The following interview appeared in the Welt am Sonntag. This translation is published here with permission. Wolfgang Reitzle is one of Germany’s leading business executives. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
Welt am Sonntag: Mr. Reitzle, the corona crisis robbed many Germans of their illusions about this republic. They don’t recognize their country anymore. They used to think of it as progressive, organized, digitalized, and well led. Was that image of modern Germany just a fantasy?
Wolfgang Reitzle: There have been plenty of signs of a discrepancy in Germany between appearance and reality: despite a defense budget of 47 billion euros, our guns can’t shoot, our tanks can’t roll, and our airplanes can’t fly—this doesn’t seem to bother anyone here, but other countries have taken notice. Our inability to build an airport for our capital city astonished the world.
Welt am Sonntag: The public just responds with passivity.
Wolfgang Reitzle: Berlin is one of the worst-governed capitals of Europe. The disregard for criminality, the tolerance for squatting, the spread of organized crime—wherever one looks, Berlin has become a dysfunctional city, a failed state. And Mayor Müller, who is responsible for this failure, is constantly in the news telling us how to manage corona.
Welt am Sonntag: Is he one of those magicians who just create an illusion of depth?
Wolfgang Reitzle: In any case, his claim to be world class has not been true for Germany for a long time. The corona crisis made this brutally clear. After sixteen years of Merkel, Germany needs renovation in many arenas: bureaucracies stuck in the age of the fax machine, inadequate digitalization, no high-speed internet, massive flaws in the infrastructure, and rotten schools are just a few examples of the failures that are an embarrassment for a leading industrial country. And we choose strange priorities. While we take down the signs for “Moor Street,” China is building its Silk Road.
Welt am Sonntag: You say “sixteen years of Merkel.” Would two terms have been enough for you?
Wolfgang Reitzle: Yes, the Merkel years are an example of why it would be better to limit top positions to ten years. As far as I’m concerned that would make sense in the business world too. Ten years are plenty to develop a new strategy, implement it, and reform organizational units. Sooner or later the innovative capacity of leaders just peters out. At that point, it is better to hand over the power to a successor.
Welt am Sonntag: The state has called the corona pandemic the greatest challenge since 1945.
Wolfgang Reitzle: After the war, Germany had good reason to choose federalism as the principle of political organization. But it is counterproductive in the context of crisis management. In an emergency situation, everything that delays the response should be pushed aside. In such situations, speed is a value in itself. But here, even in a crisis situation, leadership gets stuck in the jungle of our excessively administered and overregulated normalcy.
Welt am Sonntag: So you are probably not very happy with the vaccination process.
Wolfgang Reitzle: Aside from the fact that across Europe we were unable meet the basic condition for defeating the pandemic—having a sufficient amount of vaccine available—we adopted a vaccination priority system that was viewed as equitable and that was supposed to run exclusively through vaccination centers. And precisely here one has to ask why we did not just start by using the more than 100,000 doctors’ practices as decentralized vaccination stations. Those doctors know their patients well and understand who should be vaccinated first. But there was too much suspicion that doctors might advantage their tennis partner or a patient with a better insurance plan. So we were prepared to settle for a vaccination process that is equally inefficient for everyone and extremely slow.
Welt am Sonntag: Richard Wagner once said that “Being German means doing something for its own sake.”
Wolfgang Reitzle: And I say: Being German means overdoing something for its own sake! If this country wants to give priority to its high-profile commitment to justice, then the fight against the pandemic cannot succeed. The state is laying claim to total control of the vaccination process and is failing terribly—as it always does when efficiency and speed are at stake. Too many people are dying unnecessarily because of the incompetence of our overregulated bureaucracy apparatus.
Welt am Sonntag: Is data protection part of this overregulation?—including the “Corona app,” which has been refined to the point of uselessness?
Wolfgang Reitzle: Just like our exaggerated concern with justice is hindering an effective vaccination campaign, data protection stands in the way of digital contact tracing. If you value data protection more than saving human lives, then you end up with an app that does not work.
Welt am Sonntag: The public health offices in particular have turned out to be hopelessly under-digitalized.
Wolfgang Reitzle: That’s right. At the start of the pandemic almost all of them were still working with fax machines. And even now, a year later, only 283 out of 376 offices have the Sormas analysis software—and even fewer of them really use it. Contact tracing itself takes place by telephone chains, a very ineffective method.
Welt am Sonntag: At least they don’t use quills, ink, and parchment anymore.
Wolfgang Reitzle: This is how we got to the famous incidence rate of 50: because someone determined that health offices would only be able to trace infections up to this number. That means that the whole lockdown politics is based on the limitations of the old-fashioned methods of the bureaucracy. In short, thanks to its claim to have exclusive control of vaccinations and contact tracing, the state has found itself tangled up in its own overregulated structures of bureaucracies and guidelines.
Welt am Sonntag: What would you want to see in a modern politics oriented toward the future?
