It was no small thing for a lot of us to read of Chancellor Merkel’s visit to Jerusalem and watch, via the Web, her laying a wreath yesterday at Yad Vashem. If there were ever a bilateral relationship overshadowed by history it is that between Germany and the Jewish state. Frau Merkel herself started off her chancellorship on the wrong foot, permitting the release from a life sentence of the killer of an American sailor, Robert Dean Stethem, so that the killer could go back to Lebanon. We called the act despicable. Frau Merkel, however, has been a generally pro-American and pro-Israeli leader, at least by European standards, and she has been welcomed warmly on her three-day visit.

The issues in the air go back to Konrad Adenauer, who had started off his political career by refusing to shake hands with a Nazi and had been harassed, and at times jailed, by the Nazis before and during World War II and who, as the first postwar chancellor of what was then called West Germany, assumed the historical debts and obligations of the defeated Reich. The assumption was designed to signal that the real Germany was the Federal Republic, not the communistic regime in East Germany, which, in any event, would accept no responsibility for the Holocaust on the fiction that, as communists, its leaders, who had signed a non-agression pact with Hitler, had always been opposed to Hitlerism.

Adenauer inherited a hurricane of controversy when, in his negotiations with Nahum Goldmann, he agreed to pay reparations to the Jewish state. The idea proved so incendiary in Israel that a large demonstration of opponents gathered on the day the Knesset voted to approve the arrangement, rioting outside the Knesset and interrupting the parliament’s procedures. A future holder of high office was arrested outside the foreign ministry carrying a package filled with dynamite. It took another 13 years until diplomatic relations were established. Yet in the past two generations, German-Israeli relations have become embedded at national, regional, municipal, political, and cultural levels. Not to mention the close ties between intelligence services from the two countries.

Frau Merkel referred to this complex web when, on her arrival Sunday, she said Germany had a “special responsibility” toward Israel. We might have added a special cultural affinity, too, in that Yiddish, one of the Jewish languages, is partly based on German, which, Herzl dreamed at one point, would be an official language of the Jewish state. Germany meanwhile, has united and has become an economic powerhouse and a central power, pardon the expression, in the European Union. And it has come a long way since Chancellor Schroeder and Prime Minister Chirac tried to forge a Franco-German union that would dominate the E.U., isolate Britain, and stand up to America. Now Frau Merkel and President Sarkozy are working with, rather than against, the Anglo-American alliance. Ms. Merkel’s expressions of support for Israel heard this week fill out an important part of the picture.