This was in striking contrast to her public image during the Greek debt crisis, when cartoonists depicted her in SS uniform resplendent with swastika. But those cartoons were for the masses only. The European political elites, all of them, happily voted with the Merkel government when it came to disciplining the Greek dissidents. They were as eager as the Germans to keep European monetary union alive. Merkel has left Europe to a political class to whom she has not only taught the trickery of two-level politics — national and supranational — but whom she has also, in part, brought to or kept in office. It is a political class that has bet its future on a Europe built around German hegemony.

In many parts of Europe, it is still considered a pleasant surprise to see a German who is soft-spoken with good manners, a wide heart and a big purse, smiling rather than shouting. This proved useful in her rise to becoming informal ruler of the continent. It also helped that she was a woman — someone who could be pictured as a nourishing mother as opposed to a punishing father.

But other things were more instrumental in her rise. When she took office, in 2005, major developments had recently taken place, and major decisions made, which certainly eased her career progression. In the Nineties, centrist political parties, of the Right as well as the Left, had been programmatically emaciated by the advance of neoliberal globalisation. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been unable to reconcile ever more rapid capitalist modernisation with its traditional commitment to paternalist social protection. This left an ideological vacuum that would give her unprecedented room far for manoeuvre once she became leader.

It also helped that her main rival, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was breaking apart over the Third Way social policy reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder — in particular Agenda 2010, which cut unemployment benefits and increased the pressure on people to accept job offers. Not only did the Agenda weaken the SPD for decades, but it spared Merkel, once she had ascended to the chancellorship, from having to implement the neoliberal reforms she had promised as opposition leader. Instead, she could allow the SPD, her partner in three coalition governments, to try to work out reforms to the Schröder reform, thereby reminding its constituents that it was responsible for policies they hated. Merkel, for her part, could claim for herself rising levels of employment and the balancing of the federal budget.

Rising employment and declining fiscal deficits weren’t just a result of the Agenda, though. Merkel’s third and most important long-term advantage was the work of the European heads of government who had created European Monetary Union in the Nineties. It is worth remembering that the common currency was a project not of German but of French and, to a lesser extent, Italian elites, who had hoped that a currency shared with Germany would force neoliberal restructuring in their own countries while protecting them from German financial competition. As it turned out, the former goal was defeated by domestic opposition, while the latter evolved into a Plan B: the southern member states would extract monetary and fiscal policy concessions from Germany in exchange for remaining in the union.

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For Germany, on the other hand, the monetary union was an economic godsend. It made the country the growth pole of Europe, the centre of a liberal economic empire. It also firmly established the preservation of the euro as Germany’s paramount national interest.

Unlike others in Germany, Merkel understood early on that preserving the monetary union would require side payments to its losers. These did not necessarily have to be financial but could be symbolic, for instance by occasionally allowing her colleagues on the European Council to outvote Germany. At home, Merkel had to overcome opposition to what the German public was always prone to see as excessive concessions to profligate southerners. To avoid conflict between domestic and European political needs, most side payments, especially the more expensive ones, had to be made under the counter, through complex operations deep in the bowels of that monster technocracy, the European Central Bank.

This does not mean that there were no tough negotiations on the magnitude of compensations due. Merkel tried to keep the price Germany had to pay as low as possible. But she also understood that the cost had to be sufficient to keep the currency union together. The transfers did not need to solve the continent’s structural imbalances. Their main purpose was political: keeping pro-EU governments in power by helping them fend off challenges from anti-euro parties and movements; providing them with the material and ideological resources to reward their supporters and thereby preserve ‘political stability’.

Very early in her tenure, Merkel realised that the central concern of German policy in Europe had to be defending monetary union against the disappointment of its original proponents. This required keeping alive the impression that the EU was run, if not by all members alike, then at least by a French-German “tandem”, and not Germany alone. Four French Presidents — Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron — had to be reassured on this score.

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French aspirations for ‘European sovereignty’ — meaning French sovereignty extended to Europe as a whole — and for a shared ‘strategic culture’  —meaning the EU adopting French military doctrine and ambition — Merkel could satisfy only symbolically. In reality, German national security remained firmly in the hands of the United States and NATO. To keep both the US and France happy, German foreign policy had to rely on rhetorical obfuscation and double-dealing, disciplines in which Merkel excelled. German troops were sent to both Afghanistan and Mali, and would have had to be sent to other places as well had the government not had the excuse that under the postwar German constitution, out-of-area military missions have to be formally approved by the Bundestag.

