A poignant alarm had been recently raised for Merkel in a newly published, nearly thousand-page tome, The Thirty Years War: European Catastrophe, German Trauma, 1618-1648, by German historian Herfried Münkler. The work, which she devoured, reconstructs the savege seventeenth-century war that eventually engulfed most of Europe, from Spain to Sweden, and decimated the continent's population. Merkel invited its author to the chancellery, where, for two hours, she and the historian discussed how war again erupted seventy years after the Peace of Augsburg had ended Europe's bloody religious wars in 1555. After seventy years of peace, few people with personal memories of the atrocities of the earlier war survived. Thus, Europe stumbled blindly into another round of mindless and savage fighting.
Merkel increasingly noted the dangerous similarities between those four-hundred-year-old events and today, "because it is now roughly seventy years since the end of World War II, and those who experienced the war themselves will soon no longer be among us," she remarked sadly in a speech in May 2018. Looking around her, Merkel saw frightening portents of another global unraveling. "They feel they can do whatever they like. One more demand here . . . another there . . . and be a little more aggressive, and suddenly all order is in ruins," she said--without needing to name names.
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