When I lived in Germany I found much to admire. Id been dragged to Berlin from Paris in 1998 and within a couple of months found myself at dinner with the foreign minister in one of the new Italian joints springing up in Mitte and with the chancellor in his Grunewald residence. The contrast between the Bundesrepubliks openness and the arms-length formality of France was giddying. Berlins disjointed flux was a tonic after the gilded perfection of the French capital. France was for dreaming but a new Germany got me thinking. The edginess of a city being reborn was heady. Space nursed possibility. Urban perspective kept shifting as fast as shadows on a breezy beach. The past, ubiquitous ghost, was not erased but absorbed. What I admired in Berlin was something deep: the capacity for long-term purpose that had pulled a nation from the ashes and united it. Germany had not recovered from the cataclysm on a whim and a prayer. It had stuck to its task. Germany, in other words, was, just a decade ago, the opposite of Angela Merkels shifting, changeable nation with its finger to the electoral winds and its surprising talent for unpredictability. Solidity has given way to whim, direction to drift. I will get to that in a minute. Of course the 'German question, Europes 20th-century conundrum, was only resolved with outside help. The United States anchored Germany; France reimagined it; Poland forgave it. But the hard work was German: overcoming the guilt-ridden silence of the post-war years, working the cracks in the wall that detente opened, constructing the European Union (most genial of entities) and when Europes and the countrys division ended rising to the challenge of unification. These were colossal achievements in which constancy and imagination coalesced. Hundreds of millions of Europeans, many now oblivious, have benefited. Yet over the past year Germany has embarked on a stop-go crab walk suggestive of a nation uncomfortable with power and unsure of its purpose. First there was Merkels halting response to the Greek sovereign debt crisis of 2010. As the future of the euro hung in the balance the chancellor had her eye not on Europes fate but on Dusseldorf, or more precisely the May 2010 election in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germanys most populous state. Talk about thinking small. So she procrastinated. As she did confidence in the euro eroded, Ireland and Portugal accelerated their slide to the brink of default, the Bild tabloid whipped sell-the-islands anti-Greek sentiment into a frenzy, and anger toward Germany in Europe grew. To top off these happy developments, Merkels Christian Democrats (CDU) lost anyway in North Rhine-Westphalia. A case, youd think, of lessons learned. And youd be wrong. A year later, along come the Libyan and Japanese crises. They soon find Merkel in familiar guise, thinking not of the future of the Arab Spring or the fate of Fukushima but of Stuttgart, or more precisely the March 27 election in Baden-Wurttemberg. Whats a chancellor to do when statesmanship vies with parochialism? Embrace the latter, of course. The new, new Germany thinks small. Tangled up with her struggling partners, the Free Democrats, and her incoherent Free Democrat foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, the chancellor went for a double electoral gamble on the military and ecological fronts and got both wrong. She shunned Germanys core allies, the United States and France, on a military intervention in Libya to save Benghazi from a massacre, and she ordered a Japan-prompted U-turn in nuclear policy, closing seven power stations (at least for now) and raising doubts over her sound decision last year to extend the lives of Germanys nuclear plants, which provide about a quarter of the nations electricity. As Hans Heinrich Driftmann, head of the German Chamber of Industry and Trade, told Reuters, Panic and party politics make bad advisers. Merkel lost anyway in Baden-Wurttemberg, after 58 years of CDU rule. But the biggest casualty has been her credibility. Her coalition just looks unserious. The time for a mea culpa has come. The loss of European idealism is the most shocking change Ive seen in Germany this past decade. Merkel, who would still be stranded in East Germany if Kohl had wavered as she has, needs to lay out just how Germany, with its 3 per cent growth and low unemployment, benefits from the EU, the euro and a borderless market of almost half a billion people. The Christian Democrats cant behave like awkward pro-Europe British Tories: keeping quiet about the EU and hoping the issue will go away. The chancellor must lead on Europe, not least in building bridges eastward and working for the Russia of Medvedev rather than Putin. She should acknowledge her Libyan error and bring Germany back into the alliance effort. And she should stop her nuclear wavering: Europes biggest economy needs nuclear power for the foreseeable future. What was right in 2010 is not wrong in 2011. Renewables are worthy but are not yet ready for prime time. Predictability has been the great German virtue since 1945. Its gone. I dont know if Merkel can recover. New York Times