As I sit by my window, gazing out over the autumnal park, the turning leaves straining in the gusting west wind, and a suggestion of morning sun stippling a clump of trees in the near distance, my thoughts return to the view from my childhood room on Lutherstrasse, a bourgeois, cobblestone-paved street in Wittenberg lined with neatly spaced lindens. How tranquil it all seemed then. Like other early childhoods contemplated late...