Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss also dreams of being king of Germany. Despite his fashion sense of tweed and silk scarves, the 72-year-old minor aristocrat and property developer from Thuringia shares Reiser’s disdain for the powers that be. The only difference is that Heinrich is dead serious about it. So serious, that two years ago, thousands of police officers raided dozens of locations and arrested him and 26 others who were allegedly plotting to overthrow the Scholz government and install Heinrich as monarch. The elderly prince and his supporters, who include a TV chef, a judge, a doctor, and some ex-military guys who grew their hair long, are now standing trial for creating a terrorist organisation and plotting high treason. The case is so sprawling, it has been handled by three separate courts in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. The evidence takes up several kilometres of folders.

This motley crew belong to the Reichsbürger scene, a catch-all term for the tens of thousands of people who reject the legitimacy of the Federal Republic. And for whom the democratically elected governments of modern Germany are vassals installed by the post-war occupying powers. No peace treaty was signed between the Third Reich and the Allies, they say. And so the Reich, for them, remains the legitimate state, though for them this usually means skipping back past the unpleasantness of the Hitler regime to the Second Reich, the era of Bismarck, the Kaisers and pointy helmets — still lurking, intact at the back. The Reichsbürger believe the Federal Republic is a corporation which funnels money to the US government and the Rothschilds — you know where this is going. As with many conspiracy movements, a large dash of antisemitism seems to be an essential ingredient. A state-owned finance agency does in fact exist in Frankfurt, but it solely manages the state’s debt and investments, explains the German Lawyer’s Association, which says it receives a surprising number of queries from concerned citizens on the topic.

Although standard Anglosphere rabbit-hole stuff is often mixed in — QAnon, Bill Gates is the devil, etc — the Reichsbürger are, at core, a uniquely German phenomenon. One aspect is their hatred of the modern technocratic state. As someone who has run a small business here, I have a certain amount of sympathy. German bureaucracy — its endless paper forms, its hyper-complex procedures, its myriad fees and taxes — can deaden your soul, drive you crazy, and make you shout “enough!” Several Reichsbürger groups print their own German Reich passports and banknotes, and refuse to pay taxes and social insurance contributions. It’s no wonder these groups are founded by and followed by Germans who have been burned by what they perceive as an oppressive, corrupt state that fails to protect their welfare, such as in the vast economic turmoil in eastern Germany in the aftermath of unification.

A lesser-known but still pivotal aspect of German yearning for a Kaiser is its New-Agey side. It’s no coincidence that the Reichsbürger group included an astrologer. During a protest against the government’s restrictive Covid policies in 2020, hundreds of Reichsbürger rushed up the steps of the Reichstag. It was a strange foreshadowing of the events at the US Capitol the following January. Among the flags of the Second Reich were Russian banners, rainbow flags, even signs with Donald Trump’s face. And it was a young woman with dreadlocks — a self-proclaimed alternative healer — who triggered the spontaneous stampede when she called from the demonstration’s stage for protestors to march up the parliament’s steps and take back “their house”.

The pandemic was a unifying moment for Germany’s discontented. A new anti-Covid movement, the Querdenker (literally lateral thinkers), managed to bring together everyone from Holocaust deniers to natural healers to normal people who felt their livelihoods had been shattered by the government’s heavy-handed approach to the pandemic. The alliance between esoteric types and retro-monarchists caught the mainstream off-guard — but perhaps it shouldn’t have. Already two centuries ago, exploration of the occult — the mystical and irrational — was wedded to a desire for national German consciousness. At the start of the 19th century, nationalism among the dozens of tiny German-speaking states was largely a reaction to Napoleonic occupation, with imported French rationalism and universalism seen as an alien threat to the German Volksgeist. Thinkers instead embraced Germanic mythology, folk tales and mediaeval alchemy. Painters such as the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich explored mystical, sublime German landscapes, while the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte embedded the love of the natural and the mystical in German nationalist thinking: the “natural” became synonymous with the “national”.

Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, this embrace of the “natural” by German subcultures stood for resistance against various “artificial”, “foreign” or “un-German” forces. Nudism, organic agriculture, homoeopathy, the wide-reaching work of philosopher Rudolf Steiner — these are some of the not-so-sinister outshoots of this stream of anti-modern thought. But Romantic anti-modernism also birthed the völkisch ideology of the Nazis that saw Jews as “unnatural” non-humans who had to be cut out of the “pure” German body politic.

It’s uncanny to see this current rear its head again among the Reichsbürger and affiliated conspiracy-based subcultures, which range from the AfD leadership who refuse to support the German national football team because it’s too ethnically diverse to far-Right back-to-the-land types who wear felt jackets and try to set up kindergartens blending esoteric Waldorf and völkisch thought.

Indeed, it is mostly outside of Germany’s large, cosmopolitan cities that these movements take root. Self-declared mini-countries are home to these ideas, sometimes headed by cosplaying middle-aged dudes with skullets. Peter Fitzek is but one example — before crowning himself as King Peter I of Germany in 2012, he ran a shop filled with New-Agey knickknacks in Wittenberg, coincidently where another German radical, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 Theses to a church door 500 years prior. Fitzek’s humble business of peddling dreamcatchers has long since morphed into a cultish make-believe monarchy with various properties that have seceded from the Republic and joined the new Reich. Financed by eager volunteers and believers, Fitzek’s fantasy state, “the Kingdom of Germany”, has its own currency, the Engel (Angel). Euros can be exchanged for Angels but not vice versa — ensuring an inflow of hard currency, a trick Fitzek surely copied from the former rulers of this territory, the German Democratic Republic. Fitzek’s “state” also has its own passport, which he claims he has travelled around the world with.

At some point, though, the game’s up for guys like Reuss and Fitzek. The site of Fitzek’s “Kingdom of Germany” was raided by police and fiscal authorities in June. Fitzek is totally upfront about his tax evasion. At some point he’ll be locked up like Reuss, but perhaps martyrdom is what he’s looking for.

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One thing all these people seem to agree on is a hatred of the United States and a belief that Russia is the natural partner of the German people. Prosecutors allege Prince Heinrich’s group had contact with Russian diplomats and the Russian biker gang Night Wolves. Reuss counted on Russian support for his Reich, while Russia perhaps considered using his gang for its sabotage and misinformation purposes.

On one level, there’s something rather pathetic about middle-aged to elderly men wearing homemade crowns and declaring silly little independent states in shabby old buildings in forgotten villages and small towns, often in the former east. It reeks of a loss of purpose in a society subjected to rapid technological and economic change — perceived to be increasingly dominated by American technology and American-style capitalism. The irony escapes these groups that it is the platforms of Silicon Valley that have empowered them to spread their message to their flock.

Germany’s mainstream media pundits and experts on the far-Right warn that we shouldn’t just dismiss the Reichsbürger around Reuss as some crazy, harmless old men. After all, they had plenty of weapons and a handful of ex-army officers who knew how to fire them. If they’d summoned the gusto to carry it, the Reuss group’s alleged plan to kidnap Scholz would have certainly failed.

For me, the story of the Reichsbürger tells an even more disturbing tale. They’re the canary in the coalmine pointing to a greater threat than an individual gang of wannabe putschists. It points to a country whose civil fabric is fraying at the edges. Whose sense of shared reality is fragmented into a thousand irrational, naive and antisemitic narratives. A country that is losing the plot. A country that’s yearning for that one strong leader who will bring everything together after the collapse

On my jog along the railway tracks in the north of Berlin this morning, I encountered a middle-aged man slowly, intentionally approaching a tree and then embracing it for several minutes. Harmless enough, right? You never know. Maybe he’s dreaming of becoming the next king of Germany.

And yet, governing Germany, that amorphous blob at the centre of Europe, has been no picnic over the centuries. For most of the past millennium, there was hardly any Germany at all — or, depending on how you look at it, there were dozens, sometimes hundreds of Germanies. The incarnations of the Holy Roman Empire (which was nothing of the sort), the Reformation, the sectarian bloodbath known as the Thirty Years War, the German lands’ centuries-long role as buffer between greater powers — none of it was conducive to the creation of a stable nation state out of unruly Saxons, Bavarians, Franks, Prussians, Swabians, Hessians, Thuringians, Friesians and all the rest of them.

Napoleon’s occupation in the early 1800s stirred German nationalists into action. They dreamt of forging a proper country out of this mess. Bismarck, that crafty Prussian, finally managed through “blood and iron” to unify most of the 30-odd German states around at the time. Then came the twin disasters of the First and Second World Wars, and the tragic attempt at liberal, federal democracy wedged between. German unity paired with an overly ambitious centralised German state — most extreme under Hitler — ended in unspeakable suffering.

Against such a backdrop, Article 1 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) is a moment of enlightenment: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” And on it goes, with the right to “develop one’s personality freely” and not to be “discriminated against or favoured because of one’s sex, descent, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, religious or political views”. Not even five years had passed since the end of Auschwitz, and here were 146 articles detailing a radical departure from the savagery of the brownshirts. Signing this document must have felt like spitting in the faces of the surviving Nazis. As a German, it still makes me teary-eyed.

The document created something new for the defeated, humiliated, morally bankrupt country — at least the western part — to rally around. The Volk had hit rock-bottom, and the constitution was the operating manual for a fresh start. And it’s the glue that holds modern Germany together. It fine-tuned power relations between the Länder (federal states) and the central government better than any previous attempt. The regions and cultures of this country vary wildly — some are practically nations in their own right with their own versions of pork, starch and alcohol. Catholic Bavaria, with its Lederhosen and Dirndls, jovial hospitality, crucifixes in public buildings and impossible-to-understand dialect, has more in common with Austria than the subdued, Lutheran and windswept Schleswig-Holstein, which is culturally closer to Denmark. Many in the former GDR, especially in Saxony, feel an affinity towards Russia and antipathy towards the US and Nato, while most of my family stem from Hesse in the West, a region heavily influenced by American culture, thanks to decades of military presence.

This isn’t to say the federal framework — which also prevents too much power from amassing in a single institution in Berlin — is perfect. Massive redundancies are baked into the system. From tiny city-state Bremen (population 700,000) to North Rhine-Westphalia (18 million), each Bundesland has its own domestic intelligence service (a Verfassungsschutz or Office for Protection of the Constitution), tasked with spying on “anti-constitutional” organisations and individuals. Coordination between these agencies can be woefully inadequate. Better communication might have prevented the deadly 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market. Federalism has also been an obstacle to technological progress: poor e-government coordination between Berlin and 16 states has left the digitalisation of German bureaucracy in a sorry state of durchwursteln (muddling through, literally sausaging through), lagging years if not decades behind its European neighbours.

