Finis Germaniae?

"After World War II, the Allied occupiers, as Mr. Sieferle sees it, saddled Germans with a false idea of their own history—the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, a fundamental difference between it and the West. That may describe Russia, but not Germany, and Germany's modernity is painful for Westerners to face. 'If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,' he writes, 'then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human "progress" of modernity can go into reverse.'"

Christopher Caldwell at The New York Times discusses German historian Rolf Peter Sieferle.