PHOTO CREDIT: KATHARINA BOSSE FOR TIME
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Dönhoff's journey from the coal car to the present is a sort of model for the course that Germany itself has taken, along with much of Europe. During the entire postwar period, Dönhoff has been a powerful voice for liberalism and democracy in a nation that has groped its way toward both. Today, as editor of Die Zeit, the nation's most prestigious weekly newspaper, she is probably the best-known woman in Germany.
Europe in 1945 seemed to be in a state just short of Carthaginian extinction. Now, after a 50-year struggle to transcend its fractious past and bellicose nationalisms, it has come an astonishing distance toward prosperity, democracy, tolerance and even unity, however flawed and quarrelsome.
Self-renewal has always been an American genius; the Americans, with their enormous continent and resources, have historically been able to expand and thereby overleap their own failures. After World War II, Europe, a shambles, was forced to renew and even to reinvent itself. Like Japan, Europe was obliged to replace much of its physical plant and soon emerged with newer, more advanced factories than those of the conquering Americans.
