from the get-go.
But the second, more important reason was the former West Germany, a then-extremely wealthy nation with an economy to marvel at. Its currency, the Deutsche Mark, was the preferred currency in intra-European trade, harder than the euro today, and with an aura of invincibility that the euro was never quite capable of achieving afterwards. The whole country was considered an example of Ordnung which, nevertheless, was able to square the need for order with respect towards human rights.
Scientifically, the Germany of the 1990s was no longer the powerhouse of the world. This position was irretrievably lost in the 1930s when the Nazis purged German universities of the Jews; since then, the collection of Germans with Nobel Prizes has barely expanded. But as far as sophisticated manufacturing went, few would be able to compete with the Germans of the 1990s, only Japan and the United States played at the same level in that game. Germany was the Exportweltmeister, the global champion of exports.
This is no longer true and, as a consequence, the prestige of the German language took a nosedive that will be hard to recover from. Airplanes usually don’t recover from those either.
As of 2026, Germany is a stagnant economy infamous for its sprawling bureaucracy. It collectively watches China squeezing it out of every previous business niche and does not know what to do.
It is not clear to me what precisely happened, but if someone throws sand into a running machine constantly, you cannot pinpoint the precise grain which stopped it either. They all act together. There is the paper war about everything, delaying important projects by decades; there are the high energy prices; there is a welfare system that may be unrealistically magnanimous and ill-prepared for the graying of the country; there is all the immigration from the Islamic world which cannot really compensate for the dearth of native Germans. But most of all, there is the sort of complacency that kills, and its first warning signs were already visible in the late 1990s.
The first time I encountered the Internet head-on was in September 1996, when I moved to Prague to study mathematics. I was 18 and already a computer person, but the Internet still took me by surprise: wide-eyed, I typed my first e-mails to people who lived several countries away and received their replies quicker than it took to make a cuppa3.
Even in those early days, there already were patterns to the Internet, and one of the most striking patterns was just how Anglophone it felt. Aside from the native speakers, you’d meet a lot of Scandinavians, speaking their perfect school English, and more than a few Dutchmen with the same ability. But the big nations of Europe - Germany, France, Italy, Spain - were visibly underrepresented online. We’re talking about some 200 million people here, and they, taken together, were about as common on the early Internet as the Swedes and the Finns were. Or at least as visible.
For some reason or other, Germany never took digital tech particularly seriously. There was a symbolic moment in 1981 when the then-Chancellor Schmidt decided to build a pan-German optical cable network. That would have been a good early step forward, and if that plan had been adhered to, the future might have looked different. But Schmidt lost his office to Helmut Kohl in 1982, and Kohl’s government decided to just shelve it and build a cable TV network instead.
Kohl’s minister of the posts and telecommunications, Schwarz-Schilling, was friendly to cable TV providers and this was his Geschenk (gift) to them and also to the traditional producers of copper and coaxial cables. This single decision might have doomed future digital Germany and turned it into a country of dusty fax machines4. Yes, there was the Fraunhofer Society and there still is openSUSE (long since foreign-owned). But there seem to be preciously few new things, not even a new Rammstein to bang your head to.
It would probably be unfair to blame one person and one decision for a development that spanned decades. For years and years, traveling around Germany and talking to people gave you an idea that especially the older folk just didn’t consider the Internet particularly important. Same in Austria, but, interestingly, not in Switzerland. The Swiss were always notoriously online, and they are still following the trends. “Whenever I visit Germany, I feel like I returned to 2003,” a Swiss programmer confided in me last year.
I don’t really know what happened, what particular digital train was missed. It is a train of mixed blessings, full of posers and schemers and outright frauds, but also of many good things and good people; after all, if it weren’t for sites like Substack and everything that underpins them, you wouldn’t be here to read my thoughts and maybe disagree with them. It is definitely better to be on that train than on the platform, though, and some other nations like Sweden, Estonia or Poland are trying their best to board it. Which does not mean that Estonian will ever be our common language - a language whose word for night is öö can never really conquer the rest of Europe.
And yet. You can still learn German in Prague, Warsaw or Bucharest, and many still do. But it no longer comes with a scent of the future.
The extent of AI use in this article: 37 grammatical errors and bad word choices corrected. Two factual mistakes corrected. Three Creative Commons images recommended. No editing.
“Laughing beasts” in the sense of “bastards”, not “cattle”.
Not that they needed to; the WWII story of the Jasenovac concentration camp proved quite conclusively that anyone can do this crimes-against-humanity thing.
Most Czechs prefer coffee, but I am a tea person. A family tradition, just like preferring English to German. I can speak both, but only English I love.
That is not really a joke. Just a few weeks ago, first responders in Thuringia ran an exercise in order to test their capabilities to rescue people from a train trapped in a tunnel. It was a miserable failure; in real conditions, most passengers would have died. And yes, at a certain point during this disaster, those firefighters had to communicate via fax.
I started to learn Russian during primary school in Czechoslovakia. I was forced to by a regime. Later I found out that I can buy very cheap Russian translations of current American books about computers. I started to learn German as a (compulsory to learn) second language at the secondary school. I could choose English instead of German, but German was more usefull at the end of 1980s. Used to watch German sattelite TVs and during my first visit to west in Austria in 1990. Later I started (again compulsory :-) ) to learn English at the university, now in Slovakia.
And now… I am learning Chinese. :-)
Interesting. I’ve just realised how the sceptical slogan ‘Fressen – Ficken – Fernsehen’ probably came about in the 1980s. ;-)