German soldiers learn a fixed sequence for leading: Lagefeststellung, establishing the situation, then Planung, planning, then Befehlsgebung, giving orders, and finally Kontrolle, checking. The cycle then starts again. Its essential features were already set out in an army regulation of the Reichswehr in 1924. It is taught from the training of noncommissioned officers up to the general staff course. The German Life Saving Association teaches a similar Führungsvorgang. Its training sheet defines it as ein zielgerichteter, immer wiederkehrender und in sich geschlossener Denk- und Handlungsablauf, a purposeful, recurring and self-contained sequence of thinking and acting.
The V-Model
The German state has its own standard for running IT projects, the V-Modell. The first version was developed in 1986 by the federally owned company IABG for the Ministry of Defense. In February 1991, it was made the development standard for software in the Bundeswehr. A civil version followed in 1993, and in 1997 the V-Modell 97 was recommended across the federal administration. The current form, V-Modell XT, appeared in February 2005. It defines the activities of a project, the documents they must produce and the roles responsible for them. The private sector now uses it as well.
Retirement at 67, Scheduled Years Ahead
A law of April 2007 provided that Germans would retire later. The standard retirement age was to rise from 65 to 67, step by step from 2012 to 2029. The law contains a table, year of birth by year of birth. Someone born in 1947 reaches the standard retirement age at 65 years and one month. Someone born in 1958 reaches it at 66. Someone born in 1963 reaches it at 66 years and ten months. Everyone born in 1964 or later retires at 67. Each person could look up their date years in advance.
Five Months Without Trains
The Riedbahn between Mannheim and Frankfurt is one of Germany’s busiest rail lines. Deutsche Bahn adopted a plan for its complete renewal in September 2022 and awarded the contracts in September 2023. The line was then closed completely from 15 July to 14 December 2024. It reopened on 14 December 2024. Some tracks and a branch line followed by 24 December, and the new ETCS signaling only in 2025. The cost rose by 195 million euros, or 15 percent, to 1.5 billion euros. The Riedbahn is the first of about forty such renewals planned on the same model by 2030.
Eight Years to Move the Capital
On 20 June 1991, the Bundestag voted 338 to 320 to move parliament and government from Bonn to Berlin. Then came the law. The Berlin/Bonn Act was passed on 26 April 1994. A separate agreement gave the Bonn region 1.437 billion euros in support for the years 1995 to 2004. Bonn kept the title Bundesstadt, federal city, and six ministries kept their main seat there. The move itself was carried out in stages, and most of it took place in the summer of 1999. Since the autumn of 1999, Berlin has been the seat of parliament and government.
Forty-Nine Days in Rothwesten
The currency reform of 1948 changed West Germany’s money overnight. From 21 June 1948, only the new Deutsche Mark was valid. The details had been worked out in secret. From 21 April to 8 June 1948, eleven German financial experts met in a closed building in Rothwesten near Kassel, behind a fence guarded by US military police. For 49 days, they drafted the regulations and the logistics of the reform. On the Allied side, most of the work was done by Edward Tenenbaum, who was 27 years old.
After Euro 2000
At the European Championship of 2000, the German national team went out in the group stage. The German Football Association responded with a plan for the long term. It expanded its talent program to 390 training centers for players aged eleven to seventeen. From 2001, youth academies were introduced in the Bundesliga, and from 2002 they were mandatory in the second division as well. Today every club in both leagues must run one to obtain its license. The academies were long seen as the origin of the golden generation that won the World Cup in 2014.
Thinking From the End
In the Chancellery under Angela Merkel, her method had a name: Die Dinge vom Ende her denken, thinking things through from the end. Her biographer Ursula Weidenfeld described the steps. Merkel commissioned reports, called ethics councils, watched public opinion and kept her own intentions to herself. Weidenfeld summed it up as Warten, Schweigen und dann erst Handeln, waiting, silence, and only then action. Merkel herself tells a story from school. In a sports lesson, she stood on the three-meter diving board and jumped only when the school bell had already ended the lesson.
The Airport Mediation
Frankfurt’s western runway opened in 1984 after years of protest, some of it violent. When the airport planned its next runway, the state government of Hesse took a different route. In 1998, at its suggestion, a mediation group was formed with environmental groups and the towns under the flight path, to discuss the expansion with an open outcome. In January 2000, the group supported a new landing runway, on one main condition: ein striktes Nachtflugverbot zwischen 23:00 und 5:00 Uhr, a strict ban on night flights between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. The airport accepted the ban when it applied for the runway. The state’s approval of 2007 still allowed seventeen night flights. In October 2011, days before the new runway opened, the state’s highest administrative court imposed the night ban.
Bishops and Laity at One Table
In 2018, a study on sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church was published. In March 2019, the bishops responded with a unanimous decision for a verbindlichen Synodalen Weg, a binding synodal path. The bishops’ conference and the Central Committee of German Catholics, the lay organization, shared responsibility for it. In its assembly of more than 200 members, lay members voted with full rights alongside the bishops. A decision also needed a two-thirds majority of the bishops. It met five times in Frankfurt between 2020 and 2023. Rome objected. In July 2022, the Holy See declared that the Synodal Path was nicht befugt, not authorized, to oblige bishops and the faithful to accept new forms of church government.