Wolfgang Reitzle: Let me dream for a moment. What Germany needs is a nonpartisan consensus for a nonideological new beginning. Germany has enormous potential—a few examples: We need the public to have a widespread understanding of the economy—shouldn’t we have economics as a requirement in the schools? Our bureaucracy has to be reduced, the administration has to be digitalized, and it should begin to view the citizen as a customer. What would it be like if all our actions were based on the recognition that prosperity depends on effort and achievement? How can we strengthen trust in the power of markets—and then reduce the public sector below 50 percent? How about a binding ten-year plan for investment in forward-looking infrastructure! Now that Europe has not been able to compete with the internet giants, let’s at least try to take the lead in the “Internet of Things.” If we want to get the economy going quickly after the pandemic, we need to reduce taxes for companies. Let’s use the potential of the military to build up competency centers for the development of cyber and drone technology. And personally I think it is very important to develop new, nonideological policies for energy and transportation.
Welt am Sonntag: Do you think that politics is being run by ideologues and true believers?
Wolfgang Reitzle: In any case there is no longer any openness toward technology. Regarding mobility, it is actually all only about the climate—in reality, Green politicians and journalists sympathetic to them want to impose battery-driven electric cars, with no alternative, and put an expiration date on the internal combustion engine. The proposition that a combustion engine might work on synthetic fuel with no carbon dioxide emissions is excluded a priori.
Welt am Sonntag: Why is it excluded?
Wolfgang Reitzle: The internal combustion engine is treated as something that is in itself evil. But then one has to ask if the Greens are genuinely concerned with the climate or if they are not rather focused just on promoting the technology that they favor. Electric cars will surely be the future—but right now, using an electric vehicle in Germany is still more harmful to the environment than driving a modern diesel car: German electricity is simply too dirty because a large part of that energy comes from gas and coal plants. And nuclear energy, which produces no carbon dioxide, will be eliminated soon.
Welt am Sonntag: It is not only mobility that is supposed to be electrified.
Wolfgang Reitzle: No, it’s a matter of nearly all industrial processes. But where is this “green” energy supposed to come from? After all the billions of subventions, we only have a capacity of 125 terawatts of renewables in Germany, which hardly means that this volume of green energy can be produced when there is no wind or during the nighttime.
To support the electrification of all sectors, we would need to expand those 125 terawatts to 3,000 terawatts by 2050, for which we would need 330,000 wind turbines that would cover a quarter of Germany. So in the end, we will be taking energy from nonrenewable plants or importing it from the nuclear reactors of other countries—what a hypocritical energy policy.
Welt am Sonntag: It is not only the dreamers who are making the economics of the car industry difficult. The industry managers themselves are contributing as well by overlooking the trend toward electric cars, delaying digitalization, and ignoring the software revolution, without even mentioning the diesel scandal.
Wolfgang Reitzle: The German car industry will be able to carry out the transition to electric cars, self-driving cars, and mobility services—just look at VW. But electric mobility is being pushed with ever-shorter timelines, regardless of the fact that companies cannot reassign hundreds of thousands of employees overnight. Tesla is always presented as a shining example: Elon Musk is indeed a genius, but a genius especially in appealing to fantasies.
Welt am Sonntag: Musk and fantasies?
Wolfgang Reitzle: Tesla is years ahead of German producers in terms of software and operating systems. This is the crux of the technological advantage. However Musk has not really built a car company but rather a system to collect transportation data. That is what is driving the stock value. But also the fact that producers of conventional vehicles are forced by law to purchase carbon credits from Tesla. So in 2020, the classic competitors paid Tesla about 1.6 billion dollars, and Musk could turn his own operations loss of 862 million into a positive balance of 721 million—welcome to the market economy.
Welt am Sonntag: If German car producers are still making too few electric vehicles, that isn’t Tesla’s fault.
Wolfgang Reitzle: No. Of course the car industry made mistakes. It lost the trust of politicians through the diesel scandal. As a result, the French were able to push their emissions legislation through Brussels to support their own low-performing cars, while making things more difficult for German manufacturers with their dominant premium vehicles. The whole thing is a political game, and carbon dioxide is just the pretext.
Welt am Sonntag: In 2030, the car industry will make a quarter of its sales and nearly half its profit from software and digital services. Would it not make more sense if producers here were to develop a shared operating system, rather than each of them investing billions in new IT projects?
Wolfgang Reitzle: In fact, there is considerable competition in software development, and maybe one or the other German car company should consider joining up with a competitor to develop a standardized software architecture. In ten years, around the world there will be maybe five operating systems for cars. For it to be worthwhile, you need at least 20 million cars. That’s why cooperation among several producers would definitely be worthwhile. The future of the car industry will be decided in the next two or three years, as well as the question as to who loses out and turns into a box builder for software firms. They’ll be able to find someone who will do the manufacturing on the cheap. In the meantime they are betting on automatic and autonomous driving, so the passengers can use Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple for hours. And that is how they make their money.
Welt am Sonntag: Mr. Reitzle, thank you for the discussion.