Domestically, Merkel’s main project was to build a hegemonic neo-bourgeois political centre, with her party in the driver’s seat. Early on, she decided on the Greens as ideal partners who could inject urgently needed new blood and close the generation gap from which older parties suffer in a world of fast cultural change. In the end, however, the alliance with the Greens failed spectacularly. Shutting down nuclear energy after Fukushima and later phasing out coal pleased the Greens but raised the question of how to secure a growing energy supply. The answer was making Germany dependent on Russian gas, to the dismay of the United States. Russian gas also is resented by the Greens, with their “value-driven” idea of foreign policy. While she went along with Western sanctions against Russia over its re-possession of the Crimean Peninsula, Merkel at the same time founded her energy and climate change policy on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project that her Green friends want to abort, as do her French friends, who are eager to sell their nuclear-produced electricity to Germany.

Similar difficulties and domestic-international complexities arose after Merkel’s decision to open the German borders for one million mostly Syrian refugees in 2015. While her refugee policy once more endeared her to the Greens and the new middle class, it divided her party and reinvigorated a then declining Alternative für Deutschland. It also forced her to negotiate an agreement on behalf of the EU with the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, in which Europe paid him considerable sums of money to act as the EU’s gatekeeper, preventing Syrian and other refugees from crossing into Europe. Also to control immigration, Germany insisted on a quota system in Europe for future refugees, knowing full well that it would be unacceptable to most other member states as it would involve a de facto Europeanisation of the German asylum regime. The result was passionate opposition in Eastern Europe and a split in the EU just as in the German electorate.

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Merkel’s migration policy was one reason why the recent Green advance was accompanied by a decline of Merkel’s own party such that in the 2021 election, the CDU/CSU became too small to form a successor government. In the end, the neo-bourgeois centre that Merkel had intended to build was to consist of a three-party coalition under the leadership of the SPD and a chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who as Merkel’s finance minister had done his best to learn from her. As the new government was sworn in, the outgoing chancellor was so alienated from her party that she seemed quite content to see her office turned over to a Social Democrat.

For her successors, Merkel’s will be a hard act to follow. Her manner of leadership by evasion — deferring decisions, delaying moments of truth, papering over conflicts with ambiguous rhetoric, substituting opportunistic improvisation for strategy and suppressing uncertainty by a public display of optimistic equanimity — requires specific personal skills. The same holds for Merkel’s extraordinary ability to get away with abruptly reversing decisions and making conflicting promises to different constituencies. From Merkel, two or three generations of European statesmen and stateswomen learned that leadership in the crises of today means nothing more and nothing less than making yourself appear optimistic enough to satisfy public desires for public displays of optimism.

Now, however, this may no longer be enough. Merkel’s equivocally friendly stoicism is unlikely to serve the next German government, or a German Europe, as well as it served her. During Merkel’s tenure, there was always enough money around to keep most of her partners reasonably happy — enough slack, in cash and time, for making the incompatible appear compatible. That this is no longer true was indicated, among other things, by the recent German coalition agreement, which could come to pass only because the parties deliberately abstained from discussing finance.

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But financial issues will soon assert themselves whether the parties want to discuss them or not, as the monetary union and the pandemic do their work, and German domestic needs make themselves felt. Note that already before Covid struck, there was a crisis of German physical infrastructure. Moreover, the new government, unlike Merkel’s Grand Coalition, will face an opposition in CDU/CSU that it cannot exclude from public debate on principle — as Merkel and all the rest excluded the AfD. This means, among other things, that questions will be asked and have to be answered on Germany’s ability to pay to keep “Europe”, meaning the monetary union, alive by keeping pro-EU governments in control in the south. For this, the ECB will have to invent ever more extravagant methods of direct state finance, including holding interest rates down close to zero in spite of rising inflation and cutting government debt by “fiscal repression”.

The list of unresolved problems Merkel leaves behind is long. It extends from the future fiscal and monetary constitution of the eurozone to Europe’s ever-increasing public debt, the relationship of the EU and its member states to the two hostile global superpowers, the United States and China, the European and especially the German relationship to Russia, the tension between German Atlanticism and French Europeanism, the status of national sovereignty in the EU state system, the future energy supply of Western Europe, and asylum and immigration policies, national and European. More issues could be listed, each urgent, some critical, none easy to resolve.

In a few years’ time, Merkel’s tenure may be remembered as a golden era when pious wishes still helped — a time when hard decisions could still be successfully postponed, dilemmas hidden by optimistic denial and benevolent neglect, and contradictions reconciled by all sorts of pocket money, borrowed or printed. Now, by contrast, things are about to get serious.

