When I lived in Berlin nearly a decade ago, I marvelled at how readily the vegan ice cream-munching denizens of that city would take to the streets of Kreuzberg to protest about “Nazis” and “fascists”. With a history like theirs, one can understand their vigilance – but one also might have hoped that they’d know the difference between housing association bosses who hadn’t provided enough free accommodation for refugees and actual National Socialists.
Young Left-wing Germans have long specialised in a sort of anti-war, performative activism that is altogether detached from reality. Above all, they tend to confuse being nice with being morally right. But the pursuit of the nice over the right almost always results in people and countries giving real baddies a free pass. It tends to result in false moral equivalences, too: we in the West are “just as bad” as those who would seek to destroy our way of life, and so we should look to ourselves instead of fighting or disciplining anyone else.
It is a pacifistic tendency that has become particularly problematic in a country that, quite rightly, took from the Second World War the message: “never again”. And even more so in a country that has become so rich and complacent that it has seemingly thought nothing could challenge the comfortable German way of life.
So it is little wonder that, in recent decades, Germany has spent an irresponsibly low amount on defence (well under the Nato commitment of 2 per cent of GDP agreed in 2006), and that its leaders became obsessed with detente and keeping the Kremlin happy, based partly on guilt and partly on gas dependency.
Can a worm like Germany really turn? With the West under assault in its own backyard, many are now hopeful that, wonder of wonders, it can. Germany seems to have, in a stroke, moved beyond years of anti-war, Kremlin-pleasing dogma into a brave new world of reality and backbone.
Last weekend, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, made a speech to the Bundestag that veered close to the fire and brimstone actually demanded by the outrage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He announced that Germany would be sending 1,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine, and would no longer obstruct attempts to kick Russia off the Swift international payment system – all rather more useful than the 5,000 helmets his government sent Ukraine a few weeks ago as Russian troops massed on its borders.
He has made it sound as if Germany might finally become a force to be reckoned with, instead of Angela Merkel’s damp rag lazing behind American security guarantees. Scholz vowed that Germany will now push to meet Nato’s 2 per cent of GDP target and create a €100 billion fund for defence investments. This money will be used, among other things, for the development of the next generation of fighter-jets and tanks, in partnership with France, and for the purchase of Heron drones from Israel. If Scholz comes through then Europe, and the world, will be a far safer place.
But will he? Is Germany suddenly different? The opinion polls might suggest a radical change in position among the German public, but I have my doubts about what that actually means.
I spent two days in Munich last week and found myself recoiling at the Lefty-lite German popular response to events. Even the scrawls in the windows of shops and cafes worried me. Consider one I saw, in a wine bar window, which read Stop the War: Drink Wine For Peace, #NOWineForPutin, accompanied by a green heart rimmed in orange. To British eyes, it seemed unbelievably crass, but I honestly think that to many Germans, such words, in such a place, might seem like a legitimate, laudable act of resistance.
At best it represented a stunning naivete, a lack of awareness at how a safe, snug, nicely spruced-up wine bar in the middle of a wealthy city in Bavaria is a bizarre platform for protesting a brutal war complete with civilian shelling and flirtation with nuclear disaster. But my concern is that Germans, cossetted for so long in the warm embrace of a rich, overbearing, welfare state, have lost the ability to tell the difference between the serious and the non-serious, the flippant and the awful, between outrage and sentimentality.
Perhaps the German public have indeed realised their errors, and swung behind rearmament. But I fear that, again, this is a sort of performance – that, once the shock of Vladimir Putin’s invasion dissipates, they will return to their bad old pacifist ways.
Another example: Munich hosted a major “anti-war” protest while I was there, one of many that took place in Germany last week. A number of these have been organised by the youth-led environmental group Fridays For the Future. On the one hand they are billed as “peace marches” calling for an end to all war (the pacifism again). On the other, the crowds demand tougher measures against Putin. But these “tougher measures” aren’t militaristic. They are about increasing renewable energy investment. Important as it might be for Germany to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, I couldn’t escape the feeling that a war is being hijacked to make a point about climate change.
Germany’s political leadership might finally now have its head screwed on. But the crisis to hand is only escalating, and Germany’s sudden awakening may have come too late. I hope not. As the granddaughter of German Jewish refugees, I’m often told that I ought to be the first to worry about a strong German army. In 2022, the reverse is true – and should be so for everyone.
