Germany’s protracted crisis may manifest largely at the level of parliamentary politics, but the deeper context for these political ruptures is the transformation of the country’s economy beginning with reunification in the 1990s and accelerating in the mid-2000s with the creation of the eurozone and deregulation of the German labor market. Though the size of Germany’s economic pie grew over the last two decades, it did so at the cost of reordering the class structure, relegating millions of workers to insecure, temporary, and low-paid employment as their only long-term prospect. This has created a new working poor, the existence of which is highly lucrative for capital while also exerting moral pressure on other workers to stay productive and not rock the boat, lest economic turbulence cause the low-wage sector to expand even more.