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THE SECRET OF SUCCESS IS TO UNDERSTAND THE POINT OF VIEW OF OTHERS.

—Henry Ford

This surprises me. It’s not at all what an extremely fit bald man should have as his mantra. It’s soft. The deputy German finance minister further disturbs my wild assumptions about him by speaking clearly, even recklessly, about subjects most finance ministers assume it is their job to obscure. He offers up, without much prompting, that he has just finished reading the latest unpublished report by IMF investigators on the progress made by the Greek government in reforming itself. “They have not implemented the measures they have promised to implement,” he says simply. “They are not making the agreed-upon reforms.”

“The people at the IMF put it that clearly?” I ask.

He turns to page seven of the IMF report, where it recommends not giving the Greeks the next tranche of the money the government needs to avoid defaulting on its bonds. “They have a massive problem still with revenue collection. Not the tax law itself. It’s the collection which needs to be overhauled.”

The Greeks are still refusing to pay their taxes, in other words. But it is only one of many Greek sins. “Their labor market isn’t changing as it needs to.” I ask him for an example. “They had very clearly as a tradition a thirteenth or fourteenth monthly salary,” he says instantly. “Due to developments in the last ten years, a similar [civil service] job in Germany pays fifty-five thousand euros. In Greece is it seventy thousand.” To get around pay restraints in the calendar year, the Greek government simply paid employees for months that didn’t exist. “They need to change the relationship of the people to the government,” he continues. “It is not a task that can be done in three months.” Changing the relationship between any people and its government, he added, was not a trivial matter. The Greeks needed to change their culture. He couldn’t have put this more bluntly: if the Greeks and the Germans were to coexist in a currency union, the Greeks needed to change who they are.

This is unlikely to happen soon enough to matter. The Greeks not only have massive debts but are still running big deficits. Trapped by an artificially strong currency, they cannot turn these deficits into surpluses, even if they do everything outsiders want them to do. Their exports, priced in euros, remain expensive. The German government wants the Greeks to slash the size of their government, but that will also slow economic growth and reduce tax revenues. And so one of two things must happen. Either the Germans must agree to integrate Europe fiscally, so that Germany and Greece bear the same relationship to each other as, say, Indiana and Mississippi—the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks—or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce “structural reform,” a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, possibly even suicidal, for Greeks.

The only economically plausible scenario is that the Germans, with a bit of help from a rapidly shrinking population of solvent European countries, suck it up, work harder, and pay for everyone else. But what is economically plausible appears to be politically unacceptable. The German people all know at least one fact about the euro: that before they agreed to trade in their deutsche marks their leaders promised them, explicitly, they would never be required to bail out other countries. The rule was created with the founding of the European Central Bank and was violated in 2010. Public opinion turns more against the violation every day—so much so that Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a reputation for reading the public mood, hasn’t even bothered to try to go before the German people to persuade them