The Grundgesetz has created a shared identity, though. For the Nazis, myths of racial purity and superiority were supposed to be the unifier. In the Federal Republic, more innocuous narratives emerged. There’s the one about German intellectual excellence (“Land of poets and thinkers”), the one about engineering excellence (“Autoland Deutschland”), the one about a shared consumer culture (Haribo, VW, Playmobil etc.), and let’s not downplay Fußball and the accomplishments of the Nationalmannschaft. But perhaps underpinning it all is “constitutional patriotism”, a term promoted by West German thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas. In short, it’s hard to be proud of our country after Nazism, but we can at least be proud of our constitution and the liberal state we built around it.

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And yet, constitutional patriotism feels perhaps overly academic, dry, even naive in today’s polarised, fraught environment. Not least because the Grundgesetz and the values it embodies are under constant attack. The most obvious threat comes from those who don’t even recognise it, like the Reichsbürger, a peculiar and somewhat ludicrous Right-wing movement whose leaders went on trial this week for planning a coup. Nostalgic for the pre-Hitlerian Reich, they say the Federal Republic has no sovereignty, refuse to pay their taxes, and print their own passports. Led by the self-declared Prince Heinrich XIII, they argue — correctly, in fact — that the Grundgesetz was intended as a temporary document, valid only until the unification of all the Germans (meaning West and the GDR). A permanent constitution would have to be approved by the entire Volk, even though East Germans did eagerly vote for reunification, accepting the western constitution part and parcel.

The AfD, by contrast, are playing a longer, subtler game. Earlier this year, a purported AfD “remigration” plan was uncovered by journalists: not just immigrants but also non-white German citizens were to be deported. This alarmed the broad centre and millions took to the streets in protest. “Never again is now” stickers appeared in the window of my local ice-cream shop, as if the country was a hair’s breadth from returning to genocidal fascism.

The AfD denies that “remigration” is its official part, knowing that it would certainly violate the Grundgesetz. Turning the issue on its head, the AfD claims it is the true defender of the constitution, pointing to its opposition to the government’s pandemic measures. And yet, the Grundgesetz is at the heart of the issue that has ignited support for the AfD: immigration. The right to political asylum was anchored in article 16, as a reaction to the failure of the international community to take in those who had fled the Nazi regime. Fast forward to last year, and 350,000 migrants claimed asylum in Germany — and each has a constitutional right to have their application fairly assessed. Tens of thousands of those claims will be rejected, but that takes years, while deportation often never happens. In other words, the Geist behind the AfD is paradoxically being enflamed by the Grundgesetz.

Indeed, not a day goes by without the constitution being put to the test. The harsh treatment of pro-Palestinian protestors by German police raises questions about the tension between freedom of speech and freedom from alleged anti-Jewish hate speech. Add to the mix the polarisation fuelled by social media, the uptick in attacks on politicians across the spectrum, and fragmentation of the information space by foreign bots and AI content — and the 75-year-old founding document is heading through a rocky patch.

Faced with these crises, more durchwursteln is to be expected. This is how the centre holds in post-war German democracy. And while it’s not exactly sexy, this is still easily the most peaceful, most prosperous Germany we’ve ever had. All of which is a long way of saying: Let’s pause for a second, raise a glass. Prost!

Decades later, Germans are as obsessed with their cars as ever. But the autobahns are choked with traffic, and large, growling combustion engines capable of demonic speeds seem, to many, hopelessly out of sync with Germany’s self-proclaimed global leadership on environmental protection and climate change.

And so the shine is coming off German car manufacturing. Headlines such as “Share of e-cars imported from China into Germany more than triples” will sound scary if you’re VW, Audi and co. Yet official German sales statistics for April show that domestic models still occupy eight of the top 10 spots, with VW models featuring in four places. Chinese electric models and Teslas are nowhere to be seen. The ID-3 and ID-4, VW’s electric models, far outsell Elon Musk’s machines.

Germany, however, represents a tiny slice of the global car market these days. VW has long since been set on conquering the Chinese market and has done astonishingly well there. But its sales in China fell by 15% in the first quarter, including a 40% drop for electric cars. The bigger picture suggests that there is indeed cause for alarm.

The world’s largest carmaker, the Volkswagen Group, still towers over the rest, following a brief drop to second place under Toyota after the deeply embarrassing diesel scandal eight years ago, when California researchers discovered defeat software that allowed VW to fake their cars’ nitrogen oxide emissions during testing. Dieselgate, which has so far cost VW more than €30 billion in fines globally, is far from over, and threatens to inflict further damage on the brand. Earlier this month, on the 166th day of his fraud trial, Rupert Stadler, former CEO of Volkswagen subsidiary Audi, changed his mind about what he knew about emissions cheating and pleaded guilty. He is now expected to face a €1.1 million fine rather than prison.

Stadler is the first senior VW German executive to admit wrongdoing. He confessed to allowing the sale of cars to continue even though he knew they contained the emissions manipulating software. Until now, VW higher-ups had insisted they had been unaware of their engineers’ cheeky tinkering. The trial of Martin Winterkorn, former Volkswagen CEO, is on hold due to ill health, but the Stadler confession will embolden fresh lawsuits. Thousands of German drivers are already suing VW and its marques for damages — and a total of 10 million cars on German roads could, in theory, be affected. The financial consequences of damages at that scale could eviscerate the industry, which would prefer to leave Dieselgate in the rear-view mirror.

The affair was the death knell for “clean diesel”, which, ludicrously, had been sold around the world as a green fuel, not least by German manufacturers who stubbornly insisted that petrol and diesel internal combustion motors had a bright future, despite much of the industry elsewhere placing its chips on electric. Germany’s sprawling car industry is built around these two, 19th-century motor technologies, with suppliers such as Bosch and hundreds of smaller Mittelstand firms supplying VW, BMW, Daimler, Opel and Porsche — not to mention large foreign-owned factories for Ford and Tesla. By some estimates, car manufacturing accounts for €500 billion in revenue and employs, directly and indirectly, 10 million people. Electric cars, by contrast, are essentially computers on wheels, contain far fewer mechanical components and require less factory labour and more software coders.

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It’s no surprise, then, that the sluggish, reluctant switch to electric has been painful. Until last year, when Musk opened a “gigafactory” for Tesla SUVs and batteries at the gates of Berlin, German car management and unions, lobbyists and politicians were all largely in denial about the need for a radical transformation. It’s too early to tell whether domestic brands can fend off Tesla, with its bottomless market cap and the threat of cheap Chinese imports.

Yet resistance to electric cars is as cultural as much as it is economic. As Ulf Porschardt, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, has written: “Internal combustion engines made by Porsche, Maserati and Lamborghini were, and are, high culture. To stop making them is as if Beethoven had stopped after the 7th Symphony, or Wagner had finished the Ring after Siegfried.”

Dramatic stuff. But depending on who you ask, Porschardt is either a shameless apologist for the country’s most corrupt and powerful industry and its dangerous, polluting and climate-destroying products — or else he’s an apostle of the values that the car has embodied in both German and Western, post-Second World War culture.

In his history of the iconic Porsche 911, Porschardt regularly defends the absence of a speed limit on German motorways: “The autobahn is the last place where we enjoy more freedom than others in the world.” It is no coincidence that Porschardt supports the Free Democratic Party, a tiny, liberal and pro-car party which recently derailed plans, pushed by its Green coalition partner, to introduce a speed limit of 130kph. Debate over driving speeds resurfaced last year as Germany attempted to reduce its dependency on Russian oil: lower speeds means lower fuel use, lower emissions and fewer accidents. But with a majority of Germans now favouring a speed limit, Porschardt and his fellow travellers are on the losing side of this very German culture war.

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The car, and its place within German society, has never been so furiously debated. In Berlin, there is bitter opposition to a proposed extension of an inner-city motorway through densely populated neighbourhoods. The capital is positively brimming with community groups keen to create low-traffic “superblocks”, as Barcelona has done.

Yet, in spite of the Greens’ participation in the Scholz coalition, new motorways continue to be proposed across the country. In response, a radical new climate movement, Letzte Generation, has sprung up, so named because they believe they are the last generation that can prevent catastrophic climate change before dangerous tipping points kick in. For them, the unfettered use of “motorised individual transport”, as they prefer to call cars, must be restricted. And so they have taken to supergluing themselves to intersections and exit slipways, causing horrendous rush-hour traffic jams, sometimes even to the hindrance of emergency vehicles. This, somehow, is supposed to pressure the government to adopt more effective climate policies.

The Kulturkampf around das Auto shows no signs of slowing. Germans’ obsession with driving is deeply associated to West Germany’s emergence as an economic powerhouse from the ashes of the Second World War. According to one intriguing, provocative theory, made by writer Mia Raben in her essay “The Incapacity to Brake”, the post-war obsession with speed is directly related to Germans’ refusal to face up to the reality of what their country did to the world under Hitler, a leader, she says, they adored. “The object libido has migrated from the Führer to the car,” she wrote.

Raben’s essay title referred to a famous 1967 book, The Incapacity to Mourn, which took a psychoanalytical approach to explaining why it was so hard for ordinary Germans to look the crimes of the Nazis in the face. Even today, everything is somehow explained by the war, from the national obsession with cars to the misplaced radicalism of the environmentalists who oppose them. When I think of my grandparents — who very much belonged to the Hitler generation, and spent their lives avoiding the question of guilt for war and genocide — and how they thundered across the glittering autobahn, there is some sense to this theory. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by travelling at the highest speeds possible in their shiny, powerful Mercedes, they weren’t trying to outrun their past.

In 2023, Germany, like much of Europe, faces a massive new wave of refugees, but the widespread mood of certainty embodied by Wir schaffen das! has long since faded. Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, says he will take unprecedented steps to limit immigration.

In those heady days of 2015, volunteers greeted trainloads of exhausted people at the Munich main station with food packages and applause. I too played a tiny part in Willkommenskultur. On a rainy evening in November of that year, via a chat group organised by volunteers, I picked up a Syrian in his early thirties called Mohammed from the throng of people outside Berlin’s overwhelmed refugee registration office, gave him a meal and bed for the night, then drove him back in the morning. We had no common language, but he showed me a photo of his wife and two kids back in Aleppo. I understood he was a car mechanic. I gave him my number, in case he needed anything, knowing he’d never call.

