Is Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, a female reincarnation of the “deutsche Michel”? Back in the 1840s, cartoonists portrayed Germany’s everyman answer to John Bull as the victim of unscrupulous neighbours who picked his pockets and stole the shirt off his back. It has been interesting to see the revival of this pre-Bismarckian self-image in the recent discussions about the causes and consequences of the eurozone crisis.

According to German economists such as Hans-Werner Sinn, the crisis has a simple explanation. While the virtuous German Michel toiled away, reforming his jobs market

and controlling his unit labour costs, less scrupulous peripheral countries became uncompetitive by gorging themselves on cheap euro credit. When the crisis struck, the European Central Bank and other EU agencies sought to bail out the peripheral countries at the expense of the savers and taxpayers of the “core”.