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That is why Europe’s money problems feel not just problematic but intractable. It’s why Greeks are now mailing bombs to Merkel, and thugs in Berlin are hurling stones through the windows of the Greek consulate. And it’s why European leaders have done nothing but delay the inevitable reckoning, by scrambling every few months to find cash to plug the ever growing holes in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and praying that bigger and more alarming holes in Spain, Italy, and even France do not reveal themselves.

Until now the European Central Bank, in Frankfurt, has been the main source of this cash. The ECB was designed to behave with the same discipline as the Bundesbank but has been redesigned by the financial crisis into something else. Already, it has bought, outright, something like $80 billion in Greek and Irish and Portuguese government bonds, and lent another $450 billion or so to various European governments and European banks, accepting virtually any collateral, including Greek government bonds. But the ECB has a rule—and the Germans think the rule very important—that they cannot accept as collateral bonds classified by the U.S. rating agencies as in default. Given that the ECB once had a rule against buying bonds outright in the open market, and another rule against government bailouts, it’s a little odd that they have gotten so hung up on this technicality. But they have. If Greece defaults on its debt, the ECB not only will lose a pile on its holdings of Greek bonds but must return the bonds to the European banks, and the European banks must fork over $450 billion in cash. The ECB itself might face insolvency, which would mean turning for funds to its solvent member governments, led by Germany. (The senior official at the Bundesbank told me they have already thought about how to deal with the request. “We have thirty-four hundred tons of gold,” he said. “We are the only country that has not sold its original allotment [from the late 1940s]. So we are covered to some extent.”)

The bigger problem with a Greek default is that it might well force other European countries and their banks themselves into default. At the very least it would create panic and confusion in the market for both sovereign and bank debt, at a time when a lot of banks and at least two big European debt-ridden countries, Italy and Spain, cannot afford panic and confusion.

At the bottom of this unholy mess, from the point of view of the German Finance Ministry, is the unwillingness, or inability, of the Greeks to change their behavior. That was what the currency union always implied: entire peoples had to change their way of life. Conceived as a tool for integrating Germany with Europe, and preventing the Germans from dominating others, the euro had become the opposite. For better or worse, the Germans now control the financial fate of Europe. If the rest of Europe was to continue to enjoy the benefits of what was essentially a German currency they’d need to become more German. And so, once again, all sorts of people who would rather not think about what it means to be “German” are compelled to do so.

Jörg Asmussen offers the first hint of an answer in his personal behavior. He was a type familiar in Germany but absolutely freakish in Greece or, for that matter, the United States: a keenly intelligent, highly ambitious civil servant who had no other ambition but to serve his country. His sparkling curriculum vitae was missing a line that would be found on the résumés of men in his position almost everywhere else in the world—the line where he leaves government service for Goldman Sachs to cash out. When I asked another prominent German civil servant why he hadn’t taken time out of public service to make his fortune working for some bank, the way every American civil servant who is anywhere near finance seems to want to do, his expression changed to alarm. “But I could never do this,” he said. “It would be illoyal!” Asmussen echoes this sentiment when I ask him why he hasn’t bothered to get