Many Germans did far more than me, hosting families for months and years. They helped out with bureaucracy and language issues. Eight years later, there are countless examples of how Syrians and people of other nationalities have settled successfully in Germany, from outstanding Syrian restaurants in Berlin, to young people who found tech jobs, to a village in the supposedly hostile East where the arrival of Syrian families meant the local school could stay open.

Then there were the dark chapters. Reports of violent crimes involving immigrants shook Willkommenskultur to the core: the 2016 truck attack against a Berlin Christmas market by an unsuccessful asylum applicant from Tunisia that killed 12; the sexual assault of dozens of women by a crowd of largely immigrant men in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015. Nonetheless, despite the enormous strain on Germany’s health, welfare and educational systems, within a year or two there was a general sense that immigration was by and large under control again, not least thanks to Merkel’s shaky deal with Turkey, under which Erdoğan agreed to take back “irregular” migrants who had reached Greece islands from Turkey in exchange for billions of euros.

Today, by contrast, Merkel’s deal with Turkey could crumble if Erdoğan’s challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wins the second round of the country’s presidential election. He’s vowed to send millions of Syrians back to Syria, though some might risk entering Europe. Meanwhile, a million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war have settled in Germany. Perhaps due to an inner European solidarity, Ukrainians receive preferential retreat and are immediately granted the right to work and the same welfare benefits as Germans. At the same time, the number of refugees and asylum seekers from elsewhere has been rising steadily too, people from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Moldova and many other places. This year, 300,000 non-Ukrainian migrants are expected to apply for asylum in Germany, according to an estimate by the CDU’s parliamentary group.

And with these rising figures, new tensions have started to simmer. At a school in Ludwigshafen where 98% of children come from immigrant families, a third of pupils had to repeat their first year because of a lack of basic German skills. There have also been reports of racist violence, such as when, last week, a group of largely immigrant pupils attending a maths camp in a village in the former East was attacked by local children shouting racist insults. The pupils were evacuated under police protection. Refugee homes housing Ukrainians have also been attacked in the East, where scepticism about support for Ukraine runs high. In the Eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland leads the opinion polls, with 28% support — placing more pressure on the political mainstream to stem immigration.

Faced with this crisis, Chancellor Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals seems to have got the memo. At a “refugee summit” last week, he committed to an additional €1 billion to be spent this year on housing, integration and digitalisation measures to help speed up the asylum application process. Even in 2023, most immigration paperwork (and much of the rest of the German bureaucratic apparatus) is processed on paper. That, combined with severe labour shortages on all levels of administration, means applications can take two years. And asylum-seekers have the right to appeal decisions. Some 300,000 people have received deportation notices but also given temporary Duldung or “toleration” status due to extenuating humanitarian or personal circumstances. A Duldung usually means you can work — which means many find a job and then get deported anyway, to the chagrin of German firms struggling from labour shortages.

Scholz, however, appears to have woken up to the fact that cities actually want a reduction of the flow of people into Germany. He has, for instance, promised more spot checks at Germany’s borders. He spoke about beefing up “infrastructure” at the outer EU border, meaning more fences, more money for the border agency Frontex, more surveillance drones. He wants to expand the list of countries deemed safe, meaning their citizens will be excluded from asylum. EU candidates Moldova and Georgia are expected to be added next.

Scholz also favours two policies the European Commission and other member states have been talking about for years. The first is fast-track asylum processing at the point that migrants enter the EU, in places like Malta and Lampedusa. Rejected applicants could be returned to the countries they had come from.

This raises the spectre of the human rights nightmare of returning immigrants back to lawless nations such as Libya — but a second policy is supposed to prevent such scenarios: a mesh of treaties between the EU and countries in Africa and the Middle East which would require those countries to take back unsuccessful asylum applicants while at the same time opening up legal avenues to a certain amount of labour immigration into Europe. The hope is that this people would apply in their home countries instead of risking a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean, which in turn could provide the labour — skilled and unskilled — required by an ageing society with a low birth rate, where millions of baby boomers are about to retire. Spain already has a similar agreement with Morocco, but getting all of the EU onboard will be a Herculean task.

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Strangely, in Germany, major political shifts often occur under the leadership of parties ideologically opposed to those shifts. The centre-left SPD cut welfare in the Nineties. Same-sex marriage and the country’s first minimum wage happened under Merkel. Now the SPD, with their Green and Liberal partners, could herald in an era of stricter immigration rules. These are early days, though. The Greens will likely throw a spanner in the works or at least do what they can to ensure a path for genuine asylum-seekers who face persecution due to their politics and or sexual identity.

It’s unlikely, then, that Germany will turn into a giant Denmark, where even a Social Democrat-led government is gunning for zero asylum-seekers. Germany says it won’t compete in a race to the bottom when it comes to cutting benefits for refugees as a deterrent. It’s no secret that officials from Greece to Switzerland encourage migrants to travel on to Germany, a practice that conflicts with the Dublin Regulation, under which asylum applicants are supposed to apply in the first EU country they set foot in, but 2015 proved that Dublin was unworkable once and for all. Under a new Europe-wide deal, Germany hopes for a more distribution of asylum-seekers and refugees across the continent — probably pie in the sky.

Yet whatever happens in the coming months, Scholz’s new immigration course has already shifted the parameters of what a mainstream politician can say. Former health minister and immigration hardliner Jens Spahn of the CDU, who memorably complained about the pressing cultural issue of embarrassed Arab men showering in their underwear at his gym, broke a taboo on a chat show last week. Perhaps Germany, he said, needed to rethink the right to political asylum anchored in its 1949 constitution, which is outdated because it was drafted in response to the massive population movements in Europe following the war. Since Germany was responsible for the vast human misery of the war, so went the thinking, it should take a generous stance towards the oppressed and persecuted fleeing dictatorships across Europe and the world. Eighty years later, the burden of war guilt could be lifting — and with it, the spirit of Wir schaffen das! is taking on a whole new meaning.

“I hated the pointless discipline,” he tells me 60 years later. But in hindsight, he sees the value of spending 18 months in the Bundeswehr against his will. “Working with people from very different backgrounds helped me manage all sorts of people” — a useful skill for later in life, during his career in business. It also made him a more organised person. “We had a drill called ‘Nato alarm’. We had to get out of bed and be ready to go within 10 minutes. That was only possible if you had all your things in order.” To this day, he’s by far the tidiest person I know.

It was a very different time. Europe was constantly on edge. The 1961 stand-off in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis were recent memories, and the prospect of a hot war between the Eastern Bloc and the West was not out of the realm of possibility. West Germany and Nato trained for what was considered a likely scenario: Soviet tanks pouring in from communist East Germany through the Fulda Gap towards Frankfurt. At the height of the Cold War, the Bundeswehr counted 495,000 soldiers in its ranks.

Now, Nato’s eastern flank is more than a 1,000km to the east and Germany has just 180,000 troops. But, having suspended mandatory military service in 2011, Germany is talking about reinstating it. After the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Chancellor Scholz gave his now-famous Zeitenwende speech, which supposedly heralded a new era of defence readiness. Last month, the new, gung-ho defence minister Boris Pistorius said it was a mistake to end conscription. Inspector of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Jan Christian Kaack agrees, arguing that it’s good for society in uncertain times: “I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in these times will have a better understanding if we have intermingling with the soldiers.” It seems that the public is on board. A recent survey found that 61% of Germans believe it was a mistake to suspend conscription.

Despite the conflict raging to Germany’s east, most advocates for conscription’s revival don’t focus on the military benefits. Last summer, when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier proposed reviving national service in the form of Dienstpflicht, compulsory military or civil service, he used an old argument: that serving your country is a way to integrate young people. “Especially now, at a time when understanding for other ways of life and opinions is waning, compulsory social service can be particularly valuable. You get out of your own bubble, meet completely different people, help citizens in distress.”

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By Maurice Frank

In post-war Germany, Wehrpflicht, or military duty, always allowed for conscientious objectors to opt for civil service. By the Nineties, half of the selected young men chose non-military work. A friend of mine drove an ambulance in Munich — an intense, life-changing experience, which included rescuing a man who was romantically entangled with a Hoover. Others wiped bums in care homes or kindergartens. Like my father, most ultimately benefited from serving in their different ways, even if it seemed hard and senseless at the time, an obstacle on their path towards university and a career.

But does it really make sense, in 2023, to reinstate mass conscription? In the decades following the catastrophe of Hitler and World War II, the army was tightly controlled by parliament, and soldiers were meant to be “citizens in uniform”. If all men participated in the armed forces and then went back to normal life, the military could not be a powerful “state within a state”, which is how my dad describes the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Interestingly, after conscription was halted in 2011, Germany’s all-volunteer army attracted proportionally more unsavoury, far-Right crackpots; some former professional soldiers have even cooked up unrealistic but potentially dangerous plans to overthrow the government or trigger a civil war. Conscription, one could argue, could not just integrate young men into society, it also could help to better integrate the military in the nation.

Compulsory service doesn’t necessarily make military sense, though, even in light of the threat presented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Carlo Masala, professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, imagines two scenarios in which the German army would be deployed: either a Russian attack on an eastern Nato country, most likely one of the Baltics, or a force directly invading Germany’s borders. A large army of conscripts only makes sense in the latter scenario; when your nation is directly under siege, a mass of troops is crucial. But the former scenario is far more likely — in the next two decades at least — and would require Germany contributing a small force of highly trained professionals armed with complex, high-tech kit.

Besides, Germany can’t afford a return to conscription. Masala says it would take five to ten years to build the barracks, purchase training equipment, and hire teaching staff. Annual costs would run in the double-digit billions. It would be much wiser to spend that money on attracting better volunteers by paying them higher wages — and buying them modern weaponry that works.

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Because the Bundeswehr has a lot of problems that an influx of new soldiers won’t fix. In the three decades after 1989, German defence fell into complacency, but from around 2015, the dismal state of the military became impossible to ignore. Angela Merkel’s last defence minister tried to boost appreciation for the troops with perks like free train tickets if they travelled in uniform — which wouldn’t be a big deal in most countries, but was controversial in Germany, where pacifism is deeply entrenched. By that point, defence was out of sight and out of mind: something rather distasteful that the Americans conveniently took care of from their huge base at Ramstein. Ironically, it was Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in Germany, who prodded the country to change, with his insistence that Nato members spend 2% of GDP on defence. The Germans, and many other nations, are now aiming to do just that.

