Ken Early: To travel by train for Euro 2024 is to see a textbook case of neoliberal capitalism’s endgame
The new slogan was “More rail for everyone!” but a better one in terms of expectations-management would be “Deutsche Bahn: Welcome to Hell”.really is a lot of fun except the bits where you are getting to and from the games. That is unfortunate because on game days you can expect to be spending most of your day getting to and from the game.
But when foreigners complain about the terrible trains they’re not telling Germans anything they don’t already know. The tourists are only glimpsing the DB darkness, the Germans were born in it, moulded by it ... It’s a fact that the transport system in Germany compares badly to what fans encountered in Qatar in 2022 or even Russia in 2018, but the poor impression this has made on foreigners matters less to the Germans than the fact they have to live this nightmare every day.
Members of Germany's national football team wait on a platform at the main train station in Erfurt, eastern Germany last month after a training session. Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images “Coping”, for Streeck, is the perpetual willingness to adapt and improvise in response to a state of permanent emergency, propped up by the doctrine that life is “an ongoing test of one’s stamina, inventiveness, patience, optimism and self-confidence – of one’s cultivated ability to live up to what has become a social obligation to struggle with adversity on one’s own and in eternally good spirits”.