The eurozone, fashioned as a deutschmark zone, was a disaster waiting to happen, and not just for its poorer members.
This is in itself extraordinary: the constitution, together with the deutschmark, was the great symbol of postwar German success.
This meant that, compared with the deutschmark, the dollar was at its highest rate for more than ten years.
So Ms Merkel is not supposed to represent her electorate while Mr Tsipras is?Germans were told that sacrificing the deutschmark for the euro would involve safeguards, with an ECB based in Frankfurt, strict rules about which countries would join the euro and explicit bans on bailouts for struggling countries.
Yet in some of the countries of Eastern Europe that have not joined the euro, the euro prevails – as it does in parts of the former Soviet Union where the deutschmark was once all-powerful.
In 1987, Lawson began to "shadow" the deutschmark, intervening whenever the pound went above 3 DMs.
By combining its Deutschmark with the currencies of poorer countries, like Greece, Germany has been able to have a cheaper currency than it would on its own and to export far more than it otherwise might.
"Reunification" would be better described as the absorption of an unhappy people in the east into the thriving republic that was ruled from quiet Bonn, at their own request, and on generous terms which included parity between the ostmark of the crumbling East German economy and the mighty deutschmark.
Germany has repeatedly rejected the country's claims and says it has honoured its obligations, including a 115m deutschmark payment to Greece in 1960.
That arrangement was proposed by the then ECB president, Jean-Claude Trichet, in clear breach of the Maastricht treaty's no-bailout rule, which had been Germany's fundamental condition for giving up the deutschmark.
Is that the Lawson who walked out on Margaret Thatcher in 1989 because she didn't like him shadowing the deutschmark?
