On Germany – Timothy Garton Ash in NYRB:

‘Countries, unlike human beings, can be old and young at the same time. More than 1,900 years ago Tacitus wrote a book about a fascinating people called the Germans. In his fifteenth-century treatise Germania, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, better known as Pope Pius II, praised German cities as “the cleanest and the most pleasurable to look at” in all of Europe. But the state we know today as Germany—the Federal Republic of Germany—will celebrate only its seventy-fifth birthday on May 23 this year. Its current territorial shape dates back less than thirty-four years, to the unification of West and East Germany on October 3, 1990, which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
Yet already the post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans, is asking what Germany will be next.’

(…)

‘By 2021 a staggering 47 percent of the country’s GDP came from the export of goods and services. The most spectacular growth was in business with China, on which Germany became significantly more dependent than any other European country. And while it self-identified as a civilian power, it exported a lot of German-made weapons, including nearly three hundred Taurus missiles to South Korea between 2013 and 2018—the very make of missile that Chancellor Olaf Scholz is stubbornly refusing to send to embattled Ukraine. In the years 2019–2023 Germany had a 5.6 percent share of global arms exports, ahead of Britain although still behind France. Mars in the service of Mercury.
With the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, Germany no longer had the insecurities of a frontline state. As former West German president Richard von Weizsäcker put it, this was the country’s liberation from its fateful historic Mittellage (middle position) between East and West, since it was now blessedly surrounded by fellow members of the geopolitical West. Accordingly, its defense expenditure sank as low as 1.1 percent of GDP in 2005.’

(…)

‘In the case of the Federal Republic, being good has a specific meaning: to have learned the lessons from the Nazi past, and hence always standing for peace, human rights, dialogue, democracy, international law, and all the other good things we associate with the ideal of liberal international order. How Germany has fared in this respect is the subject of another outstanding book, Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022, a probing moral history with a distinctly mixed verdict. “When moral principles served German interests they were flaunted,” Trentmann writes at one point, “when they stood in the way they were ignored.”’

(…)

‘The most dramatic misjudgment was about Russia. Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker who as chancellor had a portrait of Catherine the Great—a Russian ruler of German origin—in her office, was by far the most influential European politician when it came to dealing with Putin. One might argue that the Minsk II agreement, which Germany (along with France) was instrumental in concluding in February 2015, following Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, was the best that could be done to stabilize the situation at a moment when Ukrainian defenses were collapsing. Completely indefensible, however, was the German failure to change tack thereafter, realistically reassessing the Russian threat. The most telling evidence is that, far from decreasing its energy dependence on Russia, Germany increased it: by 2020 a staggering 55 percent of its gas, 34 percent of its oil, and 57 percent of its hard coal came from Russia.’

(…)

‘Over the last ten years Germany has provided 30 percent of Israel’s arms imports, second only to the US, and it rapidly stepped up weapon supplies after the horrific Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. But the reckless way that Benjamin Netanyahu has conducted the war against Hamas in Gaza, entailing what have clearly been violations of international humanitarian law, has brought those two imperatives, the particular and the universal, into painful conflict.’

(…)

‘But our subject here is Germany, and Germany is Europe’s central power. It has more than one sixth of the EU’s population and produces more than a fifth of its GDP. Does that make it a hegemon? Heinrich August Winkler, the doyen of German historians, has suggested that, like Bismarckian Germany, the Federal Republic has a “half-hegemonic position” in Europe. The phrase captures modern Germany’s classic geopolitical problem: its in-between size, too large but also too small.’

(…)

‘ Yet Germany today needs open, critical thinking as badly as an overweight, middle-aged man needs exercise.’

(…)

‘At this February’s Munich Security Conference, there was a striking contrast between the heroic rhetoric of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who talked of Ukrainian “warriors standing against the aggressor,” and the colorless bookkeeper’s language of the German chancellor. My notebook records Scholz saying at one point, “We are really impressed by the way the Ukrainian soldiers are doing their activities” (emphasis added). Er, you mean fighting? But in German, the entire language of war has been poisoned by its association with Nazism. In 2020 the head of the German army caused a stir when he said the country’s armed forces should be siegesfähig—capable of winning. (This is not a difficulty Germans have when they talk about their soccer team.) The defense minister now says the armed forces must be kriegstüchtig—war-capable. It will require imagination and judgment to find an appropriate new German vocabulary for the hard business of being ready to fight and die so that that you don’t need to fight and die.’

(…)

‘Pending the coinage of a catchier term, I would describe the strategy Europe requires from Germany as a Gesamteuropapolitik—an all-Europe policy, putting together what have in the past been the largely separate Europapolitik, meaning EU policy, and Ostpolitik.Can Germany swing the balance of the European Union toward a genuine strategic commitment to include Ukraine, Moldova, the Western Balkans, and Georgia? Can it contribute the bold, innovative thinking needed to reform the EU, making it ready both to make another big enlargement and to face a dangerous world? Can it help shape a realistic new European policy toward Russia, not for the next twenty months but for the next twenty years? And how is Europe as a whole—including countries like self-marginalized Britain—to defend its values and way of life in a world where often reflexively anti-Western great and middle powers such as China, India, and Turkey are increasingly influential, while the US interest in Europe has diminished and will continue to diminish? Germany cannot do any of these things on its own, but without Germany none of them will happen.’

Read the article here.

Too large and too small, the post-Wall era is over, and the question is how long the post-heroic era will last? In other words, how long German sensitivities will last? And it’s clear that those sensitivities also serve German interests; when they do not the sensitivities are let’s say less urgent.

From self-marginalized Britain is not much to expect. Once again, we are told that America’s interest in Europa (Biden or Trump) is waning. In other words, yes, we live in an in-between time, Germany probably more so than other countries.