Germany: The Enduring Fear

History, said Oswald Spengler, is destiny. Combined with myth, the taproot of emotion, it becomes the fate of a people. Was destiny the foundation of the sonderweg, the “special path” to modernity that joined the powerful drive of Prussia with the German idea of kultur, to become a unique nation in the modern world?

One can think of history in less apocalyptic terms. As in ethology, it may be a form of “imprinting,” the memory traces that, like the...