The worst nightmares of Europe’s sleeping giant are coming true all at once
Being a Germany watcher in the early 21st century can often feel like being an expert on ancient Greece: You kind of missed all the exciting bits. Alas, that seems to be changing. At the same time an economic cyclone is threatening to wreck one of the world’s more deceptively combustible societies, Germany is also emerging as the fulcrum of Vladimir Putin’s strategy to salvage his war in Ukraine by breaking Western solidarity—a gambit that now involves a credible nuclear weapons threat. For a country with an almost uniquely pathological fear of inflationary shocks, populist politics, and nuclear technology, the winter of 2022 is shaping up to be a horror show.
