Heather Horn: The Controversial German Book Linking the Euro to Holocaust Guilt

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It's hard to think of a good American equivalent to Germany's Thilo Sarrazin, the politician turned best-selling author. The closest one could be Pat Buchanan: in some circles, he and his writings are considered entirely legitimate. In others, they're considered shocking and revolting to the point of scandal. The last time that Sarrazin, the former German central bank director, wrote a book, he suggested that African and Middle Eastern immigrants were destroying the country, in part because of "hereditary factors" that made their children stupid and violent. He suggested educated Germans out-breed them. Controversy raged for months....

If it's hard to think of an American equivalent for Sarrazin the man, it's not too hard to think of an analogy for Sarrazin's book [Europe Doesn't Need the Euro]: it's like the schoolboy's tame little poem that turns out to be an acrostic spelling out a vulgar suggestion regarding the schoolteacher's mother. Many of the paragraphs are entirely reasonable, picking apart the questionable logic of Germany's euro-savior syndrome with remarkable dexterity. But Sarrazin's underlying message is this: Germans are being taken for a ride by countries that aren't holding up their end of the bargain -- and Germans are willing to go along with it because they feel guilty about the Holocaust....

Read entire article at The Atlantic