Germany Report – The frog in the cooking pot

The best time you see the rich is at the “Gala,” when they pose in designer clothes at some festival. But are they really the super-rich or just the “celebrities”? Just as the poor once looked up to their kings and princes, many do the same today. Or rather, by turning those who scandalously enrich themselves from them into “celebrities,” they even give them applause. What a perfidious manipulative intention: the basic conflict in this country disappears behind colorful photos.

»Germany knows almost everything about its poor, who are thoroughly examined statistically. “However, Germany knows next to nothing about its rich,” says Jens Berger. »The authorities do not collect any statistical data on wealth; all data on financial circumstances is classified information. Anyone who wants to approach these questions has to do some detective work.” The author of the book “Who Owns Germany?” did exactly that.

It was called “required reading for thinkers” in the “Frankfurter Rundschau” when it first came out in 2014 and caused a sensation. The then Spiegel bestseller has now been published in a completely revised new edition. The text is based on the latest data and also includes the consequences of the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

What is called a crisis and is experienced as such by the majority of the population has only accelerated the redistribution process from bottom to top. Jens Berger proves this with figures, as he has put a lot of effort into demonstrating the dynamics of wealth and poverty through facts that can probably only be found in this book. Because it is in the interests of power to ignore them.

Yes, wealth and power go together in capitalism, even if the system has a more or less democratic appearance. Uninhibited enrichment of the largely invisible upper class is not an annoying side effect, but rather the purpose of the whole thing. In addition to capitalist exploitation, the state in many ways imposes costs on taxpayers and does not touch profits. This also applied in Corona times: “The taxpayer financed the research, the profits from it are being privatized.” If you want to know how high these profits were and have always doubted the German lockdown course, you should read this book .

Even those who suspect that there are people making money from the Ukraine war are not wrong. “It’s a truism that you can make a lot of money with death – especially if you sell the instruments of murder.” While Germany is pouring billions into armaments at taxpayer expense, the armaments companies’ coffers are ringing.

The economic sanctions also ensured redistribution. By stopping the purchase of Russian pipe gas in favor of expensive liquefied gas imports, the Federal Republic of Germany did not bring Russia “to its knees”. International energy companies have done brilliant business, as detailed here. In contrast, “the average heating costs for a household with a consumption of 20,000 kilowatt hours of gas … have increased from 1,130 euros in 2020 to 3,912 euros in 2022. The additional indirect costs resulting from the additional costs for products and services passed on to end customers can only be guessed at at the moment.«

Jens Berger has put together a lot of extremely interesting background information to denounce the blatant injustice in our country. »There are currently 117 billionaires in Germany with total assets of $528.3 billion. The six richest among them own $158.5 billion, roughly as much as the bottom 40 percent of the population combined, i.e. 34 million people. And the trend continues… Since 1997, politicians have even voluntarily waived the collection of wealth tax, which is required by German law.

Why are rents, prices, education and pensions discussed, but not the distribution of wealth? Because it is, so to speak, a “holy cow” that cannot be touched under punishment. Jens Berger, however, makes concrete what needs to and could be changed in our country.

»The distribution issue is the elephant in the room: it is huge and everyone sees it, but no one dares to address or even tackle this huge problem. Instead, we are only too happy to let ourselves be triggered by all kinds of things, spend our time conducting virtual mock battles in secondary theaters of war, and don’t realize that the water is already up to our necks and is constantly rising.

The comparison is apt with the proverbial frog that you have put in a cooking pot and boiled by slowly heating the water. While still in warm water, large parts of the population are completely unaware of the dangers. And some would even welcome a policy of making even more poor people suffer from injustice, which they could then look down on as long as it doesn’t affect them with full force.

Jens Berger: Who owns Germany? The balance of the last 10 years: Completely revised new edition of the Spiegel bestseller. Westend, 268 pages, br., 24 €.