This is what Helmut Kohl meant when he warned, upon leaving the Chancellorship of Germany in 1998, that he was the last German leader to have lived through the Second World War and thus to have experienced the horrors it wrought. In 2012 he wrote an article for Germany’s best-selling daily newspaper, Bild, and was clearly still haunted by the possibility that because of the financial crisis the current generation of leaders would not nurture the post-war experiment in European trust: ‘For those who didn’t live through this themselves and who especially now in the crisis are asking what
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