This is a very interesting essay on how the historic divisions within Germany have profound implications for the future of Europe. Question I have is: how close is this to on-the-ground reality?

New Statesman - James Hawes - What Britain needs to understand about the profound and ancient divisions in Germany

On 24 September, Angela Merkel will be re-elected chancellor of Germany and that, we might think, will be that. With Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron in control of the European project, populism will surely be vanquished and the old Franco-German core of the EU restored. Yet things are changing, and if western Europe wants Germany to keep singing "Ode to Joy" as enthusiastically as "Deutschlandlied", it will have some work to do. Our Brexit negotiators need to see how important this is to Macron, to other European leaders and, above all, to thinking Germans.

For we may all soon miss the old, self-effacing Germany. Despite having such economic power, it always seemed to have no greater wish than to exist as part of a larger whole. Konrad Adenauer, its first postwar chancellor and founding father, made Westbindung ("binding to the West") the heart of West German politics. Adenauer came from the deeply Catholic Rhineland, "amid the vineyards" as he put it, "where Germany's windows are open to the West". His instinctive cultural sympathy was with France, but he knew that West Germany's existence depended on keeping America in Europe. France he courted out of profound conviction, the US out of clear-eyed necessity, and he was worried that after him this twin course might be abandoned. His demands for reassurance during his final year in office led to John F Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech of 1963. Every West German knew about that, and about the Berlin Airlift: these became locations of national memory from which West Germany triangulated its sense of self.

There were some Germans for whom this was too much. Anti-Americanism was ingrained among West Germany's hard left, the early Green Party and the tiny hard right. But even Germans who were suspicious of America had no fear of tying themselves closer to Europe. On the contrary, that was exactly what they wanted. The standard explanation of this is guilt. West Germans, in this argument, felt so remorseful about the horrors of the Second World War that they wanted to make amends. This idea fitted with others' belief that Germany did indeed have much to feel guilty about.

keep to the Fen Causeway