The conscription debate has flared up elsewhere in Europe. Latvia reintroduced it in January — hardly a surprising move, given the nation’s proximity to Russia. But Western European leaders are also dusting off the old-fashioned idea that shared military experience is a glue that keeps society from fragmenting. In 2019, Macron introduced a new four-week programme of national service, which will become compulsory. (He has said: “Military experience not only leads you to develop experiences but also behavioural qualities.”) In Italy, Right-wingers like Matteo Salvini have long advocated conscription’s revival: “I believe that a year of teaching the rules, good manners and duties would make good citizens.”

As for Scandinavia, Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea reawakened fears of Russian aggression. Sweden reintroduced conscription in 2017, as the number of volunteers was steadily falling. The move was backed by parties on the Right and Left. There is a broad consensus that national service is good for democracy. Every year, the nation selects about 6,000 male and female recruits based on an online survey, with questions about their physical condition and their attitude towards military service. Attitudes are similar in Norway, where 15% of 19-year-old men and women serve. Here, a shared border with Russia adds to the sense that conscription and a large number of citizens with some military training are necessary.

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But where I live, in Denmark, the hottest debate about conscription is very different from the one happening in either Germany or nations that share a border with Russia. At the moment, a small number of men are selected each year via a lottery, while women can sign up as volunteers. The government, led by social democrat Mette Frederiksen, is putting together legislation that will make service compulsory for women, too. It’s backed by feminist organisations such as Kvinfo, whose director Henriette Laursen writes: “If women and men are to be included in the Armed Forces on equal terms, military service should be the same for women and men. Therefore, Kvinfo recommends that military service be either extended to women or abolished altogether.”

Of course, forcing women to join the military might not be in their best interests; it can be a dangerous environment for them. Female veterans complain about sexual harassment and tell stories of women sleeping with knives under their pillows to ward off advances. But Laursen thinks the presence of more women will help, saying that the military needs to be cleansed of “macho culture”. Indeed, a Swedish official recently said that the main change since female conscription has been better hygiene among the men.

Equality sounds great on paper. But prominent voices object to the move. Anna Libak, a journalist and veteran, writes: “All women who have served in the armed forces — like myself — must admit that, all other things being equal, men are better soldiers because they are physically stronger than women.” There is, she argues, a fundamental reason why only 8.9% of uniformed soldiers in Denmark are female, and it’s not sexism. Her conclusion might provoke some feminists: having children is necessary for the survival of Denmark and women continue to bear the physical and financial burden of reproduction, so they shouldn’t be forced to carry arms on top. “There are many ways to defend the nation. For example, by giving birth to the conscripts of the future.”

Still, 55% of Danes favour the draft for both sexes — perhaps because most of the young people who serve these days appear to have a blast. The #værnepligt tag on Instagram reveals women in full camo floating in a lake, or a troop marching along a pristine beach at sunset, with captions like, “Hard, fun, challenging, educational, exhausting, adventurous, breaking down, building up, comradely, meaningless, meaningful, memorable! Would love to do it again!”. A far cry from the grim drudgery my father went through in Cold War Germany. In peaceful, prosperous Scandinavia, conscription really is an opportunity to make friends and learn something, just as it would be in Germany. But, in 2023, the image of the army as an Instagrammable adventure clashes violently with the horrors being broadcast from the trenches of Bakhmut.

On the brutal, 1,000-mile front that has divided Europe, the true cost of conscription is revealed: men of fighting age, and it is still largely men, being fed to the meat grinder, whether they like it or not. If, God forbid, war were to spread to Western Europe, having six months’ experience in the army wouldn’t save our young people. As peace continues to reign here, we still have the luxury of debating whether conscription will integrate disaffected young men into society, or whether mandatory military service for women will boost diversity and inclusion. But when push comes to shove, that’s not what the military’s about.

Since the first day of the invasion, Poland’s support for Ukraine has been unwavering. It has sent significant amounts of military equipment, including dozens of tanks, and its army is training Ukrainian soldiers to use 14 Leopard-2 tanks as quickly as possible. On the diplomatic front, it never ceases to beat the drum for its besieged neighbour. After all, Poland has an existential interest in thwarting Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions, especially with Russian troops looming across the border in Belarus.

To establish its authority at the heart of Europe, it plans to amass the largest land army in the Continent, with 300,000 troops, and has just announced a hike in defence spending from 2.4% to 5% of GDP to facilitate it. Already, it has welcomed more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees, more than any other European country.

Warsaw also appears to be forging a regional alliance of Nato nations in Eastern Europe. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the “Bucharest Nine”, a group that formed after the Russia’s annexation of Crimea, are united by a traumatic history of Soviet Russian dominance and occupation. On Duda’s initiative, Biden will meet with the group, which is pushing for more Nato resources to be moved to its Eastern flank.

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Balkans expert Timothy Less calls this the “new Warsaw Pact”, which rather than defending Russia’s interests, seeks to protect central and Eastern Europe from the Russians. For Less, this is a strategy that echoes the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth born in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Intermarium, a fanciful plan by Polish leader Józef Piłsudski to form a superstate from the Baltic to the Black Sea after the First World War. Behind each of these alliances was a fear of bullying neighbours over the centuries — Prussia, the German Reich, Austria-Hungary and, of course, Russia.

Poland’s Eastern European alliance, according to Less, “would marginalise France and Germany, threaten the predominant position of the EU in Europe and galvanise its seeming slow-motion decline”. It’s a vision that will appeal to Eurosceptics across the Continent: a new era in which the US gradually moves its military resources from Germany to Poland, a growing hub of power and influence.

Alas, the tale of Franco-German decline is almost as old as the EU. While Poland might have impressive military ambitions, its politics is still riddled with contradictions. Its hardline nationalism comes across as immature and foolish, as seen in its provocative games with its largest trading partner, Germany, and the entity that has allowed it to flourish, the EU.

Since the Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015, it’s never missed a chance to vilify Germany. When a popular German tabloid, Fakt, reported that Duda had pardoned a convicted child abuser in 2020, the Polish President accused its owner Axel Springer of meddling in Polish elections.

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Other criticism is entirely justifiable: Poland points to decades of Germany cosying up to Russia, as symbolised by the now-destroyed Nord Stream pipelines, which deliberately circumvented Poland and Ukraine, and delivered Germany with an endless supply of cheap Siberian natural gas. But let’s not forget that, until recently, Poland itself was also dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.

Poland is too proud to admit Germany’s role in its economic success story. Its politicians may rant about the EU being a German “Fourth Reich”, but Poland’s last 20 years of prosperity are largely thanks to German growth. German GDP per capita is more than twice as high as Poland’s, with the latter acting as a relatively cheap workshop for German industrial firms within the EU free-trade area. Annual exports to Germany, at around €70 billion, are five times higher than to any other country.

Yet trash-talking Germany seems to be a necessary ingredient in the PiS’ grip on power. The latest affront came in the form of Poland’s demand for Second World War reparations. The price tag: €1.3 trillion. In October, Poland sent the bill to Germany, in the form of a diplomatic note. Of course, Poland has no legal ground to stand on: it waived its claims to reparations in 1953. But the PiS, which knows this full well, hopes to exploit the narrative of Polish victimhood ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn. It doesn’t exactly give the impression of a grown-up country taking on a new leadership role in Europe. Nor does the fact that, when the German defence minister Boris Pistorius visited Poland earlier this month to discuss weapons shipments for Ukraine, his Polish counterpart Mariusz Błaszczak refused to appear in public with him. Apparently, for a PiS politician, there’s nothing more cringe than a photo with a German.

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Then there is Poland’s equally fraught relationship with the European Union. Poland is still by far the greatest net recipient of EU funding. While Germany contributed €21 billion to the EU budget in 2021, Poland received €12.9 billion, more than any other state. How does it show its gratitude? With its middle finger.

The current showdown between the European Commission and Poland is a case in point. The Commission is withholding €36 billion in post-pandemic recovery funds until the Polish government implements specific reforms of its judicial system that will nominally bring Poland back in line with EU law. In recent years, Poland has granted the executive branch increasing control over the courts, ostensibly to purge the courts of old communist-era judges.

A €36 billion cash injection would be helpful in the run up to an election. That’s why the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, approved a step to reintroduce a degree of independence to disciplinary procedures against judges, in the hope that it would be just enough to placate the EU. But President Duda refused to sign the legislation. Instead, he asked the Constitutional Tribunal to scrutinise it for its constitutionality. That court itself is considered to be under PiS control, one of the EU’s complaints.

For now, PiS is leading the polls. But its position is less than secure. Civic Platform, an opposition party led by pro-European former prime minister Donald Tusk, is nibbling at its heels and could assemble a sizeable coalition. Perhaps this is why the government is resorting to ever-more dubious tactics, such as increasing the number of polling stations in villages — an obvious ploy to attract more votes from older, more conservative rural voters.

Poland, then, may be keen to pose as the compassionate and brave saviour of Ukraine, but it remains stuck in the past, with an unhealthy obsession with provoking Germany and the EU, although it owes much of its prosperity to them both. As Piotr Buras of the European Council for Foreign Relations Warsaw office, speaking on German TV, said: “It’s both a leader and a pariah.”

His words echo those of Germany’s minister of state for eastern Germany, who had just been to visit. Joining Burnham at the Conference of the North, Carsten Schneider said: “The goal of creating equal living conditions everywhere in Germany can even be found in our constitution. There are good reasons for it. If regions are drifting apart, it is bad for everyone. If a variety of regions flourish, the whole country will prosper.”

“When you visit Germany,” Burnham wrote, “you can see and feel the success of this policy wherever you go in the high standards of transport infrastructure and the public realm.” Obviously, Burnham has never taken Deutsche Bahn. Thanks to ageing infrastructure and a huge investment backlog, Germany’s railways just are no longer very punctual. An investigation by ARD in September, found the rail network was on the “brink of collapse”. And, as in the UK, it is a symbol of Germany’s failure to invest equally in all its regions.

