The Rise of the Fearmongers: Germany's New Euroskeptic Elite

The day the euro falls apart will feel like paradise, or at least if Dirk Müller is there to host the event. Müller can come up with an unforgettable melody for even the worst of calamities. And to do that, he wouldn't even need more than his warm, dark voice, which can even cloak horror in ghoulish but beautiful sounds. The refrain would probably consist of a quote Müller has repeated often, because it seems to fit to every occasion: "That's it, Mr. Müller. Mr. Müller, that's it."

But, at the moment, Mr. Müller still has a problem being Mr. Müller, because his voice is threatening to abandon him. He has spent too much time in TV studios lately, talking his new book "Showdown" onto the best-seller lists, and his voice has become hoarse. The man who likes to go by the nickname "Mister Dax," because he was once a well-known stock trader and gave a face to the German stock market (and its blue-chip DAX index), still has to endure this evening in Rottweil, a town on the edge of the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. He has taken a pill against hay fever, another against the flu and a cough suppressant. It's mid-May, a week in which the mass-circulation newspaper Bild is warning against inflation, the weekly magazine Stern is running a cover story titled "Is My Money at Risk Now?" and the local paper, the Schwarzwalder Bote, is running the headline "A Passion For Europe in Free Fall." It's Müller time.