As Merkel’s Power Drains, the Threat to Europe Grows

From her seventh-floor office in Berlin, Angela Merkel is surrounded by uncomfortable relics of Germany’s 20th century history. To the east lies the Reichstag building, hollowed out by fire in 1933 in an act of arson the Nazis used as a pretext to cement Adolf Hitler’s hold on power. Next door stands the Swiss Embassy, one of the few buildings in the city center to survive World War II almost intact. The line of the Berlin Wall marking the Cold War boundary with communist East Germany is just to the north.

The barbarity represented by those daily reminders has underpinned Germany’s you-first approach to neighbors and allies since the federal republic was created in 1949. Germany even gave up its fabled deutschmark, a totem of hard-earned postwar affluence, to forge a monetary union and satisfy French and British fears over its post-reunification muscle.