Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past is Shaping its European Future. By Stephen Green. Haus Publishing; 338 pages; $29.95 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

JUDGING by the books published about Germany in recent decades, you might conclude that the only subject worth writing about was the 12 years from 1933 to 1945: from when Hitler took power to the end of the second world war. And given the enormity of what happened during that period, it is easy to see why writers return to it over and over again to try to understand the incomprehensible.

Stephen Green, a self-confessed lifelong Germanophile (as well as a former chairman of HSBC, a one-time trade minister in the British government and an ordained priest in the Church of England), offers some of his own explanations in this very personal take on the country. He starts a lot earlier than most, in 9AD, when a German tribal leader called Hermann defeated three Roman legions in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, and ends in the present, with a Germany that, thrust into a leading role in the EU, is reluctant to embrace it. The idea is to show that the roots of that dismal period go a long way back and its effects still resonate 70 years on.

Among those roots, he argues, is a sense of victimhood that eventually sees the victim turn aggressor. In Germany this made an early appearance with Hermann, on whom the Romans got their revenge a few years after his famous victory. More recently the country saw itself as the main victim of the appalling Thirty Years War of 1618-48; of French aggression, from Louis XIV to Napoleon; and, most devastatingly, of the Treaty of Versailles, in which the victors of the first world war imposed a crushing settlement on the vanquished.

Lord Green also traces the prolonged and difficult search for a German identity through the country’s religious, philosophical and artistic heritage. A key concept in German moral thought is duty, extolled by thinkers from Martin Luther to Immanuel Kant. But applied to the wrong cause, devotion to duty can lead to disaster.

Such explanations may throw some light on the origins of the Holocaust, but they leave huge lacunae. How could it have happened with so little resistance? There was some opposition, which generally proved fatal—the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler, the White Rose dissident group, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his supporters—but they were drops in an ocean of acquiescence. It seemed as though a nation’s collective conscience had been switched off.

Come the end of the war, it became plain that the whole thing had been a chimera. The Germans found themselves presiding over a devastated country and a mountain of guilt. For them, it was truly a Stunde Null (zero hour).

The miracle, as Lord Green rightly points out, is that from this state of total collapse, Germany (with the help of generous Marshall aid from America and a sensible currency reform) rose again to become a country with model democratic institutions and a highly successful economy. It is now living at peace with its neighbours for the first time in many centuries. Any remaining shadows of the Third Reich were swept away when the Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago and East and West Germany were united. Integrating them was hard but ultimately successful.

There were fears at the time that a united Germany might be tempted to throw its weight around again, yet the opposite has happened: critics now accuse it of being too reluctant to play the leading role in the EU for which its size and economic weight clearly mark it out. But they cannot have it both ways. Instead, they should marvel at this reformed character in their midst, be thankful—and learn from it.