Under the veneer of western unity in support of Ukraine, reactions to the war across Europe have been informed by different countries’ readings of their own history, of earlier conflicts on this continent, and by their conceptions of Russia’s national character. There is no automatic consensus within democratic societies about the lessons of the past, nor should there be. Remembrance is often selective, and the way ahead involves a discussion about what went wrong before.
Nowhere has this process of revisiting the past in search of the right decisions for the future been more fraught since the Russian invasion than in Germany. Over the past 16 months, the country has ended its heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas, abandoned its reluctance to send weapons to the war zone, and turned into one of Ukraine’s most important military and financial backers after the US. Most Germans now support this policy shift – or Zeitenwende (turning point) as Chancellor Olaf Scholz terms it – but public debate about the future of Germany’s security policy has not stopped. And arguments about history play a prominent part.
The brutality of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Putin’s blatant disregard for international law, and his explicit threats against the west have compelled Germany’s political and intellectual elites to reconsider long-held and widespread assumptions about the lessons for Germany of the second world war and the cold war. The significance of this change should not be underestimated, nor should anyone be surprised that it remains precarious and contested.
In the three decades after the end of the cold war, Germany’s policy in central and eastern Europe was heavily influenced by a reading of history that put Russia at the centre of German thinking about the region, while neglecting the smaller countries in its neighbourhood. This Moscow-centric bias reflected the extent of Russia’s power, but was also, at least in part, due to Germany’s recognition of its historic responsibility for the second world war, which on its eastern front, was a brutal war of annihilation. More than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died, and they play an important role in Germany’s culture of remembrance.
The readiness to face up to its historical responsibility for the second world war, and the focus on reconciliation and remembrance, are hard-won achievements of German democracy that should not be taken lightly. What remained problematic after the cold war, however, was a widespread German tendency to equate Russia with the Soviet Union, and for politicians to argue that Nazi Germany’s crimes imposed a special German obligation to seek dialogue with Russia, without extending the same consideration to the other former states of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine. After all, roughly 8 million of the Soviet victims of the second world war were Ukrainians, and Ukrainian territory was the site of brutal battles and unspeakable crimes, particularly against the Jewish population. There has been no lack of nuanced historical research on this, but it is only now, after Putin’s invasion, that the important distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union is being more widely appreciated in Germany’s public discourse.
The emphasis on the terrible price of war with the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 also resulted in a lack of German sensitivity about German-Russian collusion from 1939 to 1941 and its long-term consequences. Before Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union two years later, he and Stalin agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939 to divide central and eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. The countries that paid the price for this in brutal occupation, deportation and displacement were as deserving of Germany’s special consideration after the fall of the iron curtain as Russia. The memory of this collusion has profoundly shaped central and eastern European thinking about both countries to this day, especially in Poland and the Baltic states. However, in the two decades leading up to the war in Ukraine, their point of view mattered less to Berlin than Moscow’s.
Another defining chapter in Germany’s history that is now under re-examination is the famous “Ostpolitik” of the cold war chancellor Willy Brandt. This remained central to Germany’s thinking about Russia until 24 February 2022. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Brandt and his Social Democratic party (SPD) pursued a policy of dialogue with the Soviet Union in the hope of stabilising West Germany’s relationship with eastern Europe. His belief, 25 years after the end of the second world war, was that a strategy of “change through rapprochement” would reduce east-west tensions and possibly even help change the Soviet Union from within. Rapprochement included trade with the Soviet Union.
One does not have to be a member of the SPD to be proud of Brandt, albeit for a different reason. He is most famous for kneeling down in front of the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970, an unprecedented and hugely important gesture of shame and repentance for Germany’s war crimes and the Holocaust. It is also important to stress that Brandt’s pursuit of dialogue with the Soviet Union was from a position of strength. West German defence spending was at 3% of GDP a year during his time as chancellor, vastly higher even than what is envisaged in Germany’s first national security strategy, published on 14 June.
But Germany’s Russia policy lost its way after the cold war, as large parts of the SPD maintained a naive attachment to the principle of “change through trade” and remembered or reinterpreted Brandt’s policy in a selective way. Decades after Brandt, Gerhard Schröder, another SPD chancellor, is accused of turning this cherished and widely idealised tradition into a convenient excuse for prioritising German business interests in Russia over the geopolitical concerns of Germany’s central and eastern European Nato and EU allies. In their recent book, The Moscow Connection, Reinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner present a forensic and damning account of how Putin’s Russia spent decades courting both German political elites and public opinion, showing that the debate about Germany’s long-held Russia-centric assumptions is essential.
Germany’s support for Ukraine since the invasion constitutes a clear break with its Russia policy. The Scholz government has burned its bridges with Putin and abandoned longstanding principles that had resonated with many Germans until February 2022. This was not easy. But the crucial question is not just whether the Zeitenwende Scholz promised is really happening, but why it took a murderous war in Ukraine for it to begin.
Germany changed its mind about Russia, but not until it was too late. The necessary and agonising interrogation of why is only just beginning. A change, which from the German government’s point of view feels significant, even drastic, was long overdue and far too slow in the eyes of many of its allies. The criticism is valid. It is the urgency of Ukraine’s plight that should set the pace of Germany’s response to this catastrophic crisis of European security – not its own soul-searching.
Helene von Bismarck is a Hamburg-based historian specialised in UK-German relations.
