Claude Martin was France’s ambassador to Germany from 1999 to 2007. But long before holding that post, he had already been a quiet witness to it — a young diplomat in Bonn in the 1960s, a member of the Quai d’Orsay’s “Centre d’analyse et de prévision” in the 1970s, a deputy secretary-general in the 1990s. In his memoirs, Quand je pense à l’Allemagne, la nuit (L’Aube, 2023), he recounts, scene after scene, six decades of the same German reflex toward Washington — a reflex that runs through every government, every political color, and that no chancellor, not even the most Gaullist-compatible, has ever truly broken. What Bush was opening at Mainz in 1989 without naming it, Claude had seen coming, patiently, for thirty years already.
[…]
