How Germany Keeps Giving Up Its Best
Part One. A Man, an Island, and the Equation That Changed Everything.
There is a sentence I have not been able to stop thinking about for weeks. It did not come from a philosopher. It did not come from a historian or an academic journal. It came from the comment section of a YouTube video about studying mechanical engineering in Germany. A user posted it three months ago, and it reads like this.
Once I finally spoke to the professor. In my third attempt.
Let me explain what the third attempt means in the German university system. When a student fails an exam twice, the university sends a formal warning letter to their home address. If they fail a third time, they are permanently barred from studying that subject anywhere in Germany. The third attempt is the last chance. It usually takes the form of an oral examination conducted directly with the professor.
So this student had spent several years in a highly competitive engineering program. He had failed examinations, he had received warning letters, he was standing at the edge of being permanently expelled from his field. And it was only in that moment, that final high-stakes confrontation, that he had his first real conversation with the person who had been evaluating him the entire time.
Nine words. And they contain the entire German educational system.
I want to sit with that sentence for a moment before I go anywhere else with it. Because I think it is one of the most precise diagnoses of a structural problem that I have ever encountered. Not from a policy paper. From a comment section.
Why I Begin with Heisenberg.
I want to start somewhere else, though. I want to start in a small rented room on the second floor of a house on a rocky island in the North Sea. The island is called Helgoland. The year is nineteen twenty-five. And the young man who has just arrived is twenty-three years old, sunburned in reverse, with a face so swollen from hay fever that his landlady asks whether he got into a fight the night before.
His name is Werner Heisenberg. He is an assistant professor at the University of Goettingen. His supervisor, the physicist Max Born, has sent him to the island to recover. Helgoland is far from flowering fields and meadows. The sea air, Born figured, would help.
Heisenberg describes his room in his autobiography, which carries the wonderful title The Part and the Whole. He writes that his room on the second floor gave a magnificent view over the lower town, the dune behind it, and the sea.
In that room, Heisenberg spent two weeks memorizing the West-Eastern Divan by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He already knew Faust by heart. He knew all five piano concertos of Beethoven by heart. And somewhere between the sea and Goethe, he found quantum mechanics.
Not as a side project. Not accidentally. As the natural result of a mind that had been shaped by everything a civilization had to offer. Literature, music, philosophy, mathematics. All of it present at once, in the same head, on the same island, looking at the same sea.
What He Actually Discovered.
The uncertainty principle is one of those things almost everyone has heard of and almost no one has thought about carefully. And the reason it matters here is not the physics. It is the philosophy.
Ernst Peter Fischer is a German science historian and one of the best explainers of difficult ideas I have come across. He describes what Heisenberg actually claimed like this.
Heisenberg did not just say that we cannot measure the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time. He said something far more radical. He said that the electron does not have a position until someone asks. Why should an electron have a position? A position is something human beings invented. The electron has a charge, it has momentum, it has spin. But a location is a concept we imposed on it. The electron does not know where it is until we measure it, because it is our act of measuring that creates the location.
Think about what this means. We do not observe the world as it is. We observe the world we question. The reality we describe is always, in part, a product of our description.
Fischer calls this the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century. Not the Second World War. Not the atomic bomb. Not the moon landing. A twenty-three-year-old with hay fever on a North Sea island, asking whether an electron really needs to know where it is.
The Columbus Moment.
Heisenberg described his discovery with an image I find remarkable. He said he felt like Columbus. Not the Columbus who found an outer America, but a Columbus who found an inner one. And the thing that made Columbus special, Heisenberg said, was not courage in any abstract sense. It was that Columbus did not turn back even when the provisions were no longer enough for the return journey. He kept going. Because he knew there was something to find.
On the night the key insight came to him, Heisenberg climbed out to one of the rocks on the island and sat looking at the sea. Fischer describes the moment using a phrase from Goethe. Die and become. The moment when a person realizes they have created something that is larger than themselves.
What Fischer Says About Germany.
Fischer says something in his lecture about Heisenberg that stopped me completely. He says it almost in passing, but it lands hard. He says that one of the most depressing realizations in German scientific history is that we let Americans and British writers tell the stories of our greatest figures. He says we are giving away the treasures of our own people.
