Don't make us Fuehrer

摘要

Hitler moustaches and swastikas defiling pictures of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, have become a recurring motif in the iconography of the euro crisis, most recently in Cyprus. Scapegoat-ing is inevitable during financial upheavals, says Marcel Fratzscher, president of diw Berlin, a think-tank. Germany, he suggests, has taken theplace of the IMF during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, with Mrs Merkel playing the role of Michel Camdessus, the then imf boss who was pictured in 1997 with folded arms, standing over a humbled Indonesian president signing up to harsh austerity measures. But scape-goating can be dangerous if the goat is powerful and it begins to feel victimised.