FLOOD waters have receded, and Germans have returned to the rituals of summer. Angela Merkel, the chancellor, has made her annual pilgrimage to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, donning a new blue outfit after two years of reusing the same dress. Voters who can are heading to the beach. The hot phase of the campaign for the parliamentary election on September 22nd is yet to come. It will begin on September 1st, when Mrs Merkel and her challenger, Peer Steinbrück, will have their only televised duel.For Mrs Merkel, this seasonal torpor is fortuitous, for it coincides with a controversy that nobody could have foreseen a year ago. The revelations by Edward Snowden about the global spying of America’s and Britain’s secret services have shaken no country more than one of their closest allies, Germany. The details of Anglo-American snooping on German citizens remain unclear and confusing, but many Germans have already bought the “utterly senseless narrative”, as Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany’s interior minister, lamented this week, that “thousands of Americans are sitting down reading our e-mails and listening to our phone calls”.Memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi,…
