How Germany built prosperity for all, how it unraveled — and what America can learn.
The Story in Three Sentences
American media keep asking what happened to Germany — Kaput (2024) and Broken Republik (2025) told readers the miracle is dead. This book argues from inside the German economy that the model never failed: its economic constitution was overruled, decision by well-meaning decision. It distills that constitution into a six-question test and hands it to American readers — for the next tariff round, the next platform merger, the next energy bill.
Fact Sheet
Title: Capitalism with a Constitution: How Germany Built Prosperity for All, How It Unraveled — and What America Can Learn
Author: Joachim Enders · Foreword: Jörg Bode, former Economics Minister of Lower Saxony, Germany
Format: ~26,000 words, 29 chapters in three parts; endnotes fact-checked against primary sources, deliberately citing dissenting views
Status: Advance reader edition (e-book + audiobook read by the author) at us-edition.zukunftsformel.org; American edition of Die Zukunftsformel (Germany, 2025); US publication rights available
Signature idea: the Economic Constitution Test — six questions that grade any policy decision against the rules of a durable market order
About the Author
Joachim Enders is a German economist (Diplom-Volkswirt, University of Mainz) and strategy consultant who has advised leading industrial companies for twenty-five years, including automotive clients living the transformation the book describes. He leads a company in the German carsharing market, coaches a village soccer team — and is an FAA-certificated private pilot whose airplane carries an American N-number, the vantage point that gives the book its narrative signature. He lives in Celle, Germany, and is bilingual and available for interviews in English or German.
“Instead of ordering policy, we got symbolic politics. Instead of rules, we got interventions. Instead of responsibility, we got costs shifted onto future generations. This book is a wake-up call.”
From the foreword by Jörg Bode
Story Angles
The anti-Kaput: the first book to answer the German-decline shelf instead of adding to it.
The test travels: six German questions applied to tariffs, Big Tech, and the American energy build-out.
The insider: a consultant who sat with the auto industry through the whiplash years — and a minister's foreword saying the quiet part aloud.
The pilot: a German economist who watches his country from the cockpit of an N-registered airplane.
