As a German, this is my impression, people have the same talking points like preppers have in the US, even if they do not make sense here. There was a very small prepper movement in the 70s and 80s because of an astonishing survival guy, Rüdiger Nehberg [0], but it focused mostly on survival. With the internet the prepper movement was exported from the US all over the world.

There is a prepper component to the German society though - probably because nearly every war in the last two thousands years in Europe involved Germany, with the 30 years war being especially devastating (my hometown lost 80+% of it's citizens).

Germany is one of the few countries that is keeping a reserve of grain in secret stashes (rumored to be ~150) after the cold war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCdiger_Nehberg

Yep. If you look into what these people believe in you will notice it is largely just a rehash of US conspiracies.

Even that aside, do we judge the health of the US based on the opinions of preppers? What an inane article.

Honestly? I think many people do. Maybe not specifically peppers but other fringe groups. Though sometimes we pretend fringe groups are far larger than they actually are for long enough that they stop being fringe.

This comment reeks of Americentrism. Germans are perfectly capable of coming up with their own insanities.

Apparently the rest of the world is not as capable of coming up with their own insanities as Americans considering how QAnon has gone global.

Given all that Germany went through the past century (albeit if much of that was self-inflicted), it's hardly surprising that "prepper culture" will find fertile ground.

Actually, I would say that their history is an argument against the case that they are unstable.

The fact that Germany had such a massive political and existential crisis that led them to war and genocide is still very much present in their memory. National pride is still something that is quite frowned upon (it would make people very uncomfortable say, if you walk around the street with a German flag and it's not clearly due to a football game).

On the other hand, I would say countries that have not yet had any cultural or existential crisis in the last few hundred years as a nation are more at risk of collapse. Unless the country and culture is constantly changing and evolving and its population are similarly keen to routinely update the status quo, at some point it will fall out of sync with, people will get upset and wonder why things aren't like the good old days, find arbitrary reasons for this (identification of perpetrators and allocation of blame) and the upheaval will begin.

I'm not arguing that German society or politics are unstable, rather that there is a justifiable deep-rooted fear of instability at an individual level - which doesn't have to be rational.

Ok that I agree with - German conservative culture does value 'keeping everything as it is and not changing anything except when absolutely necessary'.