The policy lionised by centre-Left politicians like Schneider and Burnham is the mammoth project known as Aufbau Ost, the rebuilding of the former communist East over the last 30 years. When the two were reunified, the West’s GDP was 50% higher than the East’s; visiting the latter when I was a teenager felt like travelling back in time to a vaguely dystopian past with tiny, sputtering plastic cars, the ubiquitous whiff of coal smoke, and a vast shortage of house paint and non-scratchy toilet paper. Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised “blossoming landscapes” in the East when the Berlin Wall fell. The opposite happened. Industrial production fell by 70%. A third of eastern factories were shuttered; many were sold for a pittance to westerners. Joblessness exploded. The investment flowing in couldn’t stem the haemorrhage. By 1995, the alarmed Kohl government had forged a plan to properly fund the Aufbau, which he named the Solidarpakt: the “solidarity pact”. The plan was designed to honour the constitutional clause vaunted by Burnham, which makes the federal government responsible for the “creation of equivalent living conditions” across the land.

What constitutes equivalent conditions is, of course, open to interpretation. Conservatives usually understand it to mean equality of public infrastructure — roads, railways, telecommunications. But the Left often stress that it should also mean similar wage and pension levels. Periodically, the state governments bicker over the details of the formulas, with suggestions of tweaks that would work in their favour. Nonetheless, the principle of federal redistribution has remained robust.

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After all, the Solidarpakt turbocharged a system that had actually been in place since 1949, when the Federal Republic was created under the watchful eyes of the occupying Allies. That system is known as the Länderfinanzausgleich (literally: “State Financial Equalisation”), and grew out of another article in the constitution, which states that “it shall be ensured by law… that the different financial strength of the Länder is adequately compensated for”. Essentially, it regulates the transfer of tax revenue from richer Länder (states) to poorer ones.

But in the Nineties, the Länderfinanzausgleich didn’t provide nearly enough money to prevent total economic meltdown in the East. For this, hundreds of billions were needed. A new temporary “solidarity surcharge” to fund the East appeared on wage slips as 7.5% of Germans’ income tax. Petrol taxes were raised. In addition, large special funds were set up to finance culture, police and infrastructure in Berlin, commensurate with the city’s status as the new-old capital of the reunified country. Additional hundreds of billions of euros flowed into the East, in the form of state pensions that recognised the working lives of easterners, even if they’d been working in a system that had collapsed and whose currency was almost worthless.

Nobody knows exactly how much reunification “cost”, because there are so many different ways of calculating it, but it’s certainly well over a trillion euros. Aufbau Ost was a huge burden on the economy, but it meant that the “new federal states” soon received smooth autobahns and glittering train stations. Town centres and castles from the Baltic to the Czech border were impeccably renovated. Gradually, the solidarity tax was lowered. Today, only high earners pay the surcharge.

Would the English ever accept such a burden? Despite complaints in the press, West Germans generally saw it as a duty towards their brethren who suffered under communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave the project an unprecedented historical urgency. There simply was no alternative. Can one really imagine London and the Home Countries taking one for the North? For as long as it really takes to make a difference?

And how inspired should we be by Germany anyway? Länderfinanzausgleich is complicated in a way that only Germany can do complicated: Sueddeutsche Zeitung once wrote that only a few dozen people actually understand how it works — which shouldn’t be the case in a democracy.

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And though the work of “levelling up” Germany has come a very long way, it is by no means finished. Many cities in the East — Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin — are more prosperous than some of their western equivalents. The country’s unemployment deadbeat is no longer the capital, but Bremen, in the North-West. But income levels in the East remain stubbornly lower: in 2020, the average gross salary, at €36,499, was still €7,440 lower than in the West.

Other vectors point to inequality as well. According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the centre-Left SPD, most rural areas in the East are in a “lasting structural crisis” — thanks to depopulation, low wages and not enough broadband. Many smaller Western cities also struggle with deindustrialisation and rising poverty — not unlike the North of England. Levelling up hasn’t prevented their decline. Nevertheless, most of the net recipients of Länderfinanzausgleich are still in the East.

Then there is the capital — that strange spawn of East and West — which, although it now displays above-average growth, still receives the largest helping out of the pot: €3.6 billion from a total of €17 billion in 2021. It receives additional billions, too, from a separate federal fund for troubled regions, because otherwise the city wouldn’t be able to service its €60 billion in debt. This has been met with grumbling in certain parts of the nation. Though Berlin has rebounded, it is still considered run-down, decrepit and lawless by the rest of the country. When, on New Year’s Eve, youths attacked and injured police and first responders with fireworks in war-like scenes on the streets of Berlin, Bavarian leaders railed against the “chaotic” capital. Once a poor rural kingdom populated by Lederhosen-wearing yokels, Bavaria was a net recipient of financial transfers until the late Eighties. Now, it leads Germany in everything from tourism to tech to education.

Why, Bavarians asked, should they fund the “failed state” of Berlin, which can’t even maintain order — and has to re-do a local election next month because of rampant irregularities?

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Likewise, when Berlin decided to become the first and only German state to offer free day-care a few years ago, the protest coming out of Munich was loud: why should we pay for something those loser Berliners, with their €60 billion in debt, can scarcely afford? On such occasions, politicians from richer states inevitably demand reform: a kind of anti-levelling-up. Last week Bavarian finance minister Albert Füracker said he no longer wanted to fund Berlin’s “feel-good programmes” and  announced Bavaria would challenge the Länderfinanzausgleich in the constitutional court. Should someone tell Andy Burnham?

Just like in Britain, Germany’s capital indubitably gets more than its fair share. Can we, then, really be holding the nation up as a model for levelling up? And, perhaps more to the point: is the Herculean challenge of grafting a bankrupt former communist country onto a modern capitalist economy in any way comparable to the task of tackling industrial decline and a lack of investment in regions like North Eastern England or Wales? Can Britain learn from Germany, or is the German solution too, well, German?

To fully answer this question, we need to look beyond the birth of the Länderfinanzausgleich to the history the policy grew out of. That history is radically different from England’s. Until Prussia bundled together most of the German-speaking lands into an empire (the Second Reich) in 1871, the place we call Germany comprised dozens of kingdoms and dukedoms. No single metropolis lorded over the rest. England, on the other hand, became a country in the year 927. The monarch’s government has been collecting tax from its perch in London for more than a millennium. Only with the Third Reich did Germany truly centralise power (and finances) in Berlin. We know how that went.

After the war, the country was purposefully re-crafted to have no strong centre. Although Berlin is beginning to flourish economically again — it attracts more start-up capital than any other German city — it will never be a London, generating the bulk of the nation’s wealth then distributing it like a whimsical king. To disrupt structures so deep-rooted takes a catastrophe, or else decades of slow change. German “devolution” was originally imposed by the force of a few words in a constitution, dictated by occupying powers, the country having been at the stage of some of the 20th century’s most harrowing dramas. The collapse of two dictatorships demanded drastic measures. England has not seen such severe upheavals in modern times.

An awareness of history and a deep desire for stability means the German state has been willing to take on huge tasks — and throw real money at them — in a way that might seem foreign and exaggerated to some in Westminster. I’m not sure Andy Burnham realises the scale of change required to transform England’s system into something like Germany’s. One might dream of transforming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into a federation. Maybe that’s what it really takes to achieve more equality. But would London ever agree to such a radical move? Muddling through, having the provinces beg for crumbs, probably suits the capital just fine.

Today, around 50 defence ministers from around the world are meeting at the US air base in Ramstein, not far from Frankfurt, to again discuss western military support for Ukraine. Naturally, Germany will be in the spotlight. The US and other allies are counting on Scholz to take on more responsibility, to assume more leadership in Europe’s greatest security crisis in decades. And Scholz has been making the noises that Germany’s allies have hoped to hear: in a recent article in Foreign Affairs he writes: “Germans are intent on becoming the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be.” This echoes Scholz’s stated aim of making Germany a Führungsmacht, a leading power. But how close is he to achieving it? Very, very far.

The visiting defence ministers will encounter a Germany riddled with problems. For one, Monday saw the resignation of the incompetent defence minister, Christine Lambrecht. By Tuesday a new one, Boris Pistorius, had been named. He’s in for a baptism of fire. Germany has been under enormous pressure to supply the Leopard 2 battle tanks that Ukraine has been requesting for months — or at least to green light the re-export of the German-made fighting vehicles from countries like Poland and Finland. And that pressure was ramped up a notch this week by Britain’s decision to provide Challenger tanks.

In truth, there’s little willingness in Germany to spare any of the 340-odd Leopard 2s in use by the nation’s army. The government, on this front, has been dithering and stalling — or at least is that how it comes across publicly. Back in October, Scholz’ spin doctor Wolfgang Schmidt had all sorts of strange excuses not to provide the tanks. The Ukrainians wouldn’t be capable of maintaining the sophisticated German machines. Or, even weirder, the iron cross on the tanks would indicate to the Russians that the Germans were an active participant in the war. At which Ukrainians tweeted: “Don’t worry, we have paint.”

As with every German weapons delivery, making it happen would take a solid kick up the arse from President Joe Biden. Perhaps one was delivered in the phone call between the two men on Tuesday. But at the Davos summit the next day, Scholz’s communication on Ukraine was still vague and non-committal. When asked about the Leopards, he dodged the question and rattled off a list of armaments that Germany has delivered so far. It’s true that these armaments have not been insignificant. They have included howitzers, mobile anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missile systems. This month, the German government pledged 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles — but only after dragging its feet for months.

Why isn’t the Zeitenwende happening a little quicker? Partly because Germany’s military structures are sclerotic. Modernising them must be the eternal quest of the nation’s defence minister. Especially bureaucratic is the procurement of weapons and gear. A small example: a pedantic military official once noticed, while purchasing tanks, that they didn’t have mirrors that conformed to the German highway code — so he or she absolutely insisted on getting them installed, complicating and slowing down the acquisition.

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Ursula von der Leyen, while serving as Angela Merkel’s defence minister, hired McKinsey to sort out the Bundeswehr’s crusty organisational structures. A consulting budget of €2.5 million ballooned into €100 million, in what was known as the “consultant affair”. Relevant data requested by a parliamentary enquiry vanished under von der Leyen’s watch — but none of the allegations stuck. And although she massively boosted defence spending, the operational problems persisted.

Even more useless was Lambrecht, who took the reins of the defence ministry in December 2021, when Olaf Scholz’s coalition assumed power. In response to the Russian invasion a few months later, she dispatched 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, earning her ridicule. But her true talent was social media blunders, which included a post of her son riding in a military helicopter, and a New Year’s Eve video message with a backdrop of exploding pyrotechnics that sounded a lot like artillery fire. Empathy wasn’t her strength. Neither was running the military. She achieved practically nothing with a budget of €100 billion. Last month, all 18 Puma armed personnel carriers participating in an exercise broke down, coming to symbolise how ill-prepared the German army is for combat.

