Introduction
How can you spread a doomsday mood when everything's fine and the quarterly figures of the German Federal Government regularly promise a surplus? Even former East Germany, the GDR, had only disseminated positive things to say about the state. Conversely, people in the west of the republic had mainly heard about the bad things happening in the east. Why should that be any different today? Most facts are freely accessible. However, they have to be interpreted and put into context. It's not necessary to recount a lot of new material. You have to know, interpret, link and possibly even compare information. Only then can it be evaluated. It was known, for example, that the automotive industry alone intends to lay off at least 50,000 workers in Germany in 2019. "Socially acceptable" this was called to make it sound upbeat. But the jobs are gone. "Economically viable" this ain't. It's, after all, the economy that has to bear the burden of a social system that pays the unemployed.
I'm not a clairvoyant - nor am I a futurologist. If that giant volcano erupts under Yellowstone National Park before this book is published, then the predictions made in this book will be false. But that's unlikely to happen.
Some people think they know what the world will look like in 100 years, wavering between their idea of utopia and dystopia. When I was growing up, one utopia could be found in the book "The Basics of the 21st Century". The author was Mr. Gustav Schenk. He extrapolated technology and physics to the present century. The approach was a technical-physical one. To him, as a scientist, it was obvious: Any development will follow logic, which it did at the time.
Great famines still existed forty years ago; reports on the "Biafra children" went around the world. This was taken up in the dystopian movie "Soylent Green", a portmanteau of "soy" and "lentils" - dyed green. It wasn't veggies but human flesh as it turned out. By the way, nutrition won't be a problem since a continuous yield increase and yield security could be achieved through the development of highly specific equipment. However, this is being slowly eliminated in Europe now.
The title of the book is "Germany's Freefall". When you jump from the 30th floor of a high-rise building, nothing will happen to you during the fall because you're weightless. It will, however, become "slightly problematic" when you hit the ground. When I predicted the opening of Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2013 (planned for 2011) to be 2022/23, it merely elicited a head-shaking response. Unfortunately, I was pretty correct (It was late 2020 now - a 9 year delay). If only 4% of the defects there could have been eliminated by 2012, then it would have been completely unrealistic to achieve the remaining 96% by 2013. Mathematics is real and has nothing to do with "pessimism" or "optimism".
In mid-May 2019, a headline from the German newspaper "Die Welt" declaring "Why the German Prophets of Doom are Wrong" asked: "Where does this German Angstlust (or "delight in fear") come from?" The first sentence of the article reads: "The unemployment rate is lower than ever before..." But this isn't correct: Germany has renamed more than half of its unemployed in a law: All those over the age of 58 who have not found employment after one year are to be dubbed the "underemployed". Why was such a law passed, and why does an article with this kind of information start with the word "unemployed?" Exactly this kind of thing demonstrates that things are going downhill because these sorts of arithmetic gymnastics should normally not be necessary. In a separate chapter, I will unravel exactly these kinds of statistics in detail because it shows the care used to manipulate them. By the way, this seems to be what Germany does best. Other statistics also reveal that an enormous amount of effort was put into presenting figures in a way that achieves an optimal manipulative effect.
The above reports, which gloss over current politics with "crooked figures", were published just prior to the German elections. Nobody cares two hoots about them. In contrast, bogus slogans and pseudo-arguments to be found in YouTube videos ("Rezo") "The Destruction of the party CDU" virtually trigger a government crisis.
When you, like me, predict company bankruptcies ("Cassandra syndrome") and back these up with the facts (losses in the millions combined with technical incompetence) you aren't taken seriously. A friend had predicted another bankruptcy with these words: "All he does is jet around the world - that can't go on very much longer." The company owner had later declared that he "had trusted the wrong people". I could have told him that beforehand. I knew some of them personally: managers who just blew a lot of hot air (wind power).
Therefore, you can predict the future with relative certainty when you look at it from a neutral, critical point of view and without prejudice at the current time. The sense of reality of the people involved doesn't change. It allows you to conclude how things will continue. Incidentally, this company owner is starting all over again now and is blindly trusting in his Chinese counterparts. People don't change and, apparently, they can't be helped.
I was wrong predicting the insolvency of another company (it occurred 10 years later). It had squandered millions in the triple digits. This exacts its revenge when the company doesn't happen to be Volkswagen. An insolvency at VW could place the German state of Lower Saxony, which holds large blocks of its shares, in financial straits. That's a risk we know from the banks: Whenever a company is in really bad shape, the taxpayers have to foot the bill. How big this risk is yet to be carefully...
