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Aren't you just sick of hearing

German success stories?

They always win the football,

they're the first on the beach,

and while Britain faces cutbacks

and eye-watering debts, just look how well the Germans are doing.

We need, frankly, to have a more Germanic approach.

Employment is at record levels and it's a world-beating exporter.

What's more, the Germans earn more than us AND work fewer hours.

So how do they do it?

I'm Justin Rowlatt, a journalist.

..Do you speak English?

And I'm Bee Rowlatt, a writer.

And we're on a mission to discover the secret of German success.

It's like kid heaven.

We're taking the kids with us and we're going in.

Yes, there'll be beer and sausages, but this is no holiday.

We're going to work...

Just one text! No, sorry. No?

No, you're here to work.

..live...

It's too loud. What, WE are too loud? You're too loud.

..and play...

Red Army! Red Army!

..just like average, ordinary Germans,

because our challenge is to become German!

# Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens... #

Daddy, I want soup! You want soup? You've got...

Hold on, you've got food!

'I live in North London with my wife, Bee, and our four children.'

I'm not. We are, in a week or so.

They have socks in Germany, do they?

They probably have better socks than we've got!

There's quite a kind of tradition of, you know, two World Wars,

one World Cup, you know, that kind of attitude to Germany in Britain.

And I think it'll be quite interesting to see what

the Germans think of us, you know.

I mean, we've obviously suffered terrible industrial decline

since the Second World War. The Germans have done pretty well.

They're still a major industrial nation.

It'll be quite interesting to see what they think of Britain.

Put those... OK. Can you put them in there for me?

Oh, yeah. Oh, thank you.

I'm actually half German, but I never grew up there.

I grew up in this country.

My dad's German, but my parents separated when I was little.

I don't want to be disloyal. You know,

there's nothing wrong with being half German, so it's not a problem.

But maybe there is a kind of... There are a few kind of...

sort of Teutonic qualities that she has.

I can't believe I'm sharing this,

but I quite like sitting on the toilet with the door open

and I'll just have a merry exchange with anyone who passes by.

Justin thinks that's really German.

I just thinks that's the way I grew up.

I'm going to miss you.

'What's also really German is small families.

'The German birth rate is low and falling,

'just 1.4 children per couple.

'So the first step in making us German

'is to leave our eldest two, Eva and Zola, at home with Granny.'

I'm going to miss them, but it's quite nice to have a break sometimes

from all the loudness and everything.

I think it's going to be brilliant

and I'm not going to miss them at all.

'First off, we need somewhere to live.

'We've moved to Nuremberg, in the heart of Bavaria.

'It's famous for its gingerbread...

'..its sausages, and its Nazi history.'

Hello. Hello, are you Mrs Holler? Yes, yes.

'We've rented a flat from Mrs Holler.

'We Brits may be obsessed with buying property, but Germans aren't.

'More than half of them rent, compared to just a third of us.'

That's really nice. I really like this flat. Oh, it's really warm.

'And I can see why. Rents are cheap.

'This two-bed flat costs 135 euros a week.'

Kinder, kinder? Kinder bed. Kinder bed.

One kinder bed. Two kinder beds...

In Britain, I think we're obsessed with ownership,

and here in Germany, they seem happy to rent.

And they rent for, like, you know, a really long time.

She was saying people would stay for 10, 20 years in a rented property.

In Britain, there's this real kind of pressure

and expectation that if you can, you'll buy, and I...

Do you know what? I actually think it seems a lot healthier.

That's the one we looked at earlier today. Wow!

'It means the Germans don't saddle themselves with huge debts.

'In Britain, the average family owes £53,000, including mortgages.

'In Germany, it's just under £30,000.

'The kids are making themselves at home

'and I'm expecting our first German visitor.'

DOORBELL RINGS

Hiya. Hi, I'm PJ. PJ!

'PJ is an advertising guru.

'His ad agency specialises in knowing exactly what the average

'German does every minute of every day.'

We did quite a lot of research on how

the typical German lives, actually.

I brought you some things

to learn about a typical German in this area.

'Und damit auch die Durchschnittsdeutschen...'

And according to the film, the typical German is called Muller,

the nation's most common surname,

and lives in a 1970s apartment block...

..like this, a flat just like ours.

Sabina is the most common female name, so that's me.

And here's me. Thomas Muller is the most common male name.

The Mullers only have one child, unlike us.

Germans certainly get up early,

20 minutes earlier than the average Brit.

Let's talk about tomorrow morning.

Are you prepared to go a bit earlier than usual?

I don't know. 6:23? 6:23? That is early!

That's when you have to get up.

And then, the good thing is, you can take a bit of time in the bathroom.

The video goes into extraordinary detail.

No surprise that I pee standing up.

But then, I sit down and read

the sports section of the paper.

German men sit on the loo

for twice as long as German women.

And when it comes to loo paper,

the Germans are folders, not crumplers.

In fact, I get 24.6 minutes in the bathroom.

I get to sleep a bit longer

and spend 28.1 minutes in the bathroom.

With two little children

being in the family and not in school,

the typical German wife would not go to work, actually.

Really? Spend time at home with the kids,

doing, you know, housework.

Also, to teach the kids proper table manners, that is...

That's important to Germans, is it?

That is valued highly, actually, yeah. Yeah, yeah. OK.

There's a certain amount of good behaviour, and how you do things

in a certain structure and order still is very important.

'PJ gives us a German rule book which he wants us to follow,

'a checklist, telling us everything,

'from the amount of housework to our daily pork intake.'

I just don't believe that most women want to do four hours

and 11 minutes of cooking, washing and cleaning. I'll give it a go.

I'll definitely try. I'm going to do my best.

It doesn't look fair, though, does it? It doesn't! You get to sleep

and then you get to go out and eat loads of potato, pork, white cheese.

I get brown bread, you get white bread.

You get the same amount of pork, same amount of potatoes

and same amount of beer as me.

OK. All right. But your life looks normal.

To me, that just doesn't look like a normal life.

But that could be that I'm not typical. I don't know...

Half an hour in the bathroom is a long time, isn't it?

We've rented an average German car.

A VW Golf is right there, bang in the middle of

what the Germans would drive. It's kind of rock solid,

it's not flash, but it's kind of well-made

and, of course, they buy German,

which is quite interesting, isn't it?

Germany has one of the most successful car industries

in the world, and here, success certainly starts at home.

Two thirds of all the cars on the road are German.

Will, do you want to choose an egg?

Look! Which one was yours? Is this one yours, Elsa?

Time to discover a bit more about Nuremberg's history.

Kaiserburg, the Imperial Castle.

It was one of Medieval Germany's most important centres,

but most of the Old City was destroyed

by Allied bombing during the War.

Since then, the city has been rebuilt

and many of the ruined buildings restored.

Really sharp roofs, haven't they?

The city was a centre of the Nazi regime.

The Nazi Mayor called it Germany's most German city

and it is here that Hitler held his infamous Nuremberg Rallies.

Hello. Hello.

'We meet historian Hans Christian Taubrich.'

We are on the former Nazi Party rally grounds,

a huge area, covering some 11 square kilometres. My goodness!

It was created in 1933,

when Hitler designed Nuremberg

as the city of the party rallies.

So the high-ups, the leaders of the Nazi Party, would be here,

looking out on this kind of...

It's a vast parade ground, isn't it?

So I'm standing where Adolf Hitler stood? Yes.

I wonder, looking at this, cos obviously,

it's partly a lorry park, isn't it? Yes.

And I wonder whether that doesn't reflect the, kind of,

ambivalence about what you do with a historical site like this.

This is not a memorial site.

Now, the whole grounds in the last decades

have always been used for most profane purposes.

For example, parking lorries here,

race cars are touring around here,

we have festivals - Bob Dylan had been playing here,

and the Rolling Stones.

In Britain, we still seem to be obsessed by our victory

in the Second World War.

It's so interesting to see here at the Rally Ground how Germany

is still wrestling with the ghosts of its past.

You can't help but feel that losing the war