Yet there is no more sign of a spiritual awakening in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. Mrs Merkel once declared: “We as Christians should above all not be afraid of standing up for our beliefs.” Even so, the only concrete example of this standing up for Christian beliefs seems to be welcoming millions of Muslims to settle in Germany, while ignoring the plight of persecuted Christians. Her pitiless treatment of the Mediterranean countries who have been beggared by the euro crisis was anything but Christian. Unlike her French counterparts, the German Chancellor clearly has a spiritual hinterland; but like Luther’s, her compassion is selective. The quality of Mrs Merkel’s mercy seems all too strained.

Another brief historical excursus may help to cast light on this spiritual vacuum. Vittorio Hösle is the Italian-born wunderkind of present-day German philosophy: he teaches at Notre Dame, is fluent in at least 17 languages and is formidably erudite. His Short History of German Philosophy (Princeton, £27.95) points out that the German Geist, as it developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, was “philosophically grandiose but culturally unstable”. German historicism having corroded Christianity, between the wars an all-embracing, nihilistic relativism “solidified into one of history’s most horrifying worldviews”, while eliciting in response “special efforts to provide [moral] foundations that were unknown in other cultures because other cultures had no need of them”. For Hösle, “little has remained of these essential characteristics of the German spirit . . . because sadness and shame over the twelve cursed years has crippled appropriation of the spiritual treasures of the past”. He hopes, nevertheless, that the German Geist is not extinct, but that “the ark of culture will carry these ideas to the salvific shore of a new beginning”.

Germany has given up its own Geist and become a slave to the Zeitgeist instead. It is a self-mutilated land that has equipped itself with an artificial, provisional, prosthetic identity that it calls “Europe”. This ersatz identity is a poor substitute for the real, authentically spiritual glory of German cultural history, evoked here by Hawes and Hösle. Implicitly acknowledging the problem, Mrs Merkel has built her own monument to the German Geist: the Humboldt Forum, sited in the reconstructed schloss of the Prussian kings — Berlin’s postmodern answer to the Louvre. To run it, she lured Neil MacGregor from the British Museum, having been impressed by his “Germany: Memories of a Nation” exhibition. If Theresa May wishes to persuade her German counterpart — whether Mrs Merkel or Mr Schulz — to take her seriously, she could do a lot worse than to give a speech in Berlin, perhaps even at the Humboldt Forum, offering a vision beyond Brexit: of Anglo-German cultural and economic symbiosis, of a rich history in which not only guilt and shame but also the mutual benefits of free trade, artistic synergy and intellectual excellence have their place. Mrs May must show that a Europe of independent nations need not be less noble in its aspirations than the ever-closer union that Britain is now leaving. The past may all have been about the money; the future need not be.