The death of Manfred Rommel last week, at 84, ended a life that might be taken as a metaphor for contemporary Germany.

The only child of Hitler’s favorite field marshal, he personified in his long public life the postwar German republic that sought, in contrition for its past, some path to the future. Even in the scale of his own career, Rommel sought proportion: He could have been a candidate for the Bundestag, and might well have been chancellor or federal president. But he chose, deliberately, to be the well-respected, well-beloved mayor of Stuttgart for 21 years. A member of the (conservative) Christian Democratic Union in Baden-Württemberg, he permitted Red Army faction terrorists to be buried together in Stuttgart—”all wrath,” he said, “must end with death”—and championed Germany’s immigrants.