But Germans need not be nervous. This is a chance for Europe’s largest democracy to finally grow out of the nervous political infancy of its post-war decades and embrace a more confident future.

Fortunately, when Germans go to the polls in September, “more of the same” will not on the ballot paper. Even Armin Laschet, the newly elected leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) who is touted as a continuity candidate, has insisted that if his party gets re-elected, it will not stand for the “sixteen years of the past”. But there is a palpable nervousness in the air. Merkel is currently facing a barrage of difficulties which she can afford to kick into the long grass until her departure.

One such issue is the increasing scepticism among Germans about their country’s role within the EU. Like Helmut Kohl before her, Merkel has continued a policy of unconditional support for the European project. Indeed, it is rather fitting that the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will by far have been her longest-serving cabinet minister, with roles that spanned from 2005 to 2019.

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However, a Spiegel survey published last week laid bare that her adoration for the EU is not universally shared: nearly two-thirds of Germans said that their opinion of the bloc had worsened due to its botched vaccine procurement plans. Half of all participants also said their view of von der Leyen had become “decidedly worse”. Merkel, on the other hand, defended the EU’s decisions as “fundamentally right”.

But while Merkel’s unchallenged position in Germany has allowed her to ignore the public mood, her successor will not have this luxury. For it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is an appetite for change, even among conservative voters who are likely to continue to support the chancellor’s party.

That is partly why Markus Söder, the leader of the CDU’s sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) who has publicly criticised the EU’s sluggish vaccine procurement, is already emerging as the most popular candidate to succeed her. A recent survey showed that 55% of Germans thought he was the best candidate for the CDU/CSU to put forward in the elections; only 27% favoured Laschet.

This election goes right to the heart of Germany and Europe’s relationship — and it is triggering a familiar type of political angst, one with deep roots in Germany’s unique historical past. For too long Germans have voted with a risk aversion that has given their chancellors an unhealthy sense of authority and invincibility. It speaks volumes that, at the end of four terms in power, Angela Merkel is still leading the polls as the most popular German politician. In fact, had she not stepped down herself, there is every chance that she would have been re-elected once again in September.

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But while this may seem a sign of enviable consensus — so rare a commodity in an increasingly partisan Western world — the reality is far more complicated and disconcerting. Indeed, beneath the surface of outward stability stews an increasing sense of anger and disenfranchisement, which Merkel’s unchallenged position has allowed her to ignore.

The last federal elections of 2017 laid bare how thin the veneer of political consensus really is. The conservative Union of CDU/CSU came out with a loss of 8.6% while the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gained almost the same amount. Having ruled out working with the latter, Merkel once again turned to a grand coalition with the social democrats (SPD), who had also made staggering losses.

But the 12.6% of the electorate who voted for the AfD are not the only Germans frustrated at the country’s political stagnation. For years, small-c conservatives in Germany have looked on with concern as Merkel pulled their political home, the CDU, further and further towards the centre — most notably with her decision to allow 1.1 million refugees into the country in 2015.

In her typically stoic style, Merkel tried to plaster over the deepening cracks within her party with her slogan, “Wir schaffen das!” — “we can do this!”. There was no need to have a national debate; it was as if her course for the country was an act of God.

This self-image of German chancellors as the ultimate moral and political authority is, of course, an unhealthy and increasingly dangerous relic of the past. Among Western democracies, Germany stands out in the way that its traumatic history has caused its people to value stability over charisma, continuity over change, dependability over showmanship.

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Nobody embodies this more than Merkel, whose image as the austere and pragmatic mother of the nation has allowed her to rule without needing to fear the political consequences in a way that a British Prime minister would. A survey last year showed that 71% of CDU/CSU voters were against Merkel’s pro-refugee policies, yet her approval ratings remain paradoxically high.

Why are these German voters so generous? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that, from the beginning, West German democracy constantly felt under threat from extremism. In fact, in the first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, voters found an ideal candidate for the challenges the country faced. Unashamedly authoritarian, Der Alte (the old man), as he was affectionately known, led his CDU — under the slogan “No Experiments” — to victory in the 1957 election with the only absolute majority ever achieved in German parliamentary history.

But while a single-minded and reliable leader was arguably a necessary infringement on democracy in the wake of two world wars and the traumatic experience of fascism, Adenauer’s tenure also established an unhealthy detachment of the chancellor from his people. Chancellors can no longer afford to sit on a political pedestal, claiming moral exclusivity and dressing this up as steady leadership.