Lambrecht’s replacement, Boris Pistorius, is said to be a tough-talking, no-nonsense kind of guy. His appointment has upset the gender parity of the Scholz cabinet, attracting criticism from the Left. But hiring a capable minister should probably take precedent at this point. There’s a war out there — and the double challenge of getting Ukraine what it needs and turning the German army into an effective defence force once more is enormous to say the least.

But it’s not just practical challenges slowing down the tectonic shift. Equally complex are the beliefs that inform the German approach to Ukraine. Pro-Russian and anti-American impulses are common on the political fringes, among both the far-Right AfD and far-Left Die Linke, but also among mainstream politicians, including Michael Kretschmer, the premier of the eastern state of Saxony. This is the same Michael Kretschmer who called for the repair of the Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline that was attacked in September. We’ll need that cheap Russian gas after the war, Kretschmer said. Granted, his state has close business links to Russia, but isn’t it a little early to start cozying up to the aggressor?

As I’ve written for UnHerd, many East Germans feel less connected to “The West” as an idea. It’s common in this region to reject military support for Ukraine and believe in a negotiated peace with Putin. Which is confounding when you remember that East Germans staged a peaceful revolution to free themselves from the Soviet bloc. That Ukrainians were also part of that bloc doesn’t seem to make East Germans more sympathetic to their resistance.

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How influenced is Scholz by such sentiments? None of the parties in his coalition are anti-western, per se. But last summer, Scholz’ foreign policy adviser Jens Plötner snapped dismissively: “You can fill many newspaper pages with 20 Marders [the fighting vehicles Germany would pledge to Ukraine], but larger articles about our future relationship with Russia are less frequent. That question is at least as exciting and relevant.” Plötner has, for years, played a key role in Germany’s appeasement of Russia. His comments came not long after the discovery of mass graves in Bucha.

It’s not so much what Germany does as how, according to Benjamin Tallis, senior fellow at the German Council for Foreign Relations, and author of the new book To Ukraine with love: Essays on Russia’s war and Europe’s future. For him, Germany is “moving at the speed of shame. It’s been pressured into taking every one of its steps to support Ukraine. Its leadership, particularly in the chancellery, has seemed extremely reluctant to take each one of those steps, or even providing weapons at all. Now we see it again on the Leopards, the main battle tanks that would really be a game changer.”

To Tallis, the German approach is “a nostalgic politics for the recent past”, when Germany outsourced “its energy needs to Russia, its security needs to the US and its trade to China”. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany, West Germany has taken an ever more pacifist approach to foreign policy. In the late Sixties there was Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which allowed the Federal Republic to begin importing natural gas from the Soviet Union. And then came 1989.

As Thomas Bagger, currently Germany’s ambassador to Poland, articulates in his 2019 essay “The world according to Germany: Reassessing 1989”, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany — more than any other country — took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” to heart. Or, at least, an oversimplified version of Fukuyama’s thesis. Liberal democracy embedded in a rules-based international order was, in Germany, the only model with any future. Authoritarian powers like Russia and China could be turned into friendly, liberal partners if only you did enough business with them.

“Even long after it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, they continued to pursue this,” says Tallis. “It was remarkably comfortable, remarkably easy. You got to pretend you were doing good by doing well.” And all the while you whittle down your armed forces from nearly 500,000 troops in the Eighties to 180,000 today (a mere 24,000 of them combat-ready soldiers). You retire most of your military hardware, kick back and enjoy the peace dividend, under the umbrella of continued American protection.

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The chickens have come home to roost, thanks to the war. Or, as Tallis puts it: “The hypocrisy of Germany’s position is coming out now.” Its recent history shaped by the idea that “Germans, having atoned for their past, had moved beyond these very 20^th century vices of war, violence and power politics”, the nation has fallen foul of a “head-in-the-sand approach: We can get away with this while others sully their hands.”

One German commentator describes the lingering recalcitrance this way: “It sometimes seems like there’s been an accident, someone is injured, and there’s a bunch of people standing around. And Germany thinks, hopefully someone knows what they’re doing and takes decisive action to help the person, otherwise they might die. There’s a war in Europe, it would be good if someone did something. But Zeitenwende means we’re the ones who have to do something.”

Germany is doing something. The question is: is it enough? Despite the words coming out of Scholz’s mouth, it still feels as though the nation is in denial about the fact that there’s a devastating war raging just two countries away. Or it is, at least, in denial about the nature of that war — and the huge geopolitical shift it represents. Perhaps today, faced with so many of the world’s defence ministers, the nation will pull its head out the sand.

A slew of essays had been commissioned on the trials and tribulations of the former East. Topics ranged from the crystal meth crisis in the city of Chemnitz to the widespread feeling among Easterners of being “second-class” citizens. One of my jobs was to translate this writing for an English audience.

It was fascinating work, but while it helped me better understand the predicament of those “socialised in the East”, as the Germans say, it also triggered in me some typical Besser-Wessi (know-it-all-Westerner) eye-rolling. When will these East Germans stop complaining? When will they admit that reunification has vastly improved their lives? It’s a bit of a generalisation but no matter how many billions are ploughed into their part of the country, they always seem to have something to complain about.

Since September or so, the Besser-Wessi’s counterpart, the Jammer-Ossi (Eastern whiner), has been back in the news. Every Monday, in cities and towns across Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, citizens have gathered to protest the government’s energy policy, the cost-of-living crisis and its support for Ukraine. Their demands include an end to the sanctions against Russia, a return to using the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and immediate talks with Russia to end the war.

Placards at these gatherings are straightforward. They read “No poverty for Biden’s war” or “Immediate Nato withdrawal from Ukraine” or, in English, “They got money for war but can’t feed the poor”. What’s striking is how the words “Putin” or “Russia” are nowhere to be seen — as if the war were entirely the doing of imperialist Uncle Sam. As if Ukraine had no right to defend itself. As if Poland, the Baltics and other eastern European nations were just puppets of an American masterplan to control the region — and had no legitimate security concerns of their own.

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The protesters aren’t your traditional peaceniks. No flowers nor Birkenstocks here. Instead, they represent the far-Left and far-Right fringes, with both the Ring-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and far-Left Die Linke trying to light a fire under a new rebellion on the streets.

Some Right-wing organisers hope growing anger about the war will bring together unlikely bedfellows from Left and Right under the banner of anti-Americanism. Jörg Elsässer, the publisher of far-Right German magazine Compact promoted a demonstration outside the US Consulate in Leipzig last weekend with the hashtag #Amigohome (Yank go home). Meanwhile, veteran Left-wing politician Oskar LaFontaine (a Wessi who became disillusioned by the Social Democrats) published a book titled Ami it’s time to go home: A plea for the self-assertion of Europe. For LaFontaine, Germany supplying weapons to Ukraine makes it a vassal of the United Sates. Compact, not to be outdone, has just put out a special edition titled “USA vs Germany: The 100-year war”. The previous week its cover featured LaFontaine’s wife, the popular Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht, with the headline “The best chancellor for Left and Right”.

Stoking anti-Americanism probably isn’t even necessary. A more effective rallying call is the feeling that the East is suffering disproportionately from the severing of economic ties with Russia. One flashpoint is the city of Schwedt on the Polish border, where the Russian-owned PCK refinery employs 1,200 people. Sanctions on Russian oil kick in on January 1, meaning the pipeline supplying the plant has to shut down, creating a direct link between Western sanctions and potential mass layoffs. Unsurprisingly, economy Minister Robert Habeck was heckled when he visited Schwedt to talk to workers over the summer.

The workers’ concerns are obviously justified, but it’s not as if they aren’t being heard: Olaf Scholz’s coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals has been working overtime to make sure PCK is supplied with non-Russian oil, delivered via German and Polish ports once Russian oil stops flowing. All jobs at the refinery have been guaranteed to the end of 2023. Yet despite the rescue plans, Habeck and his Green party remain objects of hate in the East. He’s blamed for allowing energy prices to soar to new heights, while the Greens are decried as hypocritical warmongers, former pacifists who have to toe the American line on supplying arms to Ukraine.

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Elsewhere, anti-war sentiments have come from unexpected quarters: associations representing East German craftspeople have published open letters warning that war-driven inflation meant ordinary people could no longer afford their services. They demand an end to sanctions and a diplomatic solution to the war. Interestingly, trade associations in the West of the country — where SMEs have been equally impacted or even been bankrupted by high energy prices — have said exactly the opposite: Germany must support Ukraine until Russia is defeated.

In fact, it’s hard to pin down an economic cause for the current wave of protests. In Saxony, where the “resistance” is strongest, the jobless rate is at a near-record low of 5%. And despite the gathering clouds, the German economy is still growing. This is reflected in the Government’s new measures. In October, for instance, the minimum wage rose to €12 an hour, up from €9.82 at the beginning of 2022. Next year, jobless benefits rise by €50 per month, alongside higher housing and child benefits. Hundreds of billions are being mobilised to cap energy costs for consumers and small businesses. So claims that nothing’s being done for the little guy seem unfounded.

Rather, what really seems to be driving East-German discontent is a sense of victimhood, helplessness and anger rooted in the traumatic experiences of the Nineties, when Easterners’ fates lay entirely in the hands of Western officials, politicians and businessmen who had descended, in their view, like a pack of vultures, shutting down factories, and stripping assets, sacking teachers, professors, judges and officials with a communist past. It’s as if they woke up in a new country that devalued everything about them: their past, their identity, their work.

The “blossoming landscapes” promised by Helmut Kohl took far too long to materialise — and in many rural areas never really took root. Many no longer trust Western liberal narratives propagated by a uniform media that, in their view, dismisses concerns about immigration as racist or economic anxiety about Covid lockdowns as crazy. Perhaps that’s why conspiracy theories that go well beyond comprehensible dissatisfaction find fertile ground here. A speech by Christian Klar, an extreme Right-winger and convicted felon who organised a demo in the small city of Gera on October 3, spells out a simple, grand explanation for East Germans’ problems: “Whether it’s mass migration, climate change, corona, vaccination or the Ukraine war: everything serves a grand plan. In the wet dreams of the globalists, the cabal, we are all the bottom of the food chain.”

