Specialists on Germany often write about the nation’s struggle to come to terms with its past. First and foremost, they have in mind the calamitous Nazi era of 1933-45. Yet grappling with Nazism requires some awareness of how German society and the state evolved after unification in 1871, during the first world war, and under the flawed democracy of the post-1918 Weimar Republic.

Perhaps the effort to understand should not stop there. In their reliable and engaging book, Simon Bulmer and William Paterson suggest Germans would benefit from confronting the era of the Bonn Republic — the West German state born in 1949 and unified with former communist East Germany after the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989.

In contrast to its ugly eastern sister, West Germany was in its day the most prosperous and free state in the nation’s history. But it also had what the authors call a “leadership avoidance complex” — a reluctance to treat power as something normal to wield. Instead the foundations of West Germany’s identity, liberal domestic order and international credibility rested on an effort to place the country at the heart of an integrated Europe, and resist the old temptations of abrasive nationalism.