Are Germans afraid to succeed?

On the face of it, isn't this an odd question? If you look at Germany from the outside, what do you see and hear?
A hugely successful country, at times the export champion of the world, with free (mostly) education and a vocational training system other countries envy.

What is this talk of being afraid to succeed?

Today's version of the claim Germans are afraid of success comes in an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine about college attendance rates of children from non-academic homes.

The figures are solid. Children from a home where parents went to college will attend college at a rate of about 75%. Young people from "working class" families make up 25% of new students. The latter is much higher than 50 years ago, when only 10% of workers' kids made it into colleges and universities.

Th working class kids are merely afraid to succeed, that's the response we have seen so often in our time in Germany that we feel the need to comment.

Afraid to succeed is, in our opinion, the great cop-out after having exhausted all the obvious and some not so obvious answers. One of the details in the article mentions that medical doctors and lawyers are overwhelmingly from the same family backgrounds - a doctor or lawyer family - plus other academic parents. Working class children tend to go into engineering and liberal arts.

To make a long story short: the upbringing as a working class child is very different from that of a middle class child. It reflects the German class system, a system less egregious than the British, but nevertheless a formidable one.
Severely damaged as a result of losing two wars, the German class system did not go away, and the last 25 years or so have seen it regain strength.

Another afraid to succeed blurb came from Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Facebook fame. Presented in Germany as a German in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel]s statement that German computing folks are afraid to succeed received wide press coverage. That coverage ignored the fact he was taken to the U.S. by his parents at age one.
By the same standards, you could call Sandra Bullock a German actress because she had a German mother and spent lots time with her grand parents in Germany.

The German computing industry has its poster child SAP, one of the top players in enterprise software, and it has many smaller companies which are successful but go unacknowledged in an industry hyped like no other.

Those German internet entrepreneurs who get most media attention are what we have called in the blog the "me too" internet folks. The German content industry is hamstrung by a  world class "cease and desist" industry and the strangest of copyright laws, the "ancillary copyright" governing tiny text snippets.

German internet wizards are not afraid to succeed, they face much greater obstacles along the way.

Our last example of the victim blaming afraid to succeed comes from politics. State legislatures and chiefs of state government have been slapped with this label when they complained about having very little freedom in how to run a state. In the political arena, a nearly synonymous explanation is found in "consensus oriented".

Much of the German government and affiliated power structure is in fact carefully parceled out by political party. Not a single position of relative power and good earnings in that structure was awarded on merit as loudly proclaimed. This is not unique to Germany by any means but it helps create the impression of a consensus oriented society - even though it is a manufactured consensus at best.
German state governments are not afraid to succeed when it comes to spending money on irresponsible projects like the Stuttgart train station (part state financed), a billion dollar philharmonics building, a half billion dollar old race course rescue -- all of them touted as successes.

Let's say it is less about afraid to succeed and more about how you define success in the first place.