Inflation-phobic Germans misunderstand their history, says study

Lagarde has made speaking and listening to a very wide range of voices a key priority for her time in office.

Christine Lagarde’s bid to win the hearts and minds of a skeptical German audience could begin with a history lesson, new research suggests.

As she begins her eight-year term as European Central Bank president in Frankfurt, Lagarde will have to deal with a German public concerned her institution’s loose monetary policy is doing more harm than good. According to the Jacques Delors Institute in Berlin, that criticism stems from the fact that many Germans don’t quite understand their own history.

Most Germans believe their country’s interwar period was shaped by only one crisis that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler —