Germany Didn’t Melt Down—Its State Did

Two interrelated stories emerged in Germany after last week’s heat wave. The first: that it exposed the dangers of global warming. The second: that it exposed the dangers of a state and its infrastructure unfit for purpose and worryingly ill-equipped to withstand recurring heat events. 

Enduring the intense heat—which lasted for several days and at times reached up to 40 degrees Celsius—was not easy for many. But witnessing the country’s infrastructure collapse, or prove utterly inadequate, came as a genuine shock.

Take the news that most hospitals and nursing homes lack air conditioning or any effective cooling system, despite years of “heat planning”: “Most hospitals currently have to mitigate the heat using simple and largely ineffective measures, such as shading and fans,” said the deputy head of the German Hospital Federation in 2025. Matters haven’t changed. In some nursing homes, residents had to be evacuated from overheated parts of the building. 

Then there was the near-collapse of Germany’s decrepit public rail system, which I experienced firsthand.

It started with passengers who had booked a train for that hot weekend receiving emails politely encouraging them to cancel their trips free of charge—clearly in anticipation of the system’s impending breakdown. Those who didn’t, myself included, faced chaos: overcrowded platforms where thousands of people, including pregnant women and the elderly, had to wait hours for delayed trains. I only made it back to Berlin from Erfurt on Sunday evening, and with great difficulty: the train I had booked for 5:00 p.m. was cancelled, and every other train was either so packed that no one else was allowed to board—in one case, police had to physically stop passengers from getting on—or was cancelled outright.

We have plenty of statistics on the heat records set that day in various places, yet none on the scale of the delays and cancellations across the German rail network—in itself, surely, a symptom of the warped, interest-driven priorities of our administration and media. That leaves us relying largely on anecdotal evidence: reports from friends and social media. Within my own circle of acquaintances alone, several were left sitting on train platforms for many hours.

The heat wave was, or should have been, a warning about state failure causing unnecessary suffering. The heat itself was unavoidable; the failed response to it was a political failure.

In the official narrative, both the extreme heat and the suffering that followed from it are attributed to global warming—with humanity’s role reduced to that of a mere cause, a CO2 producer. Yet, arguably, most of the suffering was not due to the heat itself but to a different kind of human failure: bad planning and misplaced priorities that have led to a dangerous neglect of public infrastructure, along with a broader loss of nerve within the administration. The poor state of that infrastructure is one of the clearest signs of Germany’s decline. And it is in this context that the dire consequences of a heat wave become something close to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Signal failures and broken switches caused by extreme heat—that was the official explanation for the train chaos. But Germany’s rail network is prone to disruption even in mild weather (and it regularly fails passengers in snow and ice, too). Over 40% of long-distance trains run late, and even that statistic flatters reality: as Germany’s DW explains, “When a train is canceled, which happens often enough, it’s not included in the count, nor are trains that end their journey prematurely.”

On June 23rd, before the major heat wave even began, the entire rail system ground to a nationwide halt for more than two hours because of a software update error in its outdated GSM-R railway radio system—a disruption unprecedented since wartime. As people stood on platforms hearing of yet another delay or cancellation, they rightly asked themselves what had gone wrong over the past decades in a system that once prided itself on being among the best in the world. “Everyone talks about the weather—we don’t” was a slogan of Deutsche Bahn in the 1970s. 

One thing that clearly went wrong is that key investments in areas directly affecting citizens’ safety and well-being were gravely neglected—especially during the 2000s, when the economy was still supposedly booming.

In the case of German rail, this means, as DW explains, that there are stretches of track across the country where the rails, switches, and signal boxes date back to the 19th century. This despite the fact that after reunification, successive governments promised to modernise and streamline the old, deficient railway with plans even floated for a full or partial stock market listing (plans finally dropped after the 2008 financial crash). But with governments managing less and less, the system has grown ever more fraught, despite massive subsidies. Poor project management has produced scandals like Stuttgart’s decades-long construction of a new railway station, originally meant to be completed in 2019 but now unlikely to finish before 2031, with a cost overrun of roughly €10 billion.

Incompetence, poor planning, and an unwieldy, sluggish bureaucracy are one side of the problem. The other is a broader confusion of our times: as the state took on ever more tasks, from educating the public about healthy eating and the dangers of smoking to promoting the benefits of diversity and anti-racism, it invested ever less energy in what were once considered its central pillars: defence, infrastructure, schools.

And then there is the green-left ideology that has been allowed to take hold across nearly every part of society, which has also played a role.

One example is the deep-seated green hostility toward, even demonisation of, air conditioning, which has let hospitals and care homes get away with cutting costs on this crucial equipment. Germany’s state-run news services have run countless reports on the dangers of this modern device. One such report, from the equally hot summer of 2024, was titled “When Cooling Devices Heat Up the Climate” and lamented that “19% of Germans already have air conditioning” at home, even though, as the report explained, such devices only make global warming worse. During the most recent heat wave, too, state broadcasters again urged people to hang up damp cloths or roll up their carpets to stay cool, while, as journalist Jan Fleischhauer noted on Focus TV, the suggestion to simply buy an air conditioner was conspicuously absent.

The hypocrisy is stark. We’re constantly told to take the train rather than the car and to treat trains and hospitals as more essential, more virtuous, than cars or planes. Yet none of that professed reverence translates into actual care once heat—itself a consequence of the very warming these institutions claim to fight—puts them to the test.

The default assumption that people have only themselves to blame if they ignore apocalyptic warnings about a supposedly life-threatening heat wave and travel by train anyway is another example. Deutsche Bahn’s appeal to passengers to stay home for the weekend was not treated as yet another system failing to do its one job but was instead welcomed as sensible by pundits. There was a time when a train ride in a comfortable, air-conditioned carriage would have been the ideal way to spend a scorching day—a time when trains stood for a sense of freedom, even in Stalinist East Germany, where genuine freedom was otherwise in short supply. As Anna Funder wrote in Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, there is something to the pleasure of trains and the freedom of being suspended between two places.

Today, people are simply told to stay in their often stifling flats instead, with no regard for what that means for their plans—or for social life in general.

This mindset was on full display when one train that might have brought me closer to Berlin was declared overfull, because an entire carriage had been sealed off with red tape—much like during the COVID era. The reason: the air conditioning in that carriage had failed, and for safety reasons, loudspeaker announcements informed us, no one was permitted to sit there. 

“That’s at least a hundred more votes for the AfD,” one passenger joked, referring to Germany’s right-populist party. An engineer friend, when I told him the story, put it more bluntly: “organised irresponsibility.”

It felt almost like a mockery of the public that every overcrowded train pulling into the station—many without functioning air conditioning—still carried large stickers proclaiming it ran on green electricity: “To your destination on green electricity” is one of Deutsche Bahn’s slogans, alongside its repeated claims to uphold “social responsibility.”

The state-owned company seems to have compensated for its loss of planning and technical expertise over recent decades by doubling down on political and ideological messaging instead. Every advertisement is phrased in mandatory, gender-neutral language, and every station is decked out with rainbow flags. The billboards often feature contented, healthy, mostly young people with migration backgrounds: a demographic far removed from the broad cross-section of citizens who stood sweating on the platform in Erfurt that Sunday.

“Europe is a sick man who owes the greatest thanks to his incurability and the eternal transformation of his suffering,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft). To him, this was a good thing: a world in which individuals must create their own values and in which embracing life’s challenges becomes a source of intellectual vitality and growth. Echoing this, we might say today: Germany is a sick man—except its state fails to meet new challenges, let alone its most basic responsibilities. Instead, driven by a new “green” faith, it has enshrined values that harm citizens rather than serve them. The story that all of this is simply the result of global warming is a convenient distraction—one that citizens should reject.