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"The Germans are being given a second chance," says Stern. "That is the rarest of gifts, and one can only hope that they will do justice to it. The Germans deserve friends who feel the burden of the past, as so many of them do, but who have compassion for a people who have had so rich and terrifying a history."
In Germany itself, there are still observers capable of taking the future a little less seriously. One of the cleverest is the novelist and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose latest book, Europe, Europe, includes a scene in which an American reporter visits Berlin in the year 2006. He finds himself in the midst of an environmental conference being conducted in the traditional Berlin style. "Masked demonstrators from the eco-anarchist milieu clashed with officers of the environmental police. A representative of the chemical industry, who made profuse ritual protestations of humility and reassurance, was shouted down." Going to look at the onetime Berlin Wall, the reporter finds that it is now a nature preserve. "A unique biotope," says an official. "There are wild rabbits here, hedgehogs, opossums." The problem is that the environmentalists' efforts to get rid of the Wall are being blocked by art historians. "They regard the Wall as a work of art," the official complains, "because of the graffiti." An expatriated Scot finally explains to the American that the "famous reunification" back in the 1990s was "all just coffee and cakes." "Do you still remember how frightened of the Germans everyone was in the '90s? And what's happened? Nothing at all. Since then the German bogeyman has very quietly been laid to rest. We fell for it because we didn't know the first thing about German history."