To the historian and the philosopher surely nothing about the historical process is more baffling and inexplicable than the role of fortune, Providence, or sheer luck. Luck defeats cunning and rewards the stupid. Luck makes the irrational rational. Those who think they understand and grasp the process of history suddenly discover they have embraced an illusion. Historians may make the past meaningful; they rarely, if ever, make it totally understandable.
Nowhere has historical good fortune played a more important role than in the history of Germany since 1945. Guilty of crimes that invited the vengeance of God and man, defeated and crushed, her economy halted, her capital liquidated and her spiritual and moral resources dissipated, Germany has risen in the course of fourteen years to become the most powerful and dynamic state in western Europe. The historian can elucidate the process by which this happened; he cannot fully understand it.
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