Soon after Germany’s peaceful unification in 1989–1990, Fritz Stern unforgettably described it as Germany’s “second chance.” Europe’s economically dynamic central power had had its first chance in the years before 1914. “It could have been Germany’s century,” as Raymond Aron once remarked to Stern. It blew that chance in two world wars and the Holocaust. Now it had another.
.. there are so many ghosts in the German language. As the former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has noted, you can have a conference of young leaders, but junge Führer…? I find people often slip into English to use the word “leadership.” So, because of Hitler, the palette of contemporary German political rhetoric is deliberately narrow, cautious, and boring.