The Duden defines Fehlerkultur as an open and constructive way of dealing with mistakes. The Duden examples show how the word is used. People speak of developing a Fehlerkultur in a company or a party. They complain that a Fehlerkultur has been lost, and they want to revive it. The oldest example shown in the DWDS dictionary comes from Die Welt in 2000: wir brauchen also eine andere Fehlerkultur beim Lernen, so we need a different error culture in learning.
Sayings About Mistakes
Irren ist menschlich — to err is human.
Aus Fehlern wird man klug — mistakes make you wise.
Wer nichts macht, macht nichts falsch — whoever does nothing does nothing wrong.
Sich blamieren — to embarrass yourself in front of others.
Der Versager — the failure, said of a person.
Man Errs as Long as He Strives
In the “Prologue in Heaven” of Goethe’s Faust, the Lord speaks to Mephisto about man: Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt. Man errs as long as he strives. A little later in the same scene, the Lord says that a good man, in his dark urge, still knows the right way: Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange, / Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt.
Managers Who Keep Their Mistakes to Themselves
In 2023 the consulting firm EY published a Fehlerkulturreport, an error culture report. It surveyed 200 managers and 800 employees in finance, the car industry, mechanical engineering and transport. Of the managers, 64 percent said that in the past two years they had not admitted their own mistakes, or had admitted them only in part. Of these, 68 percent feared it would harm their careers.
Punish Transgressions, Not Errors
Michael Frese, a business psychologist at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, puts the rule this way: Fehler sollte man nicht bestrafen, Übertretungen hingegen schon. Mistakes should not be punished, but transgressions should. In a study published in 2005 with three colleagues, he found that a culture of managing errors was linked to better company performance. The finding held in a second study, using data on changes in profitability from 47 German organizations. A 2018 article in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse sums up the research on error culture in one sentence: Theorie und Praxis liegen weit auseinander. Theory and practice lie far apart.
A Ranking Nobody Can Trace
German media often repeat that Germany ranks 60th of 61 countries for error culture. The comparison is attributed to the psychologist Michael Frese. The figure appears in articles from 2016 to 2026, but the articles do not name the study, its year or what exactly it measured. They describe the measure as tolerance of mistakes or as error culture. They also disagree on the details. One says Germany shares last place with Singapore. Others say only Singapore scored lower. The number is widely repeated, but its source is hard to find.
“This Mistake Is Mine Alone”
On 24 March 2021 Chancellor Angela Merkel withdrew the Osterruhe, an Easter lockdown with extra days of rest. The federal and state governments had agreed on it during the night to Tuesday, a day earlier. Merkel said the idea had been a mistake. Then she said: Dieser Fehler ist einzig und allein mein Fehler. This mistake is mine alone. She asked all citizens for forgiveness, and she added: Denn am Ende trage ich für alles die letzte Verantwortung. In the end, I bear the final responsibility for everything.
The Relotius Case
The statute of Der Spiegel says that every fact in the magazine must be correct: müssen unbedingt zutreffen. Its documentation department, with more than 80 staff, is considered the largest of any news magazine in the world. On 19 December 2018 Der Spiegel made public that Claas Relotius, one of its most prominent writers, had invented large parts of his reports. His colleague Juan Moreno had noticed contradictions, checked the facts and reported his suspicion to the heads of the section. They reacted with skepticism. Der Spiegel called the case a low point in its 70-year history, and a commission examined why its checking systems had failed.
“We Will Have to Forgive Each Other a Great Deal”
On 22 April 2020, early in the Covid pandemic, Health Minister Jens Spahn spoke in the Bundestag during government question time. He asked for understanding for hard decisions made under uncertainty. He said: dass wir miteinander wahrscheinlich viel werden verzeihen müssen in ein paar Monaten, that in a few months we will probably have to forgive each other a great deal. Years later, the sentence was still quoted in the dispute over his purchases of face masks.
Doctors Write About Their Own Mistakes
In January 2008 the Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit, an alliance for patient safety, published a brochure called Aus Fehlern lernen, learning from mistakes. In it, 17 doctors, nurses and therapists described mistakes, most of them their own. One of them was Günther Jonitz, president of the Berlin medical association. The foreword asks that such events not be kept quiet, and that the search for someone to blame should not come first. The Bild newspaper reported on Deutschlands mutigste Ärzte, Germany’s bravest doctors.