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Germany's glistening new capital on the Spree - capped by Sir Norman Foster's Reichstag dome - is the throbbing heart of a reborn First Reich, a secular and democratic variant of the Imperium Romanum Sacrum or Hohenstaufen Empire. Brussels has become a backwater again.

Half of Europe lives in trepidation of the mercurial Wolfgang Schäuble, the crippled idealist and mastermind of reunification whose own tortured emotions have become a Continental curse, and who entirely conformed to his reputation for irascible outbursts when I met him last week in the forbidding board room of Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe headquarters. The euro has delivered a "German Europe" after all.