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But will enough East Germans rebel to the point of no return, delivering extremists into positions of power? I’m sceptical. Enough voters still realise that, despite the problems, there is no alternative to an economy wedded to Western Europe and the US, or to a foreign policy in lockstep with the West. Russia might have delivered cheap fuel for Germany’s industrial economy but that can be replaced in the long run. The US accounted for €122 billion in German exports last year. Exports to Russia were a fifth of that. And American companies are investing like mad in eastern Germany. Tesla’s plant in Brandenburg, as well as a massive new Intel semiconductor factory being built in Magdeburg, will provide thousands, if not tens of thousands, of well-paid jobs.

So, call me naive, but I believe most East Germans have it better than ever. Just like the old readers of the Berliner Zeitung, the numbers of diehard Ossis are dwindling. For now, these demonstrations have remained small. Most younger people just see themselves as “German” and, for the most part, haven’t inherited the trauma caused by the collapse of East Germany. For them, closer ties to Russia make no sense. At least for the foreseeable future, the West is their only home.

***

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Next week, Danes will go to the polls — and the country is showing tiny signs of fatigue. To the casual observer it’s not at all obvious. On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, Copenhagen is a picture of harmony: cyclists glide home along supersized bike paths after their short work days; jolly pensioners sip beer on the banks of one of the inner city lakes as fit millennials pass by on their after-work jog. A pint costs an arm and a leg, partially thanks to the country’s 25% VAT rate, the third highest in the world, but, according to the surveys at least, the Danes are happy to part with a significant portion of their income for comprehensive healthcare, low-cost daycare and world-beating welfare benefits. The caring state is largely responsible for their reputation as the “happiest people in the world”, even if the Finns pushed them down to second place in the World Happiness Report this year.

Thanks to those stellar rankings, Denmark has attracted the awe of progressives overseas, most notably during the 2016 US presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders, to his own detriment, banged on about “democratic socialism” — you know, like in Denmark. What he meant was free healthcare and free university, traditional policies of European social democracy.

Denmark is not particularly socialist. Its economy is highly capitalist. In fact, it’s the easiest country in the world to do business. Taxes might be high, but capitalists also seem happy with the pragmatic “flexicurity model” pioneered by Social Democrats in the Nineties while the rest of the Western world was going all out neoliberal: Denmark weds a super-flexible (it’s easy to hire and fire) labour market with comprehensive retraining and generous financial support for the unemployed. The system works: in September, the unemployment rate was a minuscule 2.7%.

So where are the signs of fatigue? Quite simple: as in the rest of the world, Denmark’s resilience has been stretched by the after-effects of Covid and now the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis.

The Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, steered the country through the pandemic with a steady hand. Showing a decisiveness that was praised at the time, she sent Denmark into lockdown before other European countries, but then was one of the first leaders to lift Covid restrictions. Denmark’s vaccination programme was extremely well organised — something I can attest to, having moved here in the middle of the pandemic from Germany, where the response was muddled and inefficient. At the time I thought: this is the well-ordered country Germany wants to be.

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But Frederiksen made one fatal mistake: a rushed decision in 2020 to slaughter 17 million farmed mink after 12 Covid infections in humans were traced to infected animals. Hundreds of mink farmers were stripped of their livelihoods. The affair took a macabre turn when “zombie minks” resurfaced from mass graves, pushed up by gases released by their decomposition.

The cull was illegal, it turned out. Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the leader of the Danish Social Liberal Party, one of the “red bloc” parties supporting Frederiksen’s minority government, threatened earlier this month to stage a no-confidence vote over the mink scandal, forcing the prime minister to announce an election on 1 November, seven months before the end of her term.

How will she fare at the polls? In the 2019 election, Frederiksen came up with a new winning formula to grab power from the conservatives: get harsh on immigration. This meant, to the horror of other European social democrats, ramping up anti-refugee rhetoric, supporting the former government’s strict cap on refugees and continuing the internationally condemned “ghetto deal” — repackaged as a programme to fight “parallel societies” — to prevent a concentration of “non-Western” people in certain neighbourhoods.

Many Danes liked the message. In the 2019 election, the Right-wing populist Danish People’s Party was decimated, its support falling from 21.1% in 2015 to 8.6% in 2019. After Frederiksen took power, her government kept up the pressure on refugees and immigrants. Hundreds of Syrians, even well-integrated young adults in employment or higher education, continue to face deportation. Meanwhile, Ukrainians have been exempted from the “ghetto” policy and have been allowed to move into social housing emptied of “non-Westerners”, prompting accusations of racism.

Some measures seem particularly absurd, even sadistic, such as the “Jewellery Law”, implemented by the conservatives in 2016, but unchanged by Frederiksen. It allows police to confiscate cash and valuables from refugees to pay for their stay in Denmark. Here, again, Ukrainians have been officially exempted. The thing is: since the law was enacted, very few confiscations have actually taken place. The real purpose was to scare refugees away, it seems, not unlike ads Denmark ran in Arab media during the Syrian refugee crisis with the message: “Don’t even think about coming here. You’re not welcome.” Psychological pressure is also put on non-Western immigrants who have lived in Denmark for years to “repatriate”, as shown in a documentary by exiled Zimbabwean writer Tendai Frank Tagarira.

For Frederiksen, all this is consistent with her idea of social democracy. Recently she said: “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration, and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.”

In spite of her hardline stance, three Right-wing populist parties are still vying for the anti-immigration vote: the Danish People’s Party, the New Bourgeois, and the wet-behind-the-ears Danish Democrats, led by former immigration minister Inger Støjberg, who once gained notoriety by baking a cake to celebrate 50 ways she had made life tougher for immigrants. Even by Danish standards, Støjberg’s fanatical style was seen as too radical when she ordered the separation of couples in asylum centres where one partner was under 18. Parliament stripped her of her job and she was sentenced to 60 days in prison. Now her face adorns lampposts across the country. Her messaging, which includes rants against liberal, out-of-touch Copenhagen urbanites — a classic from the populist playbook — is landing the Danish Democrats around 9% in surveys.

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Immigration, however, probably won’t be the big vote-winner in this election. After all, the Social Democrats’ approach doesn’t differ substantially from the Right’s policies. So what issues are resonating with voters? The sense of urgency over climate change present in 2019 has made way for fears about rising energy costs and inflation. Frederiksen is promising new programmes to dampen the economic impact on ordinary people.

Another battlefield is the growing crisis in health and social services. Thanks to poor working conditions during and after the pandemic, around 2,400 nurses are lacking in public hospitals. In an open letter, Danish surgeons expressed their fears that they are unable to operate on patients fast enough. There is also a severe shortage of workers in daycare. And other dark clouds are gathering, too: Antidepressant use is sky-high; the cancer rate is the world’s highest; young Danes are unhappier than ever; life expectancy is lower than in Germany.

After this election, unlike any Danish social democrat before her, Mette Frederiksen hopes for an alliance with the centre-Right rather than with traditional Left-wing and green allies. She says this is the best way to tackle the country’s looming problems. At 27%, her party leads the polls, but the “blue bloc” leads by Venestre (literally “Left” but actually conservative) has a good chance of governing with its Right-wing allies.

In the final scene of Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic masterpiece Melancholia, sisters Claire and Justine sit with Claire’s son Leo in a “magic cave”, a transparent teepee made of branches. The three hold hands as a giant planet engulfs the Earth. A burst of flame, a roar and then nothing. When I rewatch this scene I can’t help but think of Denmark and its anxieties. Danes still believe in their protective magic cave — no matter what the contemporary world of pandemics, globalisation, and immigration may throw at them. But change is coming, whether they like it or not.

Usually — and appropriately — sombre, this year’s commemorations were agonised and dramatic. They kicked off with Berlin’s mayor banning Russian flags from war memorials. Then the city government banned Ukrainian flags — after all, they thought, violent pro-Russian activists might try and tear them down. Instead, Berlin police were filmed confiscating an enormous Ukrainian flag and it was viewed millions of times on social media.

Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz did not visit Moscow on Victory Day, as German Chancellors often do. But nor did he visit Kyiv, despite being invited to do so by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. By evening, the popular German sociologist Harald Welzer was debating Ukraine’s ambassador on a television chat show. What the ambassador did not understand, Welzer told him, was that the 45% of Germans against delivering heavy weaponry to Ukraine might have family memories of conflict. They simply wanted a negotiated ceasefire. Wouldn’t weapon deliveries merely prolong the agony? The memory of World War Two was being used by a German intellectual to argue for a ceasefire with a dictator. Who could have predicted that in 1945?

The new reality has proved to be an unpleasant one for Germany. Russia’s invasion brought out the worst in some Germans. Heated opposition to weapons shipments to Ukraine mirrors the Querdenker movement that took, hysterically and counterproductively, to the streets during the pandemic. Across the political spectrum, and in nearly every segment of society: church leaders, artists, intellectuals, far-Right Putin fans, old-school peaceniks, trade unionists, and huge numbers of social democrats. What unites them all is a special brand of German navel-gazing. “Lumpen pacifism” is the best way to describe it.

This crowd isn’t bothered that the German peace-through-trade policies of the last few decades have failed. Shortly after the war began, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “new era” in which Germany’s defence budget would increase to a level proportionate to the country’s size. But on the path towards providing ever-more military aid to Ukraine, he’s wobbled through a minefield of national anxieties: from the chilly prospect of Russia turning off the gas pipelines, to worries about nukes, to good old-fashioned queasiness about supporting violence on the battlefield — in eastern Europe of all places, as if the Wehrmacht still had boots on the ground there.

This is not a fringe movement limited to sandal-wearing Easter Marchers. On April 29, a group of intellectuals and artists spoke out against sending arms: they published an open letter to Scholz in Emma, a magazine edited by veteran German feminist Alice Schwarzer. “The delivery of large quantities of heavy weapons could make Germany itself a party in the war. A Russian counter-attack could trigger the collective defence clause under the Nato treaty and thus the immediate danger of a world war.” An online petition supporting the statement has been signed 225,000 times. Whether he realised it or not, Scholz’s initial reluctance to send heavy weapons to Ukraine was in accord with these sentiments.

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Many of the names on the list are admirable. But the participation of these ‘Professor Doktor’ types reveals a truth about numerous German public intellectuals: they exude ivory tower arrogance. Too many are out of touch with reality. They dismiss the massive responsibility Germany carries in this war — Europe’s largest economy has spent two decades prioritising lovey-dovey vibes with Putin over the security needs of Ukraine, long seen as a buffer zone between Russian and Western Europe.

