When Germany's former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, appeared at the European Union summit in Vienna recently to become an honorary citizen of Europe, he seemed like a well-fed ghost from a forgotten age. After 16 years at the centre of European political life, Dr Kohl has all but disappeared from view - not least in Germany itself.
Mr Gerhard Schroder's sweeping election victory on September 27th changed Germany's political map, bringing a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens into power for the first time with a mandate for political and economic reform. The German public remains content with the choice it made in September but Bonn's chattering classes have done their best to write off the new government as a failure before it passes a single piece of legislation.
The chief bogeyman is Mr Schroder's Finance Minister, Mr Oskar Lafontaine, who upset the entire German business establishment, the Bundesbank, the European Central Bank and a number of European governments within a month of taking office. The British tabloid, the Sun even dubbed him "the most dangerous man in Europe" - a compliment he will surely cherish for a long time.
Mr Lafontaine and Mr Schroder have long been rivals within the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with the Finance Minister usually regarded as the voice of the left while the chancellor is often seen as being close to business leaders. Some of Mr. Schroder's many admirers in the German press were disappointed when the SPD's election manifesto contained more of Mr Lafontaine's ideas than those associated with their hero.
When these same ideas formed the basis of the coalition's programme for government, almost every German newspaper demanded that Mr Schroder should rein in his over-ambitious Finance Minister. The chancellor has ignored their advice and taken every available opportunity to express his support for Mr Lafontaine.
During the election campaign Mr. Schroder repeated like a mantra the words: "We won't do everything differently, but we'll do a lot of things better." Yet almost everything in Germany seems to have changed since September's election, a shift at least as dramatic as that experienced in Britain after Labour's victory in May last year.
It is not only the faces and the ideology that have changed but the generation running Germany. The 50-somethings known in Germany as the 1968 generation have long been in control of much of Germany's cultural, academic and media establishment. But this is the first time that a generation with no personal experience of the second World War has taken control of the levers of government power.
Moreover, as people of the left, they were shaped by the liberal agenda of the 1960s that places individual freedom and social justice at the top of the political agenda.
The presence of the Greens in the corridors of power promises to add an imaginative streak to Germany's government over the coming years. Apart from their commitment to environmentally sustainable economic policies, the Greens are Germany's most eloquent advocates for the rights of women, immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Germany's seven million foreign residents are already guaranteed a better deal under the new government, with a revised citizenship law allowing many of them to become German citizens. The conservative opposition complains sourly that this is simply a stratagem to create millions of new voters for the Social Democrats and Greens. But it is also a belated acknowledgement of the reality of Germany's multi-cultural society.
The change in citizenship rights is partly an expression of confidence in Germany's post-war national identity, which is robust enough to absorb influences from other cultures. But there are disturbing signs that the same national confidence may have less benign manifestations, especially in relation to Germany's past.
Mr. Schroder, who was still a baby when the second World War ended, believes that Germany should be regarded as a "normal" nation and he has little time for expressions of national remorse. Thus, he told France and Britain that he was too busy to attend this year's Armistice Day commemoration ceremonies and he put plans for a national Holocaust memorial on hold.
A new plan for the memorial envisages an interactive museum, possibly including Steven Spielberg's video archive of Holocaust survivors. Any memorial should, according to the chancellor, be a place "people enjoy going to".
At the same time, a bitter debate is raging among German intellectuals about whether it is appropriate to commemorate the Holocaust at all. Martin Walser, a 71-year-old novelist who has agonised about the German soul for half a century, recently told a gathering of Germany's political and intellectual leaders that every time he saw a programme about the Holocaust on television he wanted to turn away.
The Holocaust was, he claimed, being "instrumentalised" to make Germans feel guilty even if they had nothing to do with Hitler's crimes. When he was finished speaking, the entire audience stood and applauded - with the single exception of Ignatz Bubis, the leader of Germany's Jewish community.
When Mr. Bubis, whose father, brother, sister and niece were murdered in Treblinka, accused Mr. Walser of "latent anti-Semitism", he was deluged with condemnation. Mr Walser, on the other hand, won the backing of many distinguished intellectuals and politicians of the left.
The controversy, which is likely to continue for months, has cast a grim shadow over the birth of Germany's ambitious, idealistic young government. It also serves as a reminder that no German government can entirely escape the ugly stain Hitler left upon the memory and the character of their nation.