As his popularity plummets and one electoral disaster follows another, the German chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, has little to be pleased about these days. But he can derive some satisfaction from the smooth passage through the Bonn parliament last week of legislation committing Germany to membership of the EMU.
The chancellor has now persuaded the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, the Bundesbank and the Federal Constitutional Court to accept the euro. Bankers, big business and most trade unions are in favour of EMU too. The only group that has yet to be persuaded is the public, most of whom remain unhappy about giving up the deutschmark.
With all the main parties except the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) backing the euro, there was never much doubt about parliament's decision. But populist rumblings from Bavaria's conservative prime minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber, and Dr Kohl's Social Democratic (SPD) challenger, Mr Gerhard Schroeder, could have sparked a backbench revolt.
It was the chancellor's cunning stratagem of commissioning the Bundesbank to report on the readiness of European Union member-states for membership of EMU that made rebellion impossible.
The austere central bankers in Frankfurt were scathing about most EU states and identified Ireland, Finland and Luxembourg as the only states among the 11 founding members of EMU that have achieved a fiscal position "that can be unreservedly classified as sustainable".
But the report came down in favour of a broadly-based EMU and declared that, with a little effort, even Belgium and Italy could get their fiscal house in order.
The Bundesbank report was enough to persuade Mr Stoiber to abandon his campaign to postpone the launch of the euro beyond 1999. Mr Schroeder continued to warn that EMU was "a sickly, premature birth" that could destroy jobs but, in the end, he voted for it.
The Federal Constitutional Court rejected a petition by four academics to declare German membership of EMU unconstitutional on the grounds that fudging the stability criteria could deny Germans their constitutional right to economic stability.
Yet many Germans still fear that the euro will be unstable and most are convinced that the new currency will be weaker than the deutschmark. This anxiety is based on the straightforward calculation that merging strong currencies with weaker ones will produce a consistency somewhere in between. Many older people fear that the value of their savings could diminish if the euro does not remain strong.
Dr Kohl's task in persuading Germans to accept the euro is made more difficult because the deutschmark is seen by many as a national symbol rather than simply a currency. For western Germans, it symbolises post-war prosperity and the new, democratic Germany that emerged from the ruins of the second World War. For easterners, the adoption of the deutschmark in 1990 was the moment when union with the west became a reality, four months before the official day of reunification.
The shame that followed the second World War made Germans shy about expressing national pride but the deutschmark represented the virtues of stability, strength and discipline that the new German society aspired to.
The euro is arriving at a time when many Germans are cooling towards the idea of European unity. The massive cost of reunification has left Germany's state coffers empty and ordinary Germans are feeling the pinch.
With five million of their compatriots unemployed, Germans are increasingly reluctant to subsidise other Europeans, in the south of Italy or the west of Ireland.
Although a majority of Germans oppose the euro, most acknowledge that it cannot be stopped and there is little organised opposition to it.
