That's a really moot point because the legacy banking industry there got heavily affected.
The nation's weird affinity for pen and paper is nothing but Luddism. Once you have experience living in a country with good e-governance you'd roll your eyes at Germany and their love for faxes.
But there are areas where it definitely isn't just Luddism, especially in healthcare. See what happened in Finland [1]. Yeah, you can break into a GPs office and steal the physical data quite easily, but that doesn't scale, hacking a centralized service does.
(Sure, there are solutions which would be similarly resistant against hacks as paper - like saving the data on the actual insurance card. But those are not implemented - it has to be a centralized (often SaaS) solution, where hacks can scale nicely)
Well I did not notice whatever affected the banking industry of my country, which at least for me makes my point.
Good e-governance is incredibly difficult, which explains our love for faxes.
E.g. Microsoft faced a lot of scrutiny in the congress hearing in June, some people go as far as saying MS is a danger to the national security of the USA.
If the US, which is the home of these companies and can put pressure in ways the German government cannot, still can‘t force them to deliver secure systems, a fax ( at least an encrypted one) looks pretty attractive.
When the EU parliament still used faxes, the US at least hat to break into the offices and manually install components to the machines to get access.
And yet Estonia, a former impoverished communist country significantly less wealthy than Germany did it, and did it well. But no, Germans always have a laundry list bingo of FUD excuses as to why it can't possibly work. The bingo usually starts with "but m'uh privacy!" even though BAMF, Schufa and every law firm and government agency remotely interested in you can find out everything about you if they want to fine you for something.
1.Estonia started more or less from scratch after 1990. Building a new system based on modern standards is easier than reforming one that is working under full load.
2. Estonia is much smaller than Germany, and afaik much more centralised.
Estonia did a lot of things right, but countries like Britain, France and Germany can learn little from Estonia. The results just do not translate.
3. The German system as it is, is designed to make it slow to change. Even if hard right AFD would get the majority of votes in the next election, during one legislative term they could not change the system a lot. To do this, even the absurd long Merkle reign was not long enough.
3. might sound like a disadvantage, and it certainly is for the Germans, BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent.
There is a joke, that claim that the German anthem actually is:“ Stability, stability über alles“
> BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent.
Kind of an unrelated point. Using faxes and paper based burocracy won't save you from crappy politicians implementing crappy policies or a government going crazy.
Why are Germans so obsessed with correlating that crappy burocracy automatically means more political stability as some lame excuse for maintaining the inefficient and crap public burocracy? You can also have political stability with efficient burocracy. The key is political accountability and separation of democratic powers, to maintaining stability, nothing to do with using digital or paper for burocracy.
Germany is NOT politically stable. I would also prefer that when (not if) the next Nazi party wins an election, it has a hard time getting my data.
Germany seems to have not learned very much the first time, though, because it still keeps a hierarchical registry of everyone's religion and home address, and everyone in the bureaucracy has a "just follow orders" mentality.
> Even if hard right AFD would get the majority of votes in the next election, during one legislative term they could not change the system a lot. To do this, even the absurd long Merkle reign was not long enough.
This is a widespread misunderstanding. The AfD could drastically change the system if it had the sufficient number of seats (or a willing partner). There are very different pathways depending on what your goal is. Merkel was a conservative who had no interest in "changing the system a lot" (quite the opposite). The AfD wants to drastically change things like the immigration system.
It's a bit like how in the US the SCOTUS, thanks to the Trump appointed judges, effectively ruled that the President has a lot more power and is largely above the law (more so than these things already used to be the case before) but the Dems and Biden think the ruling is bad and thus refuse to do anything with that. They could also easily change the tune of the SCOTUS by appointing more judges but refuse to do so to avoid setting a precedent (as if the GOP needed it). "Centrists" often value decorum above succeeding at their stated goals.
There's an episode of Die Anstalt that plays through how the AfD could functionally abolish most of the constitution and democratic system within a single term if you want to know the specifics but it mostly comes down to abusing rules that exist because the system was created under the assumption that everyone would play fair (which is ironic given how things like the 5% hurdle are justified).
> There is a joke, that claim that the German anthem actually is:“ Stability, stability über alles“
I'm not sure where you heard that joke or whether this is a translation of the joke but the German anthem does not actually contain the words "über alles". The German national anthem consists of a single stanza of the Das Lied der Deutschen, the first stanza of which begins with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles".
BTW it's a common misunderstanding that the "über alles" ("above all") part is why only the final stanza was used by West Germany for its anthem. However that was originally meant as an appeal to German nationhood and unification "above" the monarchs although it was later adapted as an expression of national superiority. The actually problematic part comes later in the first stanza where it names rivers as boundaries - not only did that include East Germany (a separate country) but also parts that were no longer part of either of the two countries.
As for why the second stanza didn't make the cut, I guess it was just a weird one to start a national anthem with as it celebrates German women, fidelity, wine and song and their "old respected fame" which at this point probably felt anachronistic and also wasn't as strong as the third stanza's "unity and justice and freedom" (with "unity" also having a new meaning when East Germany had become a separate country). That said, personally as a German I think it's a terrible anthem, especially given the melody was originally written to celebrate the Kaiser (first of the Holy Roman Empire and later of Austria-Hungary).
Personally I would have preferred the original East German anthem Auferstanden aus Ruinen, at least textually. It's also not great but at least it's better than digging through scraps to adapt an outdated poem set to a monarchist hymn.
> even though BAMF, Schufa and every law firm and government agency remotely interested in you can find out everything about you if they want to fine you for something.
This isn't true, IMO. German administrative offices in general don't talk to each other without your permission, with exceptions like the police. This is also the reason why it's e.g. a giant pain to change your name in Germany - everyone has their own independent database. Can you maybe clarify, please?
BAMF has no data of German citizens ("Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge", Federal Ministry for Migration and Asylum Seekers).
Schufa is a private company which only gets data from other companies, not the government. If you don't allow a company to give your data to the Schufa (which, to be fair, you have to do for many things), they cannot legally get the data (and in this case you could force them to delete it via GDPR).
German administrative authorities don't even have compatible databases. Like, if you go from Munich to Berlin, they have to basically enter your data manually. The software of the local municipalities (Einwohnermeldeämter) have no common API, and up until a few months, there wasn't even a unique ID for every citizen which could be used as a key in databases.
Law firms only can get some data if a court allows it.
If you get e.g. a ticket for speeding, and you didn't drive your car, but your spouse did and you don't tell them who the person in the driver seat on the picture is, there is nothing they can do (except forcing you to, from now on, keep a log book of who drives your car). They can't just call your local municipality and get the ID pictures of your spouse or something.
The nation's weird affinity for pen and paper is nothing but Luddism. Once you have experience living in a country with good e-governance you'd roll your eyes at Germany and their love for faxes.