What does it mean when a country with a living memory of catastrophe spends a Sunday quietly assembling a coalition government, and the country across the ocean — the one that helped write its constitution after the last bad ending — spends the same Sunday at brunch?
I was at Eliza’s, in Georgetown, for what she still insists on calling a salon and what is in fact six people, two bottles of something Burgundian, and a roast she has been perfecting since the second Obama term. The Germans came up exactly once. A retired ambassador mentioned the coalition talks with the careful neutrality of a man defusing something, and the table held its breath for about four seconds, and then someone asked about the cheese.
The cheese, for the record, was excellent. A washed-rind from a co-op in the Hudson Valley that Eliza had driven to herself, because Eliza believes in driving to things. We talked about the rind for nine minutes. We talked about Berlin for none.
The bipartisan lobbyist was there. He is always there. He works for everyone and therefore, in the local theology, no one, and on Sunday he was wearing the cufflinks he wears when he wants to be asked about them. When the ambassador floated the word firewall — the German shorthand for the agreement among the grown-up parties not to govern with the AfD — the lobbyist examined his cufflink and said the situation was complicated. Then he said complicated things often resolved themselves. Then he asked Eliza where the cheese was from.
What is actually happening in Berlin, for those of us who read past the lifestyle section: a far-right party that polled in the high twenties is being kept out of government by an exhausted handshake between the Christian Democrats and whoever can be persuaded to share a cabinet table with them. The handshake is held together by memory. Memory, as anyone who has dealt with an aging parent knows, is a depreciating asset.
None of this was said at Eliza’s. What was said: that the Olympics closing ceremony in Verona had been moving, in a way. That the figure skating had been a scandal, in a way. That the Super Bowl had been two weeks ago and already felt like a different administration. That the Presidents Day mattress sales had crept earlier every year and now arrived essentially at Valentine’s, which someone called a merger and everyone laughed at because it was easier than not laughing.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and therefore knows where the originals are, told me last month that the requests her desk gets have shifted. People used to ask for citizenship papers and land grants. Now they ask, with increasing frequency, for the German files. The denazification questionnaires. The transcripts from Nuremberg. The instructional pamphlets the Army Corps printed in 1946 to teach a defeated country how to be a democracy again. Judy said this over coffee and then looked at me as if waiting for me to say the obvious thing. I did not say it. I am as guilty as the cufflink.
You will notice that I have written eight paragraphs about a German coalition negotiation and have not used the words that the moment plainly calls for. Neither did the ambassador. Neither did the lobbyist. Neither, when I think about it, has any column I have read this week in any of the papers that pay people to notice things. The firewall is the story. The firewall has always been the story. We are the country that built the original firewall, and we are spending this Sunday afternoon arguing about whether the cheese has been allowed to come to room temperature.
Eliza walked me to the door and said, the way she always says, that it had been a lovely evening, and that we mustn’t let so much time pass. I said we mustn’t. The lobbyist was still inside, asking for the recipe.