The prosaic walk-into-a-bar joke poking fun at national idiosyncrasies is popular among most Europeans, with one exception. Germans, steeped in an ethos of moral repentance, are typically self-effacing about what their homeland has contributed to the West. But for the value-neutral realms of car-making, liberal rationalism, and technocracy, they remain loath to put themselves forth as an example for others—particularly their European neighbors.
The historical wellsprings of this unassuming psyche are well known—Germany is the country perennially coming to terms with its past—but there is a paradox about German self-effacement and the way the country is increasingly perceived elsewhere. Even as the poster child of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History has built a political culture since reunification around post-national universalism, Germany’s frictions with the rest of Europe have not abated, but rather swelled. Its internal politics and regional leadership have set the tone for everything from the Eurozone’s response to the 2008 crash to the EU’s irregular welcoming of over one million asylum-seekers in 2015 alone. Apart from Germany acing the coronavirus challenge, German fits of helm-taking amidst European storms keep eliciting suspicion rather than trust. Germans may see in this a natural extension of Angela Merkel’s leadership, but the notion that a power vacuum at Europe’s heart is for Germany to fill is precisely part of the mixed legacy that postwar Germany is staked on transcending. If Germany has faded from the German mind, though, it looms ever larger in the minds of its neighbors.
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