Reichs and Wrongs. Perhaps the last thing one wants to read about just now is another German “crisis of identity,” one of those tortured national monologues in which our Teutonic friends wrestle with their guilt, their lingering grievances, their burdensome sense of destiny, etc., etc. Prosperous, admired, reunited at last—mightn’t the great German nation finally put its tragedies, crimes, and age-old quarrels firmly in the past, and quietly tend to its own affairs?
Alas, not a likely prospect, as we’re reminded by Amity Shlaes’s Germany: The Empire Within (Farrar, Straus, 263 pp., $19.95), one of four or five recent books on Germany’s latest “awakening.” A sleepy, self-content Deutschland is about as easy to imagine as a suddenly restless Denmark sweeping south to seize half of Europe, or brooding darkly over “the Danish Question.” If anything can be predicted of the next European crisis or upheaval, it is that the Germans will be right at the center.
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