Europe’s Debt Crisis Has Become a German Identity Crisis

“Germans, we don’t look to see what’s in our own national interest,” says Frank Schäffler. “We’re drunk with Europe.” Schäffler, a member of the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of Parliament, is speaking on the phone from his home district of Bünde. In two sentences he highlights the bedrock assumptions of postwar German politics: Greater European integration is always and necessarily a good thing, and Germany has no interests of its own. “As a good German,” Schäffler explains, “one has to be a good European.”

The debt crisis in Europe has become a crisis of German identity. The rising likelihood of a Greek default has left the Continent’s most powerful nation with an unpalatable choice: back away from its insistence on responsibility and monetary stability and agree to help purchase Greece’s sovereign debt; or hold fast and risk the collapse of the euro. To a considerable degree, the future of Europe’s banking system, its monetary union, the fate of the global economy, and Barack Obama’s Presidency now rest on how Germans decide to act. And to understand why Germans are struggling with the role they’re being asked to play in the 21st century, you need to understand that they are still very much attempting to atone for the 20th.