Germany, Innovation, Skepticism - understand-culture

The Vocabulary of the Catch

Wo ist der Haken?
Where is the hook? Where is the catch? The Duden dictionary defines Haken here as a hidden difficulty.

Die Sache hat einen Pferdefuß.
The matter has a horse’s foot. It has a bad side that is not obvious at first.

zu schön, um wahr zu sein
Too good to be true.

die Vorschusslorbeeren
Advance laurels. Praise given before anything has been achieved. The word usually carries doubt.

die Schwarzmalerei
Painting in black. A description that is too pessimistic. The word marks the limit: listing risks is expected, painting everything black is not.

The Stress Test for Stuttgart 21

On 30 November 2010 the arbitrator Heiner Geißler announced his ruling on Stuttgart 21, the planned underground main station. One of its conditions was a Stresstest. Deutsche Bahn had to prove that the new station could handle a timetable with 30 percent more capacity in the peak hour, with good operating quality. The railway ran the test, and the Swiss firm SMA und Partner audited it. On 29 July 2011 the results were presented and discussed in public, again with Geißler as moderator. The auditors found that the required 49 arrivals in the busiest hour could be handled. Opponents argued that the railway had not kept to its own rules. One group of critics said that the station could handle only 32 to 38 trains in the peak hour.

Anyone May Object to a Patent

When the German Patent and Trade Mark Office grants a patent, the decision is not final at once. Under the Patent Act, jeder, anyone, may file an opposition within nine months after the grant is published. The opposition must be in writing and give reasons. One ground is that the invention is not patentable. Another is that the patent does not describe the invention clearly and completely enough for a skilled person to carry it out. The patent office then decides whether the patent is maintained, to what extent, or whether it is revoked.

The Analysis of Possible Failures

In the car and aerospace industries, and often elsewhere, a new product or process goes through an FMEA, a Fehlermöglichkeits- und Einflussanalyse, an analysis of possible failures and their effects. A team from different departments lists what could fail, where and how. For each possible failure it describes the consequences and identifies the causes. The aim is to avoid failures from the start rather than to find and correct them later. A general German standard for the method appeared in 1980 as DIN 25448. In 1996 the German Association of the Automotive Industry, the VDA, published an improved version. Since 2019 the car industry has used a common handbook of the VDA and its American counterpart, the AIAG.

Parliament’s Office for Consequences

Since 1990 the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag, the TAB, has advised parliament on scientific and technical change. The German word for its work is Technikfolgenabschätzung, the assessment of the consequences of technology. A committee of the Bundestag decides what the office studies. One of its reports examined what would happen in a large, long-lasting power blackout. It was presented to the Bundestag on 27 April 2011. The report found that all critical infrastructure would be affected and that a collapse of society as a whole could hardly be prevented. The consequences, it said, would equal a national catastrophe.

Weighing Technology

The TechnikRadar is a survey by acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering. The first edition, made with the Körber Foundation, appeared in 2018. In it, 35.1 percent of respondents agreed that technology creates more problems in the long run than it solves. 40.0 percent gave an ambivalent answer, and 24.6 percent disagreed. The report concluded: Trotz dieser Sorge lehnen die Deutschen Technik grundsätzlich nicht ab. (Despite this concern, Germans do not reject technology in principle.) They take a differentiated view and see that the risks are balanced by opportunities. The 2025 edition, based on a different survey, found that Germans judge each technology by its use. 70 percent called renewable energy useful and 12 percent risky. For genetically modified crops the figures were 23 percent useful and 57 percent risky.

Immune to Criticism

In 1968 the philosopher Hans Albert published his Traktat über kritische Vernunft, Treatise on Critical Reason. In it he argued that every attempt to justify a claim with final certainty ends in one of three ways. The justification goes on without end, or it runs in a circle, or it simply stops at some point. He called this the Münchhausen trilemma, after the baron who claimed he had pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair. Breaking off the chain of justification, Albert argued, amounts to an appeal to a dogma. German Wikipedia sums up its purpose: um den Behauptungen das Risiko des Scheiterns an möglichen Einwänden zu nehmen, to protect claims from the risk of failing in the face of possible objections. Since reason can err, theories must be exposed to criticism again and again. Albert was a leading voice of critical rationalism in Germany. In Germany, its best-known declared follower in politics was former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

He Does Not Play Dice

On 4 December 1926 Albert Einstein wrote to Max Born about the new quantum mechanics. He began with respect: Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr achtunggebietend. (Quantum mechanics commands great respect.) Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, daß das noch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. (But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing.) The theory delivered a lot, he wrote, but it hardly brought us closer to the secret of the Old One. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt. (In any case I am convinced that He does not play dice.) Until his death in 1955 Einstein tried in vain to find a deterministic theory behind it. Experiments later disproved his conclusions. But the observations behind his objections proved correct and fundamental. German Wikipedia says he was the first to put his finger in an open wound.

The Professor Who Drank the Cholera

The Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer did not accept that Robert Koch’s cholera bacterium alone caused the disease. In his view, the soil and the groundwater mattered most. On 7 October 1892 he drank a culture of the bacteria himself, to show that the bacteria alone were not enough to cause the disease. He suffered only mild diarrhea. Some of his students repeated the experiment and fell ill only mildly or not at all. Koch’s bacteriology prevailed all the same. Because Pettenkofer would not accept it, he became more and more isolated in science.

In Praise of Doubt

Around 1939 Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem called Lob des Zweifels, In Praise of Doubt. It begins: Gelobt sei der Zweifel! Ich rate euch, begrüßt mir / Heiter und mit Achtung den / Der euer Wort wie einen schlechten Pfennig prüft! (Praised be doubt! I advise you, greet cheerfully and with respect the one who tests your word like a bad coin.) He goes on: Ich wollte, ihr wäret weise und gäbt / Euer Wort nicht allzu zuversichtlich. (I wish you were wise and did not give your word too confidently.)