“I tend to believe them,” the German diplomat said. “The Germans didn’t want Five Eyes when we learned about it. We’re not in a position, legally, to join, because our intelligence is so limited in scope.”

In July, officials of the German Federal Intelligence Service, or B.N.D., arrested a bureaucrat in their Munich office on suspicion of spying for the U.S. He had been caught soliciting business from the Russians via Gmail, and, when the Germans asked their American counterparts for information on the man, his account was suddenly shut down. Brought in for questioning, he admitted having passed documents (apparently innocuous) to a C.I.A. agent in Austria for two years, for which he was paid twenty-five thousand euros. The Germans retaliated, in unprecedented fashion, by expelling the C.I.A. station chief in Berlin. Coming soon after the N.S.A. revelations, this second scandal was worse than a crime—it was a blunder. Merkel was beside herself with exasperation. No U.S. official, in Washington or Berlin, seemed to have weighed the intelligence benefits against the potential political costs. The President didn’t know about the spy. “It’s fair to say the President should expect people would take into account political dynamics in making judgments about what we do and don’t do in Germany,” Rhodes said.

The spying scandals have undermined German public support for the NATO alliance just when it’s needed most in the standoff with Russia. Lambsdorff, the E.U. parliamentarian, told me, “When I stand before constituents and say, ‘We need a strong relationship with the U.S.,’ they say, ‘What’s the point? They lie to us.’ ” Germany’s rise to preëminence in Europe has made Merkel a committed transatlanticist, but “that’s useless now,” Lambsdorff said. “It deducts from her capital. Rebuffing Washington is good now in Germany.”

Obama was concerned enough to dispatch his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to Berlin in late July, to mollify German officials. During a four-hour meeting, they agreed to create a framework for clearer rules about spying and intelligence sharing. But the details remain to be worked out, and barely half the German public now expresses a favorable view of the U.S.—the lowest level in Europe, other than in perpetually hostile Greece.

In a sense, German anti-Americanism is always waiting to be tapped. There’s a left-wing, anti-capitalist strain going back to the sixties, and a right-wing, anti-democratic version that’s even older. In the broad middle, where German politics plays out today, many Germans, especially older ones, once regarded the U.S. as the father of their democracy—a role that sets America up to disappoint. Peter Schneider, the novelist and journalist, expressed the attitude this way: “You have created a model of a savior, and now we find by looking at you that you are not perfect at all—much less, you are actually corrupt, you are terrible businessmen, you have no ideals anymore.” With the Iraq War, Guantánamo, drones, the unmet expectations of the Obama Presidency, and now spying, “you actually have acted against your own promises, and so we feel very deceived.”

Beneath the rise in anti-Americanism and the German sympathy with Russia, something deeper might be at work. During the First World War, Thomas Mann put aside writing “The Magic Mountain” and began composing a strange, passionate series of essays about Germany and the war. They were published in 1918, just before the Armistice, as “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.” In it, Mann embraced the German cause in terms of national character and philosophy. He allied himself, as an artist, with Germany—“culture, soul, freedom, art”—against the liberal civilization of France and England that his older brother Heinrich supported, where intellect was always politicized. German tradition was authoritarian, conservative, and “nonpolitical”—closer to the Russian spirit than to the shallow materialism of democratic Europe. The war represented Germany’s age-old rebellion against the West. Imperial Germany refused to accept at gunpoint the universal principles of equality and human rights. Though Mann became a vocal supporter of democratic values in exile during the Nazi years, he never repudiated “Reflections.”

Several people in Berlin suggested that this difficult, forgotten book had something to say about Germany in the age of Merkel. The country’s peaceful reunification and its strength through the euro crisis might be returning Germany to an identity that’s older than the postwar Federal Republic, whose Basic Law was written under heavy American influence. “West Germany was a good country,” Georg Diez, a columnist and author, told me. “It was young, sexy, daring, Western—American. But maybe it was only a skin. Germany is becoming more German, less Western. Germany has discovered its national roots.”

Diez didn’t mean that this was a good thing. He meant that Germany is becoming less democratic, because what Germans fundamentally want is stability, security, economic growth—above all, to be left in peace while someone else watches their money and keeps their country out of wars. They have exactly the Chancellor they want. “Merkel took the politics out of politics,” Diez said.

Merkel, at sixty, is the most successful politician in modern German history. Her popularity floats around seventy-five per cent—unheard of in an era of resentment toward elected leaders. Plainness remains her political signature, with inflections of Protestant virtue and Prussian uprightness. Once, with a group of journalists at a hotel bar in the Middle East, she said, “Can you believe it? Here I am, the Chancellor! What am I doing here? When I was growing up in the G.D.R., we imagined capitalists with long black cloaks and top hats and cigars and big feet, like cartoons. And now here I am, and they have to listen to me!” Of course, there’s something calculated about her public image. “She’s so careful not to show any pretensions—which is a kind of pretension,” the senior official said.

Merkel still lives in central Berlin, in a rent-controlled apartment across a canal from the Pergamon, the great neoclassical antiquities museum. The name on the brass buzzer is her husband’s—“PROF. DR. SAUER”—and a solitary policeman stands outside. Dwarfed by her vast office in the massive concrete-and-glass Chancellery, Merkel works at an ordinary writing table just inside the door, preferring it to the thirteen-foot black slab that Schröder installed at the far end of the room. “This woman is neurotically busy,” the longtime political associate said. “She sleeps never more than five hours. I can call her at one o’clock at night. She’s awake reading bureaucratic papers, not literature.”

Merkel entertains guests at the Chancellery with German comfort food—potato soup and stuffed cabbage. When she eats at her favorite Italian restaurant, it’s with just a few friends, and she doesn’t look up from the conversation to greet her public, who know to leave her alone. When her husband calls the Philharmoniker for tickets (Merkel and Sauer are music lovers, with a passion for Wagner and Webern) and is offered comps, he insists on giving his credit-card number, and the couple take their seats almost unnoticed. A friend of mine once sat next to Merkel at the salon she frequents, off Kurfürstendamm, and they chatted about hair. “Color is the most important thing for a woman,” the Chancellor, whose hair style is no longer the object of ridicule, offered.

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Earlier this year, President Joachim Gauck made headlines when he called on Germany to take its global responsibilities more seriously, including its role in military affairs. It was the kind of speech that Merkel (who had no comment) would never give, especially after a poll commissioned by the foreign ministry in May showed that sixty per cent of the public was skeptical of greater German involvement in the world. German journalists find Merkel nearly impossible to cover. “We have to look for topics in the pudding,” Ulrich Schulte, who reports on the Chancellor for Die Tageszeitung, said. The private Merkel they admire and enjoy but are forbidden to quote disappears in public. Any aide or friend who betrays the smallest confidence is cast out. The German media, reflecting the times, are increasingly centrist, preoccupied with “wellness” and other life-style issues. Almost every political reporter I spoke with voted for Merkel, despite the sense that she’s making their work irrelevant. There was no reason not to.