Germany a “socialist nightmare”

Jacob Helibrunn visits the beautiful city of Freiburg im Breisgau and discovers that Germany has been taken over by left-wing socialists:

But if Vauban (by Freiburg) is an environmental paradise, it may also
exemplify the rather-complacent political orthodoxies that are sapping
the vitality of a country that is urgently in need of renewal. It has
something of a nanny-state feel to it since cars are basically
verboten—and where they aren’t, as in Berlin, anarchists have been
torching them nightly. Even as some of Vauban’s residents fume about
capitalism and state oppression, they lead highly regulated lives that
depend on draconian government laws mandating everything from energy
efficiency down to almost the final turn of the water faucet. Its
residents seek liberation from the free-market ethos by circumscribing
their freedoms. It’s all very German. It’s also become somewhat
problematic.

 WHAT IS really
happening from the borders of the Saarland to the hinterland of Saxony
is the takeover of Germany by the Left. If America became enraptured
with the global-capitalism gospel of the past two decades, Germany has
experienced the opposite. The country has long been held captive by the
communist program: first, through its division during the Cold War;
then, as it tried to join its ailing East with its far healthier West.
The Germans’ failure to make themselves whole and equal again leaves
their country increasingly insular and provincial.

The Horror! And Freiburg is the center of solar-energy innovation.  But renewable energy is one of those "socialist" projects that Heilbrunn abhors. Why can't Germany excel in creating something of real value like we do in the US – something like Credit Default Swaps. Oh wait, I guess he didn't visit the Deutsche Bank Head Office in Frankfurt.  But Heilbrunn is not the only American observer who is depressed by contemplating the German masses crushed under the yoke of socialism.  The Wall Street Journal has found that Germany, and Europe in general, is morally and intellectually bankrupt:

Why do Europeans so often find themselves trapped in this sterile
dialectic of populist obscurantism and technocratic irrelevancy?
Largely because those are the options that remain when other modes of
analysis and prescription have been ruled out of bounds. "All European
economic policies are the cultural derivatives of one dominant, nearly
totalitarian statist ideology: the state is good, the market is bad,"
says French economist Guy Sorman. The free market, he adds, is
"perceived as fundamentally American, while statism is the ultimate
form of patriotism."

The editors of the Wall Street Journal  can see only one positive development in the German landscape – namely, Guido Westerwelle's war against the poor in Germany.  Guido reminds these editors of the glory days when Ronald Reagan polarized the US with racist attacks against "welfare queens in Cadillacs." 

In painting Germany as a socialist state in crisis, Heilbrunn and the editors at the WSJ are willing to ignore all of the current data which shows that Germany is outperforming the US in every significant metric – including a much lower rate of unemployment.  See the Atlantic Review for more detailed – reality-based – analysis of German economic success.