Now, when a politician or a public intellectual or a newspaper goes on a Rumspringa in the rightmost reaches of the political spectrum, or if the fine citizens of some small town decide to set fire to a house, there is less of a script by which they would be welcomed back into respectability. Certain ethnic Germans used to take it as their seigneurial right to shower cruelty on the vulnerable and return to the mainstream after a cooling-off period to be listened to and shaken hands with. They are beginning to feel deprived of that right.

West Germany in the 1980s was a country of unattractive affluence, headed by a distant, uncharismatic figure who wasn’t even particularly adept as a technocrat. During the Helmut Kohl era history was everywhere—or rather, everywhere else.