Yes, at the moment, a large part of the electorate is still willing to give an incumbent chancellor the benefit of the doubt. But this better-the-devil-you-know approach can only go so far. Forgotten and left-behind, increasing proportions of the population will turn to radical alternatives — the 2017 elections were proof that this process is well underway.

Whoever inherits the baton of German chancellorship this autumn needs to take this chance of a new beginning and build a more democratic, more transparent and more approachable office which works with the other elements in the constitution rather than above them. Chancellor democracy had its time and its place, but in 2021 it is an anachronistic relic of a bygone age — and anyone who seeks to hold onto it might pay a dear political price. It is time for Germany’s democracy to trust in itself without a father (or indeed a “Mutti”) figure to cling on to, for better or worse. It is time for German democracy to grow up.

And over it all will preside Queen Angela the Great, soon to bow out, most likely replaced by her chosen successor Armin Laschet — she must, in some psychological sense, be its Queen, not its Chancellor, since it is impossible for any mere democratic leader to have approval ratings of 80% in the 15^th year of their tenure. She is, quite simply, there because the Germans feel they need her.

And indeed, under her beneficent rule, modern Germany provides Europe with its one world-class industrial economy, its most rock-solid democratic institutions — able, as almost no others have been, to shrug off the challenge of populism — and its bank of last resort. It is fast becoming functionally bi-lingual in English, and is in some ways more like the real Britain than modern Britain: an eyewitness has twice told me how, how at the 2015 G7 at Schloss Elmau, Queen Angela asked David Cameron why on earth he would even consider putting 800 years of unique parliamentary tradition aside in favour of his utterly needless referendum.

So let us celebrate modern Germany. But the reign of Queen Angela, prolonged by the Covid epidemic, will soon be over. Which makes 18 January 2021 the ideal time for us all, and especially the Germans themselves, to properly consider their history — which is to say, who they truly are.

The unification of 18 January 1871 is taught in most schools, here and in Germany, as just one of the great National Unifications of the mid-19^th century. The implication is that it was simply part of some natural, general and thus (according to the religion of Progress) virtually inevitable unfolding of history. In truth, it was the most fatal event in modern European history.

The so-called “German Unification” — more accurately the Reichsgruendungstag (“Day of the Founding of the Empire”) — saw the birth of a radically strange new state which, August Hayek argued, was the seed-bed of both Bolshevism and National Socialism. It represented the final, formal step in the complete takeover, by force, of wealthy, ancient, largely Catholic Germany by a far poorer and smaller Lutheran outlier whose sole but decisive advantage was that it was entirely organised for war. British readers might try to understand it by imagining that in the chaos of our own Civil Wars, the Calvinist Scots had beaten Cromwell at Dunbar and then, in alliance with their cousins, the Ulster Scots, installed Charles II as puppet king over far larger and wealthier, but hopelessly fractured England, annexing the whole of its wealth and power to their own project.

The division between the two Germanies was, until the 19th century, almost absolute. Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis) was officially named in 50AD and designed to be the capital of Roman Germania. When the Empire fell, the baton of European civilisation and Christianity was passed, with no real break, to the Western Germanic dynasties of the Merovingians and then the Franks. Re-founded in 800AD under the greatest Frank of all, Charlemagne, the new Roman Empire (almost identical to the original EEC in geography) had its capital in Aachen. In various incarnations, that Empire remained the heart of European civilisation for a thousand years.

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In the East, things were very different. Twelve hundred years after Augustus dedicated his first altar in Cologne, the Prussians were pagan Balts who had barely made First Contact with European civilisation. Then, in 1226, the Teutonic Knights arrived on the borders of modern day Lithuania and Russia, bearing fire and the sword. Eventually taking on the name of the tribe they had come to crush, they slowly expanded. Their spiritual heartland, East Prussia, remained a colonial realm, with a German elite lording it over Slav or Baltic helots, until within living memory (which is why Heinrich Himmler so loved the place, making it his blueprint for the Nazi New Order in the East).

My late father-in-law, born there in 1926, was taught to ride by a Russian stable-boy and listened as his parents spoke Lithuanian to their tenants. Any colonial elite like this has to be constantly on guard, and the Teutonic Knights eventually developed into Junker Prussia, that uniquely militarised realm of which Voltaire famously said: “All states have armies but in Prussia, the army has a state”.

