Princeton -- If anyone wanted evidence that we are not in the mental and political world of the interwar Great Depression, the German election result and its outcome – a stable government of the center-right - should be a clincher. In interwar Germany, the Depression destroyed German democracy and led to the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists; in today’s Germany, the most severe economic crisis since the Second World War produced the reelection of Frau Merkel.