The article is based on quotes with "experts" and articles in the European press --

"Germany is no longer, as a matter of course or of principle, the motor, heart and savior of Europe," said Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. "This isn't the Europe we signed up for. It's much larger, much poorer, and we have to take care of our own."

<...>

"People want to be normal, in the sense that other people don't come to us first and say, `You have to pay.' And it doesn't have much to do with political orientation. All of us are huddling with our backs against the storm."

"We sublimated hegemony," said Ms. [Ulrike Guérot, a senior research fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations] Guérot, a German who is working on a paper called "Germany Unbound." "But we're dropping the sublimation now." She laughed, then said: "Of course, this doesn't sound nice to others."

<...>

"With the French we have more that divides us than unites us," Ms. Guérot said.

Germans, who have already undergone a wrenching structural reform and paid a huge bill to integrate the former eastern Germany, say they feel that "they're paying a significant personal price," [European Council on Foreign Relations Editorial Director and Head of the Paris Office] Mr. Thomas] Klau said. "Poverty has increased considerably in Germany and is now a social reality. And it makes Germany more inward-looking than the old West Germany, and a more defensive country."

-- as well as anonymous officials --

Mr. Sarkozy yelled at the European Union president, Herman Van Rompuy, whom he summoned to Paris, European Union officials said. He threatened to boycott the summit meeting, while muttering that the Germans "haven't changed," according to French officials.

-- as well as an opinion piece in Le Monde by "Jacques-Pierre Gougeon, a Germany specialist at the French Institute for International and Strategic Relations":

[In fact, French criticism of German economic policy goes beyond the strictly economic and reveals a more profound malaise.  Indeed, if the criticism expressed by French minister of economy and finances Christine Lagarde with regards to Germany's "non-cooperative" policy was dressed up in the guise of the righteous cause of Europe -- repeating, actually, the reproaches expressed more discreetly by other European capitals -- it just as much] expresses a French malaise toward the growing gap between the two economies, and more generally toward this new Germany without which nothing is possible anymore in Europe, and which seems less and less likely to compromise if not in its national interests.

[Bracketed portion of quote my own translation].

The article suggests that this German uppitiness is in part due to the current generation of German leaders losing touch with their country's proper place in the aftermath of the Second World War:

Part of the change is generational, with Mrs. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, representing those born after World War II, with only anecdotal knowledge of Nazi Germany. The members of Parliament are even younger, many of them teenagers or younger when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

So the German leadership paradigm from Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl -- roughly 1949 to 1989, when Germany was a crucial junior partner both for NATO and European integration -- is gone. "When Germany steps out of the film, it changes," Ms. Guérot said.

Looking for a German perspective on this issue, and on the Greek crisis, I found an article in Die Welt about the recent bail-out proposal announced for Greece last Sunday, a bitter FAQ on the issue which rings with skepticism and even resentfulness:

Professor Gougeon's Le Monde piece lays out a series of points that illustrate the striking robustness of Germany's economy, even in the face of the current crisis:

Can't help but make one sympathetic to Germany's Verbitterung about having the screws turned on them.