Study the kiss, see if you can tell

Nikita Khrushchev once claimed to have seen Konrad Adenauer naked. "From behind," he said, "it’s obvious Germany will be divided forever. And having looked at him from the front I can also assure you Germany will never rise again".

Khrushchev’s words appeared convincing enough when Erich Honecker administered his famous deep kiss to Leonid Brezhnev. But a few years later there was something desperate about the wet smacker for Mikhail Gorbachev, which hit the TV screens just before the Trabi put-putted to the scrapheap of history and the Wall fell apart.

Not long after, Helmut Kohl and that splendid old fraud François Mitterrand preferred hand-holding to celebrate the passing of the last generation of German leaders to suffer from a bad conscience. In its way it was as significant as the fall of the Wall.

Germany’s post-war yearning to be treated as ‘normal’, or at least harmless, is the best explanation for (West) Germany’s near-religious devotion to European construction, even if it meant getting royally ripped off by everyone else.

Nowadays no German mentions, as Kohl often did, that he was "only 14 at the time"; the new generation does not see why it matters, or is their fault, what great-grandpa did in the war. The new mood is obvious to everyone except the playful Kaczy´nski Potato Twins.

In the good old days it was routine to make the Germans feel bad or trip them up, for example by saddling them with the Länder system - regional parliaments and lots of local autonomy so that, it was argued, no future Hitler could kidnap it.

The German coping strategy is messy-going-on-incoherent compromise, known as ‘consensus-building’. Angela Merkel is a mistress of such ‘diplomacy’/obfuscation, as she demonstrated last week.

But thanks to the newly-permitted German amnesia about the past, she also has a much freer hand to pursue German national interests, the more brazenly the better as far as her voters are concerned. Thus instead of digging tunnels for Ossis to flee to the West, reunited Germany is building the gas pipeline which is helping Russia to divide the EU and control the entire European energy market.

Anyone peeking in Angela Merkel’s handbag may notice a photo of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, and now a shadowy Gazprom apparatchik, kissing Vladimir Putin. Dear old Volodja apparently gave her this souvenir when they were moonlight boating on the Volga the other week. It no doubt helps her to concentrate on political realities. When Angela concludes Germany’s EU presidency everybody will look pleased but feel vaguely deceived. That’s how it works nowadays. Welcome to the post-post-war world.

Nikita Khrushchev once claimed to have seen Konrad Adenauer naked. "From behind," he said, "it’s obvious Germany will be divided forever. And having looked at him from the front I can also assure you Germany will never rise again".

• Primary Source