http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,598945,00.html
[...]
SPIEGEL: Sometimes it's a nasty game. In 2005, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman announced a 25 percent return for the company while at the same time saying it would lay off more than 6,000 employees.
Plattner: Objectively speaking, he was completely right. His bank needed those returns in order to stay globally competitive. He just expressed it badly. It's something that's understood almost everywhere around the world, just not in Germany, where one sometimes comes across a confused social romanticism.
SPIEGEL: What's utopian about people wanting a just society?
Plattner: Is German society unjust, then? Ever since the economic miracle of Ludwig Erhard, we Germans have been entrenched in a capitalist business system, on top of which we have super-imposed the cloak of a "social market economy"…
SPIEGEL: …which we find reasonable, because it softens the effects of extreme capitalism.
Plattner: I completely agree. But there's a feeling in this country that we don't want capitalism any more, and instead want something different, something nicer. But nothing better exists, despite all the system's weaknesses and its dark sides. East Germany showed us where a communist planned economy would lead us. Some people have started talking fondly about those times.
SPIEGEL: For example, the actor who played the police detective on the TV crime show Tatort, Peter Sodann, [now running for the largely ceremonial post of German president on behalf of the Left Party in an election next year] said: "I won't let the GDR be taken away from me."
Plattner: For me, that's just curious. On the other hand, the man is a candidate for the office of president of the republic.
SPIEGEL: In surveys, fewer and fewer Germans say they consider democracy to be the best political system, or capitalism to be the most sensible economic system.
Plattner: That really bothers me too. The only thing to do is take a look at the world, Cuba for example.