The president of the Bundesbank was once the mightiest central banker in Europe. No more. In the council of the European Central Bank, Jens Weidmann is just one of 23. He has only one vote – the same as Greece. It gets worse. One of Europe’s last monetary hawks, Mr Weidmann is isolated, gnashing his teeth as the ECB gears up to go full throttle into a business that, according to its statutes, is verboten: buying the debt of member states. Wave goodbye to the old ECB; say hello to the Fed-in-Frankfurt.

This is the story of a historical bet gone badly wrong. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, chancellor Helmut Kohl offered the D-Mark to President Fran?ois Mitterrand in exchange for French acceptance of German reunification. This noble gesture of self-containment was not, of course, an entirely selfless act. As part of a hard-headed bargain in return for giving up the symbol of German economic primacy, Europe’s onetary and fiscal policy would be “Germanised”. In a new D-Markzone writ large everybody would have to learn German probity.

The crash of 2008 put paid to that bet as the ECB began to fiddle with its modest mandate, fuelling bitter internal disputes. In 2011 Axel Weber, then Bundesbank chief and tipped to take over as ECB head, threw in the towel. Then Jürgen Stark, a member of the bank’s directorate and another German hawk, quit. Last week Mr Weidmann himself threatened to resign. Instead of “Germanising” Europe, the Germans are about to be “Europeanised”, or even “Club Med-ified”.