One of the signatories was the actor Lars Eidinger, famous for his Hamlet. Unsettled by the backlash, he posted on Instagram (in English): “As an eighteen year old man I refused the so called service with the weapon in front of a jury of the German military, the so-called Bundeswehr. The essential question I had to answer was, when one of my beloved ones is threatened with a gun and I had the chance to kill the aggressor — how would I react? My answer was: I would not shoot, to not service the spiral of aggression. I still believe in this ideal today.” In short: “Blood cannot be washed by blood.” You’d hope a man so familiar Shakespeare might have grasped something about human nature. But no, at 46, Eidinger hasn’t progressed much since his days as a teenage conscientious objector.

He belongs to one of the last age groups to face mandatory military service, which was discontinued in 2011. By the Nineties around 50% of young men were opting out, citing moral reservations, and choosing Zivildienst (civilian service) instead. Which is fine, of course, but that sentiment lives on through today, particularly among West Germans shaped by peace-time entitlement and “never again” convictions. As pathological as it might be to cling to such views today, many share Eidinger’s beliefs.

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After reunification in 1990, Germans in West and East, consciously or subconsciously, internalised Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. Perpetual peace, as Immanuel Kant imagined, was now a no-brainer. In the bright capitalist future cleansed of 20^th century ideological extremity, a united Germany, cloaked by the EU, would gently spread a soft-power message of trade, democracy, and Eurovision throughout the continent. International law would keep nations in check. Conquest and savagery were relegated to the past.

The entire West fell for this, but the Germans more so than any other nation. It let them finally move on from their war guilt. There was an assumption that geopolitical power struggles had vanished with the Berlin Wall. Cosy trade arrangements would turn Putin into a loveable Euro-softy! But this era is over; it died when Russian paratroopers rained down on Hostomel Airport in February. Yet the peaceniks — like the Lutheran Bishop who said it was a good thing for Germans to be “helpless spectators” — are still getting air-time. Other people’s countries are easy to give away aren’t they?

On April 22, a journalist asked Scholz why he’d been timid about heavy arms. He concluded: “I am doing everything to prevent an escalation leading to a third world war. There must be no nuclear war.” Many Germans agreed. In an ARD TV survey carried out the same day, 40% of Germans favoured restraint so as not to provoke Russia.

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Then, at a May Day trade union rally in Düsseldorf, Scholz changed his mind. He delivered an uncharacteristically passionate speech and a new decisiveness: “We will support Ukraine so that it can defend itself. I respect your pacifism but it must seem cynical to a citizen of Ukraine to be told to defend himself against Putin’s aggression without weapons.” He was booed by many in the audience. Other speakers said the money should be ploughed into the German welfare state instead.

Germany’s allies in Nato were bewildered. Scholz changed course a few days later, and announced that about 50 Geopard anti-aircraft tanks would be sent to Ukraine. The decommissioned vehicles are 40-years old and the only ammo that could be found for them has to be shipped in from Brazil, but better than nothing. Things are evolving. In his Victory Day speech, without a crowd to boo him, Scholz promised to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine. If there is a lesson from Germany’s history, it is surely the one he outlined on Sunday: “No more war. No more genocide. No more tyranny.” More tanks and personnel carriers will be delivered to Kyiv.

But intellectual leadership is missing. On the same day the Emma letter was published, the 92-year-old philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for a slow, deliberative approach to the crisis. As Scholz had previously intimated, Habermas feared potential nuclear war more than the actual bloodletting suffered by Ukrainians. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the American historian Timothy Snyder tweeted in late April. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

The most resolute support for Ukraine has not come from Germany’s intellectuals, or the chancellor’s office. Surprisingly, it is the German Greens, who partially grew out of the peace movement, who have become the hawks. For years, they drew attention to Germany’s potentially lethal dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The party’s figureheads, economics minister Robert Habeck and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, have been particularly vocal about Germany’s duty to sufficiently help Ukraine drive back the Russian invaders. Baerbock, in a visit to Kyiv, said that Germany aimed to cut its imports of Russian energy to zero, adding “and that will stay that way forever”.

This is the new reality. Germany will be Europe’s most preeminent military power within a decade. It will cut its energy ties with Russia. And it will be supplying Ukraine with powerful weapons in the months to come. Whether Germany’s pacifist lobby can stomach this, and whether they will be able to stop it from happening, is less certain.

Those unforgettable words, written in 1945, remained buried in the German psyche. A bottomless sense of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich meant that for decades many Germans (mostly in the western half) harboured a deep suspicion about their own culture and country, a fear that a militarist, nationalist, murderous Germany could rise from the ashes of the war.

Hence, for decades, Germany pushed pacifism and disarmament coupled with trade and dialogue, a policy that took off with social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the late Sixties and Seventies, as West Germany began to import natural gas from the Soviet Union. When, in 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who had lived in Dresden and was a fluent German speaker, replaced Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, Germany doubled down on Wandel durch Handel (change through trade). Volkswagen opened a large factory in Kaluga south of Moscow in 2007.

In 2011 — under the watch of ex-chancellor Angela Merkel — the Nord Stream 1 Baltic pipeline began to inject Siberian gas directly into the veins of German industry — circumventing transit countries like Ukraine, robbing them of revenue. Until the day of the invasion, Germany somehow imagined the controversial Nord Stream 2 would still open.

In December 2021, Putin phoned Merkel to thank her for “many years of fruitful cooperation”. In hindsight, what he meant was: thank you for filling my war chest. A day earlier, the Russian president had written to the incoming social democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz: “I count on engaging with you in constructive dialogue and working together on current issues on the bilateral and international agenda.”

In mid-February, as the Russian troop build-up suggested that Putin was really planning the unthinkable, Scholz took his turn at the end of that six-metre table in the Kremlin to talk diplomatic solutions — and flew back to Berlin, hopeful.

Then, on February 24 the sky fell in. Putin’s invasion of a large sovereign country two borders away (as the crow flies Kyiv is 748 miles from Berlin) shattered every illusion. The entire West was duped, but no country was more duped than Germany.

Germany was lost for words. The vocabulary required to describe what had happened lay beneath the ruins of the country’s beliefs about itself, Russia and the world. As Armin Nassehi, a sociologist at the University of Munich, wrote on February 25: “We seem to be completely blank to Russia’s aggression, not only militarily but also intellectually and conceptually.”

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The Germans had failed to fathom that, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, the existential threat to Europe would come from elsewhere. As the scale of Putin’s plans for Ukraine sunk in, Germany’s political consciousness began to shift. It was now clear that the support of Europe’s economic powerhouse for Ukraine (5,000 helmets!) had been shamefully inadequate. On Sunday February 27, Olaf Scholz — who up to that point had been viewed as a bland, ineffective chancellor — stood before the Bundestag and announced the most profound about-face in German foreign and security policy since World World II.

“In view of the turning point Putin’s aggression represents”, he said, “our standard is: What is needed to secure peace in Europe will get done”. A €100 billion defense fund for this year alone, twice the size of the annual military budget. Massive modernisation of the arsenal, structural reform of the decrepit, poorly organised armed forces. Germany would, for the first time since WWII, send weapons into a crisis zone. From now on the budget would surpass 2% of GDP — just as a blustering Donald Trump had demanded. A few sentences transformed Germany into the world’s third largest military power in terms of expenditure, surpassing Britain and France.

MPs cheered. Some cried. Scholz had turned Germany’s understanding of itself on its head. The widespread delusion that a country of 80 million smack in the middle of the continent could remain an over-sized Switzerland died for good.

Naturally, left-wing SPD backbenchers and their Green counterparts made their outrage heard but the leadership of the two left-of-centre parties stands behind the Scholz proclamation, as does the yellow partner in the “traffic light” coalition, the pro-business FDP. Unsurprisingly, the centre-right CDU is on board.

“In less than 96 hours”, wrote Die Zeit, “the political coordinates have shifted. The SPD has thrown 30 years of foreign and security policy overboard, the Greens have finally said goodbye to pacifism, the FDP has said goodbye to austerity at all costs and to the idea that the energy transition should not cost the state anything — and the CDU has said goodbye to the certainty that 16 years of Merkel were 16 good years”.

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This government’s central project, climate neutrality, has been derailed. The idea that Russian gas could serve as a stop-gap measure until enough renewable energy sources came online was one more shattered illusion. The Green economy minister Robert Habeck must now cobble together a path to carbon neutrality that slashes dependency on Putin’s fossil fuels. To keep the lights on, Habeck, of all people, is mulling an extension of coal and nuclear plants. Security trumps climate.

Another observable effect is a fraying of the political edges. The Right-wing populist AfD is fractured and weakened. Their previous admiration for the Russian president isn’t a good look, neither is ranting about “globalist” institutions such as the EU and Nato. Their whining about “corona dictatorship” comes off as puerile when an actual dictator starts a war.

Meanwhile, members of the small Left-wing party Die Linke, with its roots in East German communism, have also struggled to condemn Putin and suppress their anti-Nato instincts. Some still insist that the alliance’s eastern expansion is to blame for the war, but they’re getting lonelier by the day. This line of thought resonates with ever fewer Germans. As one commentator wrote: if Poland weren’t in Nato, the Russians wouldn’t stop until they reached Słubice on the German border.

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A minority of Twitter leftists warn of a new German militarism and the dangers of “shifting baselines” — the implication being that a better-funded, more effective Bundeswehr could result in aggression originating from Germany itself. In the minds of such people, Germany will always have an authoritarian, bellicose core, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A dictator has spat in Germany’s face and is threatening the stability of its neighbourhood. “We have an enemy again, who turns the gaze on ourselves”, writes Nassehi, meaning Germany has finally woken to the obvious fact that it is a mature, responsible democracy firmly anchored in Europe. That neighbouring countries such as Poland celebrated Scholz’s sea change boost is significant.

A friend close to the SPD leadership explained that Scholz’s defense initiative will be deeply embedded within European structures and in coordination with Germany’s allies. It’s light years from the old German militarism.

Has Germany banished its ghosts once and for all? Was this the final milestone on its path to normality? There are grounds for scepticism. The VW plant has closed but Russian gas still flows through Nord Stream 1. One could argue that Scholz didn’t really change his mind, but was strong-armed by allies. Some point out that throwing money at the neglected Germany military won’t solve its structural problems. A writer in Berliner Zeitung says Germany’s “toxic pacifism” will rage on beneath the surface.

Ten days into the war, Germany is a changed country, no question. What another ten days could do, is anyone’s guess.

What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

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Why Macron snubbed the EU

By Peter Franklin

So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

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When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

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Angela Merkel saved the West

By James Hawes

But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.