Throughout the crisis there was a Faustian battle for the soul of the ECB. That struggle was most earnest in Germany, coming close to parody when Weidmann invoked Goethe's drama as a warning against succumbing to the temptation of unbridled money creation. Should the ECB stay faithful to its first incarnation, the circumscribed conception of a doughtily independent central bank that was essentially the Bundesbank writ large on the European stage? Or did it have to shed that skin and assume a more ambitious and expansive role akin to that of the Fed or the Bank of England, even though unlike such traditional institutions embedded in their sovereign states it was uniquely a supranational monetary authority? As the euro crisis itself metamorphosed from a trial in the markets to a broader economic failure of stalling growth and protracted low inflation, the ECB was called upon to reinvent itself again, by adopting a programme of quantitative easing that would involve large-scale purchases of sovereign bonds, a policy shift as fraught for a central bank lacking a single state as the decisions it took in the heat of the crisis between 2010 and 2012.

A change of leadership in late 2011 was almost certainly pivotal in determining the outcome of the ECB's identity crisis. Under Trichet, who had taken charge in November 2003, the central bank repeatedly crossed lines it had drawn in the sands, but its French leader sought to build and to represent a consensus on the council. Since that was generally lacking during the euro crisis it was hard to widen the ECB's remit beyond the bare minimum needed to sustain the currency union. The central bank's approach in combating the euro crisis in 2010 and most of 2011 was accordingly reactive and hesitant rather than proactive and decisive.

When he was campaigning for the top job, Draghi paid homage to Germany as an economic role model for pushing through structural reforms to improve its competitiveness; and he went out of his way to praise the Bundesbank at his first press conference, in November 2011, expressing ‘great admiration’ for the institution and its tradition. His wooing of the German public earlier that year paid off when Bild backed him.