This Prussia was the first place to embrace Lutheranism and fracture the unity of mediaeval Europe. Though it rose to prominence as the robber-state villain of the War of the Austrian Succession, then as the extremely lucky survivor of the Seven Years War (when it was saved from destruction only by the death of Catherine the Great), it remained an outlier of real Germany: “What did we care about Prussia, back then?” (Was ging uns Preussen damals an?) wrote Germany’s greatest author, Goethe, looking back on his youth in mid-18th-century Frankfurt. Yet within a century, this distant, dirt-poor, only semi-German colonial realm based in what’s now Russia and Poland ended up completely taking over the great lands which had been the heart of Western Europe for the best part of two millennia.

How did it happen? We are the villains. In 1814, determined to exit troublesome Europe, Britain unilaterally gifted Prussia a vast chunk of the most developed territory in Western Europe. This so-called Rhenish Prussia, overwhelmingly Catholic, provided the state-worshipping militarists of Königsberg and Berlin with a gigantic increase in revenues, and industries like Krupp’s of Essen. Panglossian British liberals assumed (as their descendants in the 1990s assumed of China) that Prosperity and Reform must inevitably go hand-in-hand.

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After all, the Prussians were Protestants and surely, as Lord Macauley taught, Protestants were progressives? Instead, Otto von Bismarck toughed it out, Tiananmen Square-like, with the Rhineland parliamentarians: at the height of the constitutional struggle, in June 1865, the centre of Cologne was cleared at bayonet-point by troops who even enlisted an elephant from the zoo to help drive the reformists from the streets. Meanwhile, armies of state-funded Prussian university professors, their works consciously modelled on our own Whig History, embarked on a campaign to prove that Royal and Lutheran Prussia had a manifest destiny to lead all Germany. Then, in 1866, Bismarck declared long-planned war on Western Germany.

All the four other fully-fledged kingdoms of Germany backed Austria. Hanover defeated a Prussian army in the first major engagement. But the tax-take and hardware from the Rhineland gave Prussia an unbeatable edge. On 3 July 1866 at Koenniggratz the Austrians, who still used Waterloo-style muzzle-loaders, were routed at the greatest battle in Europe between 1815 and 1914. Without any real hope, the west of Germany fought on for another three weeks. Frankfurt, the ancient imperial capital, was surrounded by General von Manteuffel, who informed its citizenry that if they didn’t provide a vast ransom in bullion within 24 hours, he would give them over to plunder by his East Prussian farm-boys. This wasn’t unification, it was conquest. Bismarck waited until 1871 to dragoon the remaining kingdoms into his “German Empire” simply because he was, until then, still unsure that Prussia could digest them. Not for nothing did Disraeli call the new Empire “Prussia-Germany” or simply “Prussia” to the end of his days.

Now, Prussia-Germany was able to deploy all Germany’s industry and manhood eastwards, in pursuit of what had always really mattered to it. By late 1887, the future Chancellor von Buelow was already describing a plan which sounds like Ludendorff’s vision in 1917-18 and Hitler’s in 1941-2: the Prussian-German armies would  “devastate Russia’s black earth region”, destroy its ports and industries and set up a vassal-state in the Ukraine. This was nothing to do with German thinking and everything to do with Prussian thinking: 1871-1945 was the great aberration in German history.

It is incredibly tempting to dream about how different things might have been had Napoleon simply abolished Prussia, as he actively considered doing after trouncing it in 1806.  Imagine: after Napoleon’s fall, we would have had a wealthy, voluntarily but loosely united, largely Catholic Germany, its capital Frankfurt, at the heart of a golden European century which had no need to copy the Prussians and turn the Continent into an armed camp… the Good Russians, with this example before them, finally consigning Absolutism to the rubbish-dump of history…  Alas! Alternative History is even more absurd than Whig History. But if the past can’t be changed, it can be learned from.

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The first lesson is that Germany is not naturally some megalomaniac power bent on domination. That was Prussia. Prussia is gone. If the western Germans keep their nerve, they can safely ignore the last undead hauntings from the East. Germany’s future is where it’s past always truly was: in the West.

The greater, and more worrying lesson is that the most ancient, civilised and wealthy lands can, if disunited and unprepared to defend themselves, end up powerless against brute force wielded by a leader prepared to play va banque, backed by a bloated military who positively long to prove themselves irreplaceable. One of the many tragedies of Brexit is that an EU Army would inevitably have had English as its language of command. We, with the only major battle-hardened force in Europe, would surely have led it. No wonder Putin longed for Brexit.

So let’s not deny the excellent modern Germans our attendance at their celebration. But once the Beethoven and the fireworks and the black-red-gold lights (which would have infuriated Bismarck) on the Brandenburg Gate have faded, let us — above all, the Germans themselves — learn from the their real history. For time, as the man said,  is short.