...of the sundered eastern territories a quarter of a century ago, which I recall as having been largely consensual, Germany has not been conspicuously irredentist within the lifetimes of most of us here, although Merkel has not been shy about exercising a bit of economic hegemony now and again.

It must have been odd, though, sharing a continent with West Germany in the sixties and seventies: an exemplary, law-abiding citizen who nevertheless you knew to have been but recently released after confinement and rehabilitative treatment following an episode of homicidal mania in which he murdered half the neighborhood and burned down several houses.

cordially,