Politikverdrossenheit?

p. 180:

[The] electoral volatility [...] led to much talk of German disillusionment with politics as such - Politikverdrossenheit. Indeed the Society for the German Language proclaimed Politikverdrossenheit to be the word of the year for 1993.

Yet the word to characterise this book it is not. And as the writing at hand has aimed 'to introduce the reader to the legacy that present-day Germany has inherited from both East and West and from the period before 1945', so it has kept up to its promise.
For the student of Germany in an European and international context that I once was, this was a tale full of reminders, but also (new) insights. Some samples, p. 126:

The attempt to defend democracy through the curtailment of civil liberties was the most acute of the moral dilemmas the Brandt government faced.

- [concept sounding familiar?];
p. 145:

Buffeted by the oil shock, challenged by the New Left's rejection of the post-war consensus, undermined by terrorism, and divided by the measures to combat it, the FRG of the Schmidt period might well have seemed on the verge of destabilization. It certainly became more difficult to govern, though the talk then current of 'governmental overload' and 'ungovernability' seems in retrospect greatly exaggerated. What is true is that from the early 1970s onwards West German governments not only faced more complex policy challenges, but met greater institutional obstacles. [...] The increasing weight of the checks and balances has become a familiar feature of German politics and the Kohl government has been subject to them particularly since unification. But at the time they were a new factor and appeared to add to the burdens of maintaining the FRG's stability.
None of these difficulties seems to have diminished the legitimacy of democracy West German style. [...]

All in all, this is a collection of crisp analyses over half a century of German history - and not its mildest half, one should note - done in less pages than one would expect, but with more attention for detail than what appearances would have suggested.
It's also an abounding fountain of history's lessons considering not only explanations for solutions to crises (domestic and otherwise), but also the general context, and putting things into perspective.
Here's the book's OUP page and details: German Politics 1945-1995, by Peter Pulzer.