Maybe after seeing how relatively well they’ve come through this compared to my folks back home (I’m American), my neighbors will fight harder to keep the things that take some of the sharper edges off life in Germany.

The first part of the message is completely valid observation, and historically, there's even longer European tradition of the development of the wide-ranging "protections" of the population that is surely attempted to be destroyed by some forces (present practically in almost all the political parties) in the most recent times.

A crisis like this proves that these kinds of destruction are actually making the society as a whole significantly more fragile or brittle.