Is it possible to garner a bad review for the opening of something so innocuous-sounding as the German-American Heritage Museum? If the reviewer is the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher, anything is possible. (Fisher was the former German correspondent for the Post, before foreign correspondents became an endangered species. And as a few Germans have acknowledged—and as Fisher himself once told me—the reviewer’s relationship with Germany has never been an entirely happy one.)

The problem, as Fisher sees it, is that “the Balkanizers are in control.”