Merkel's timely message

Monday will mark the 20th anniversary of the epochal fall of the Berlin Wall. With an eye on this date, the U.S. Congress wisely invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel to address a joint session, and on Tuesday she gave heartfelt thanks for more than 40 years of steadfast American support for democracy in Germany.

The United States, she said, played a central role in ending the division of Germany and the Cold War. Her gratitude is a welcome gift at a time when it is in fashion, in some quarters, to dwell on past mistakes, both real and merely perceived, of U.S. foreign policy.

The first woman to become chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (and the first German chancellor to address a joint session of Congress) put the wall's fall in an uplifting historical context. She began by recalling another Nov. 9 German anniversary -- the beginning of Kristallnacht in 1938. On that dark night, the followers of another German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, looted and burned many Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses -- and rounded up thousands of Jews who were sent to concentration camps.

Chancellor Merkel then recalled her own childhood, cut off from the West by the repressive communist regime of the German Democratic Republic. She spoke of the joy with which she and her husband took their first trip to the United States in 1990, a trip made possible by the wall's fall and Germany's reunification.

She stressed the opening words of Germany's Basic Law: "Human dignity is inviolable." The document adds that it's government's duty to "respect and protect" human dignity.

That fundamental mission requires protecting the value of national currency, as demonstrated by Germany's horrendous experience with runaway inflation in the 1920s. That economic catastrophe gave the Nazis the political leverage they needed to being their move toward total power.

Earlier this year, Ms. Merkel wisely rejected President Barack Obama's call for a higher level of deficit spending by European governments. Although Germany's stimulus was half the size of the American stimulus, measured as a share of Gross Domestic Product, it emerged earlier from the global recession.

Our president, who will not attend Monday's gathering of world leaders in Berlin because of a "scheduling conflict," should heed Ms. Merkel's warnings about the enduring risks of fiscal recklessness.

So should Congress.