I’ve seen some nasty politics in various corporate jobs but never close to the level I saw in Germany and which my German coworkers and other Germans I knew found normal. In the US you might see a lot of infighting but when it reaches the point it’s destructive to the company it generally gets squashed. In Germany that wasn’t even a factor. People would basically just go “I’m going to take so and so down” and then go off and do it and there were no repercussions. If a project tanked completely, if the customers didn’t get their deliverables, if the company lost money (shrug) well Person A won and Person B lost and that’s how it goes. You can imagine how destructive that gets when Person A and Person B are higher level managers and Person A destroys Person B’s entire department causing all their projects to implode and leaving a pile of employees in the rubble.

Germany has a very generous PTO culture. The company I worked for in Germany offered 6 weeks paid vacation and 6 weeks sick leave per year and my understanding is that was not uncommon. There were people I worked with who had not taken any time off for years because if you went on vacation you could return to find someone had stolen your projects, your credit, even dismantled your department while you were gone. I’ve worked places in the US where the employees were actively hostile but I’ve never worked anywhere that people were regularly afraid to take time off for fear of what their coworkers would do while they were gone.

It was a hell of an experience. I have no interest in doing it again.

I clearly have not worked every job in every country so this is based (obviously) on my experience and that of my partner as our discussions with the people we worked with and other Germans and expats we knew.