The biographies of Heisenberg written in America are not interested in what he achieved philosophically. They are not interested in the fact that he knew Goethe by heart, or that he understood physics and art as a single unified pursuit. They want to know one thing. Did he help build the atomic bomb?
And popular culture gave the American audience the answer it was looking for. The television series Breaking Bad introduced an entire generation to the name Heisenberg. As the alias of a drug manufacturer.
I want to be clear. This is not an accusation aimed at America. America does what it does, and it does it brilliantly in many ways. This is an observation about Germany. We produced this man. And then we stopped telling his story.
Part Two. The Decline. How a Country Abandons World Leadership.
In the first part I talked about Helgoland. About what becomes possible when a civilization trusts itself enough to educate a person completely. Literature, music, mathematics, philosophy. All of it together, in one mind.
In this part I want to talk about how that was possible. And then how it ended.
The Peak Years and What Made Them Work.
From roughly eighteen eighty through the early nineteen thirties, Germany was the undisputed center of world science. Not one of the leading countries. The leading country.
The historian Uwe Spiekermann has documented this carefully. German-language scientific books were a major export product. By the late nineteen twenties, between thirty and forty percent of all scientific books printed in Germany were sold abroad. German was the world language of science. Not English. German.
German scientists won more Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation through the nineteen thirties. Half of all Nobel Prizes in chemistry. A third in physics. A fifth in medicine.
Heisenberg belongs precisely to this window. Nobel Prize in physics in nineteen thirty-two. Age thirty-one.
And Stanford University, today consistently ranked among the top two universities in the world, was deliberately modeled on the German university system. Gumbrecht, the Swiss literary scholar who has taught at Stanford since nineteen eighty-nine, says this plainly. America is in some ways a footnote to European history that suddenly became the main text.
A Taxi in Berlin.
Before I describe the decline, I want to tell one more story. It sounds like something from a novel, but it is documented history.
Werner Heisenberg is traveling from Copenhagen to Leipzig to begin his professorship. The route passes through Berlin. He has to get out at one train station and catch a connection at another. For the distance in between, he takes a taxi.
In that taxi sits a fifteen-year-old boy named Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker. Von Weizsaecker would go on to become one of the most significant German physicists and philosophers of the twentieth century. On that particular day, the boy is on his way to visit Albert Einstein.
Einstein, Heisenberg, and the fifteen-year-old von Weizsaecker. All in Berlin on the same day. Two of them sharing a taxi.
Von Weizsaecker said something later about the war and the atomic bomb that I have never forgotten. He said, in rough terms, that by some providential combination of circumstances it had not been possible for him to work on the bomb. Because the Third Reich simply did not have the resources.
Providential circumstances. A lack of resources. That is the strange hinge on which some of the most consequential moments of history turn.
Three Waves of Destruction.
How does a country lose world leadership in science and research? Not in a single moment. In waves.
The first wave came in nineteen thirty-three. The physical expulsion. Albert Einstein left Germany and never returned. Max Born left. Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, John von Neumann. All of them ended up in America. The intellectual capital of German physics migrated to Princeton, to Chicago, to Los Alamos. And helped build what made America the dominant scientific power of the second half of the twentieth century. Stanford. The Manhattan Project. The foundations of Silicon Valley.
Heisenberg stayed. In nineteen forty-one he traveled to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who had been his mentor. Heisenberg wanted to discuss whether the physicists of the world could collectively refuse to build the bomb. The conversation failed. Bohr was terrified. He passed word to the Allies. The Manhattan Project began in earnest. The British playwright Michael Frayn wrote a stage play called Copenhagen about this meeting, because historians were never able to establish with certainty what was actually said. When the historical record runs out, only the poetic truth remains.
The second wave came in nineteen sixty-eight. The ideological transformation. The university as a place of inquiry became the university as a political battleground. Gumbrecht dates it precisely. The humanities were inflated during the seventies and eighties, those pseudo-revolutionary years. The Humboldtian ideal, which said that education was the formation of a complete human being and that science was a search for truth, was replaced by political instrumentalism. The historian Spiekermann shows that this tendency toward ideologizing the academy was already present in the Weimar Republic. Nineteen sixty-eight completed what had begun much earlier.
