ABSTRACT
Introduction In July 2014 Newsweek Magazine declared ‘The German Century’ and noted it was mightily impressed that Germany’s “football team is the toast of the world, and Germany’s political, cultural and environmental credentials suggest the future is striped black, red and yellow”. Only a year later Germany, in the wake of the showdown over the Greek debt crisis, had wound up in the role of the European bad guy and the Greece bailout revived the image of the “cruel German” (Faiola and Kirchner 2015). Twitter was swamped by protests, using #ThisIsACoup and #BoycottGermany hashtags which prompted observers to conclude that the “ghosts of the pasts have returned with thunderous style” (Nock 2015). Especially the proposal by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble that Greece could temporarily leave the euro was interpreted as a prime example of Germany’s bullheadedness which observers described as “a disastrous move in terms of public diplomacy” (Nehring 2015) or a “public diplomacy disaster” (The Economist 2015) alike.
