While it is true that Chancellor Merkel calls the shots not only in Berlin and Frankfurt but in Brussels and Strasbourg too, it is far-fetched, to say the least, to compare German economic ascendancy, achieved peacefully through industrial strength and monetary union, with Hitler’s Neuordnung Europas (“New European Order”), imposed by military might. Indeed, Lord Heseltine’s suspicion of the Germans exceeds that of the late Nicholas Ridley, who famously (and, for himself, fatally) dismissed the EU as a “German racket” more than quarter of a century ago. It striking how much these two, on opposite sides of the Europe debate, actually had in common. Like his great rival Margaret Thatcher, Heseltine still fears the continuities in German history.

So too do the Germans themselves. Indeed, in German the words “history” and “past” have acquired uniquely ominous connotations. The reason is obvious: the 12 years of the Third Reich overshadow everything else. It is a cliché beloved of German public discourse to point out that these 12 years should not obscure the country’s astonishing post-war achievements. Indeed, non-Germans also repeat this line ad nauseam, if only to be polite to their German interlocutors. Particularly since the reunification of Germany a generation ago, there has been a compulsion amounting to an obsession to put the Nazi past into a wider context — comparing the German experience to those of other nations, agonising about its uniqueness — in order to relieve the burden of vicarious guilt and shame. As the historian Michael Stürmer put it: “In Germany for a long time the purpose of history was to ensure that it could never happen again.” Only a new way of seeing German history could make possible a new German identity. The curse of history could not be lifted except by historians.

German angst about history long predates the Third Reich. The failure (if that is what it was) of the Germans to create a unified nation state until the late 19th century was a cause for endless soul-searching. So too was the form that this unification took: a “German Reich” that excluded much of the old Holy Roman Empire, still ruled by the Imperial House of Habsburg; that absorbed the Prussian monarchy into a parliamentary system yet preserved its absolutist and military character; and that was forged not by constitutional consent but by Bismarck’s “blood and iron”. And the search for explanations of the uniquely fatal course of German history led scholars further and further back in time, to the Middle Ages and beyond.

Now James Hawes, a British writer (though a novelist and Kafka scholar rather than historian), has produced a sparkling little book, The Shortest History of Germany (Old Street, £12.99), which really does begin at the beginning, with Julius Caesar inventing “Germania”. His point is that these barbarians were thoroughly Romanised, but only within an area bounded by the Rivers Elbe and Danube and the Roman limes (a line of forts similar to Hadrian’s Wall) that roughly coincides with modern West Germany. For Hawes, everything you really need to know about the Germans is already visible in the first accounts by Caesar and Tacitus — if only one knows how to read them. He races through the next two millennia in 200 pages, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that everything bad in German history has come from the east, because the Saxons and Prussians were never really civilised. The Reformation was a Bad Thing because it cut off much of Northern Germany from Rome. So was the rise of Prussia in the 18th century, especially when the British saved Frederick the Great in the Seven Years’ War. Later the British rewarded the Prussians for their help against Napoleon by giving them the Rhineland, which turned out to include what later became Germany’s industrial heartlands. The West has been subsidising the East ever since. Bismarck’s wars of unification were, for Hawes, a thinly-disguised Prussian conquest which led directly to Hitler, because the uncivilised barbarians east of the Elbe dragged the rest of Germany into two world wars. The post-war dismembering of Prussia and division of what was left of Germany was a Good Thing because it kept the East Germans safely behind a wall, leaving the West Germans to get on with rebuilding their prosperity and democracy.