The third wave has no single date. It is structural and ongoing. Gumbrecht says from his office at Stanford that in Germany it is not permitted to be the best. Salaries rise with seniority, not with achievement. Professors cannot be dismissed. The civil service framework freezes everything in place. Spiekermann calls it an achievement-hostile professional bureaucracy and a mediocrity-friendly educational federalism. Structural. Unlikely to be reformed within the existing political framework.
Siemens, the Nuclear Industry, and the Abandoned Legacy.
Now I want to talk about something most people have forgotten or never knew. Germany was not just a participant in the development of nuclear energy. Germany was at the front.
Siemens established a nuclear energy working group in nineteen fifty-three. In nineteen sixty-nine, together with AEG, they founded the Kraftwerk Union, or Power Plant Union, which built almost all German nuclear power plants and exported reactors to Argentina, Brazil, Switzerland, and Iran. The German Konvoi reactor series of the nineteen eighties was considered the safest pressurized water reactor design in the world. Germany was simultaneously working on a fast breeder reactor that would have used uranium forty to fifty times more efficiently, and on a fuel reprocessing facility.
This was not imitation of American technology. This was German engineering leadership at the world level.
And then, within fifteen years, all of it was systematically dismantled. The reprocessing project was stopped. The fast breeder was abandoned. In twenty eleven, Siemens sold all of its nuclear energy assets to the French company Areva for one point six two billion euros.
The German nuclear technology now belongs to France. France, which never left the nuclear industry, sells electricity generated by those assets back to Germany. At market prices.
In the first half of twenty twenty-five, German households paid thirty-eight euros and forty cents per one hundred kilowatt hours. The European Union average was twenty-eight euros and seventy cents. In twenty ten, Germany paid twenty-three euros and seventy cents. Germany is now the most expensive country in the European Union for household electricity.
Part Three. Irreversible. Or: Once I Finally Spoke to the Professor.
I want to come back to the sentence I started with.
Once I finally spoke to the professor. In my third attempt.
The student in the video describes his mechanical engineering studies at a German technical university with the dry composure of someone who has understood the system and decided to stay in it anyway. He mentions the eighty-three percent failure rate in certain examinations, which he calls acceptable. He mentions that there is one professor for every eight hundred students. He mentions that in his fifth semester, students were required to draw gearbox diagrams by hand. In sixty minutes. Because that is how engineers work. In nineteen seventy-five.
The three hundred and thirty-one comments under the video are a study in themselves. The dominant theme is not admiration for the rigor. It is the pattern that everyone recognizes. Selecting out instead of educating. The high failure rate is not a failure of the system. It is the system. The failure rate is the product. It is the proof that standards are being upheld. That someone, somewhere, is in charge.
What Stanford Does Differently.
Gumbrecht describes Stanford as the place where people discover their own strength. The application process does not ask what can you prove. It asks what can you contribute.
Condoleezza Rice, who served as United States Secretary of State and is a professor of political science, was accepted to Stanford because she had been nearly good enough for the Olympic figure skating team as a teenager and was a near-world-class Brahms pianist. Tiger Woods attended Stanford. John McEnroe attended Stanford. All of them still had to maintain a minimum grade point average or they would have been banned from competing in sports.
At Stanford, professor salaries rise when students give good evaluations. They can fall if students fail in large numbers. The professor is not a gatekeeper. The professor is a coach.
One professor for eight hundred students. Versus: professor salaries tied directly to whether students succeed.
Heisenberg, before he went alone to Helgoland to think, had spent years in intense intellectual exchange with Born, with Bohr, with Einstein. The solitude that produces insight is only possible when the relationship between teacher and student has already built the foundation. The conversation has to happen first.
Once I finally spoke to the professor. In my third attempt.
The Chancellor and the Word That Explains Everything.
In March of twenty twenty-six, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz held a press conference at which he said something I need to share with you.
For context. Merz leads the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right governing party. He had been, for years before becoming chancellor, a vocal critic of the decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants, a decision made under his predecessor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in twenty eleven. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had just called Germany’s departure from nuclear energy a strategic mistake and announced that Europe wanted to participate in what she called the global renaissance of nuclear power. A journalist asked Merz what this meant for Germany.
He said this. It will not surprise you when I tell you that I personally share the assessment of Ursula von der Leyen. However, there are no consequences for Germany, because previous German governments had already decided to exit nuclear energy. That decision is irreversible. I regret it, but that is how it is.
I regret it, but that is how it is.
That sentence contains everything.
