But somebody has to do it.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Germany knew how important it was in Europe but kept its mouth shut about it (while pulling the strings behind France’s back). Those days of semi-credible falsche Bescheidenheit (false modesty) are over, sort of. Now they continue to refuse to lead openly, but still pull the strings. Only France isn’t standing there anymore.

As shown once again during yesterday’s latest “rescue” of Europe, Germany makes the decisions while France still holds the press conferences, but the absurdity of this show is starting to lose a lot of its regular viewers. This formula has jumped the shark, in other words.

But as long as major contradictions keep on coming, everybody here in Germany is happy. You remember, don’t you? Germany fled into the EU to protect itself from itself (there was something about World War II a few years ago). Now it dominates Europe through its sheer economic power anyway, but still psychologically/socially/institutionally traumatized (and loving it), refuses to openly take the role history has assigned it. It prefers instead to publically turn its back on Europe (nobody on the street in Germany truly undestands or much cares about Europe) and concentrate instead on more important things at home like solar energy, local elections and not hurting coalition partners’ feelings.

In other words, Germany may clearly call all the shots now, but it still refuses to lead. Which is kind of clever, if you think about it. When everything ends up going tango uniform later, it wasn’t Germany’s fault.

Mit politischer Macht verhält es sich wie mit Millionen von Euro auf dem Konto: Man spricht nicht darüber.