The chancellor of Germany knows the decision was wrong. He says so out loud. And he does nothing about it. Because a previous government made the call, and he has decided that previous government decisions cannot be revisited.
This is not stupidity. It is something more troubling than stupidity. It is informed paralysis. Knowledge without the capacity to act.
A German commentator put it simply. Merkel called everything she did not want to change inevitable. Merz calls everything his predecessors did irreversible. Different word, same escape hatch.
Meanwhile, fifteen European Union member states have formed a nuclear energy alliance. Germany is not among them. Germany was not represented at the Paris nuclear summit. The cooling towers of the Gundremmingen plant were demolished on Merz’s watch, in October of twenty twenty-five. Once the concrete is gone, the engineers have retired, and the institutional knowledge has dispersed, the decision does become difficult to reverse. Not because of physics. Because of will.
The Line That Runs Through Everything.
I want to draw the line that runs through all three parts of this episode.
Heisenberg on Helgoland. A person carrying everything a civilization gave him. Goethe, Beethoven, Columbus, the freedom to think without interruption. He discovers quantum mechanics because he refuses to stop asking.
Siemens and the Power Plant Union, from nineteen sixty-nine to nineteen eighty-nine. Germany takes this same spirit and applies it industrially. Builds the safest reactors in the world. Leads in fuel cycle technology. Is at the front of a technology that now powers thirty percent of the European Union.
Nineteen thirty-three, nineteen sixty-eight, and then in long structural waves. Germany gives away this position. Through expulsion, through ideologization, through institutional paralysis.
Merz in twenty twenty-six. The chancellor says he regrets it, but it is so.
And the mechanical engineering student. Once I finally spoke to the professor. In my third attempt.
What Heisenberg Would Say.
Near the end of his life, Heisenberg wrote a final essay. He called it Thoughts on the Journey of Art Inward. He described how the natural sciences and the arts were making the same movement. Away from the surface representation of things, toward the inner structures. Physics was going into the interior of matter. Painting was going into the interior of form. And he suggested that each arrival at an endpoint is simultaneously a new beginning. That the completion of one branch of knowledge opens the possibility of a new kind of thinking, which can only be sensed at the moment of its emergence, not yet described.
Those are the last words we have from Werner Heisenberg. Written in nineteen seventy-six, the year of his death.
Fischer ends his lecture with a line spoken by one of Heisenberg’s students at the presentation of his collected works in Munich in the mid nineteen eighties. The student said: Most of the time, a discipline is larger than the person who practices it. In the case of Heisenberg, one can probably say the opposite. This man was larger than the discipline he practiced.
I believe that is true. And I believe it applies in a wider sense.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that the state of a system is not fixed until you ask the question. The electron has no position until someone measures it. The world stays open as long as we do not declare it irreversible in advance.
The question of whether Germany still knows the way back has not been answered.
That is the beautiful thing about open systems.
Thank you for listening. If this episode gave you something, pass it on to someone who is ready to ask the question.
Sources and Further Reading.
Werner Heisenberg: Physics and Beyond. Encounters and Conversations. Harper and Row, nineteen seventy-one. The English translation of Der Teil und das Ganze. The source for the Helgoland account.
Ernst Peter Fischer: Portrait Werner Heisenberg. Lecture available on YouTube, channel Urknall Welt und das Leben. The source for all Fischer quotations in this episode.
Uwe Spiekermann: Vergehender Glanz: Hochschulen und deutsche Wissenschaft waehrend der Weimarer Republik. Blog essay, twenty nineteen. Historical analysis of German scientific decline.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Interviews with Roger Koeppel on the Stanford campus. Weltwoche Daily, February twenty twenty-six. The Stanford perspective on German education.
Siemens and the Kraftwerk Union: Wikipedia article on the Kraftwerk Union AG. Udo Leuschner’s documentation of the rise and decline of German nuclear competence at Siemens.
Merz statement: Press conference, March twenty twenty-six, reported by Euronews, Apollo News, and multiple German outlets. The statement on irreversibility is directly quoted.
The student comment: YouTube video: pov you are a below-average mechanical engineering student. Comment by user Sciron two eight five zero.
Germany’s Anti-Americanism Exposed. The argument in this episode is part of the larger case made in the book about the transatlantic cultural divide.
Andreas Paul John
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