By Jochen Bittner
HAMBURG, Germany — The rebuff from Berlin may have been rough, but at least it marked a new age of clarity. Not only did the German government decline a recent American request to send ground troops to Syria to fight the remnants of ISIS, but it didn’t even consider the idea: There was no debate in the Bundestag, and not even a real one in the press.
This year, Germany’s postwar federal republic turns 70. Born from the moral and physical rubble of World War II, and reunited only 30 years ago, some of its national character traits are still being formed. Others have fully matured — including a deep and abiding anti-militarism.
Germany didn’t start out on this path alone. After 1945, having crushed the Nazi regime, the Western allies granted West Germany its own army, but only as a deterrent against the Soviet Union. It was fully integrated into NATO, with no general staff of its own. Instead, Bonn paid upkeep for the American troops stationed in West Germany. From the start, responsibility for national security was outsourced to others.
At the same time, Germans began to come to grips with the moral horror of the Nazi era. One conclusion from that reckoning was a deep aversion to military strength — for many Germans, particularly in the generation born immediately after the war, their unshakable guilt meant they could never be trusted with the power to make war.
Germans did not only look backward in guilt; they looked forward in fear. Americans of a certain age will remember the terror of the two-week Cuba Crisis of 1962. For Germans of a similar vintage, like myself, our entire formative years were spent in a permanent nuclear crisis.
In school we learned how an arsenal of Soviet nuclear weapons, stationed only a few hundred miles away from our largest cities, could destroy us all within minutes, several times over — overkill, they called it. To Germans, the idea of “war” became synonymous not with guns and tanks, but with the sudden and complete eradication of their country. From this German angst sprang pacifism — not just as a moral philosophy, but out of national interest.
To Germans, the idea of “war” became synonymous with the sudden and complete eradication of their country.
In 1971, Chancellor Willy Brandt summed up this paradigm in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize: “War is not the ultima ratio but the ultima irratio.” In contrast, peace was the ultimate value; Brandt’s chief strategist, Egon Bahr, cautioned the Polish freedom movement in 1982: “The self-determination of the nation must be subordinated to the preservation of peace.”
Brandt was an idealist; Henry Kissinger derided him as a “political romanticist.” But he was not out of line with mainstream German politics — in 1993 the conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared that Germany soldiers should never intervene in nations in which the Wehrmacht had raged.
The conflict in the Balkans put Kohl’s doctrine to the test, and a ruling by the German Constitutional Court a year later opened the door to such deployments when it approved “out of area” — i.e., foreign — operations by the country’s armed forces. But they could do so only as part of NATO, United Nations or European Union missions.
Since then, Germany has deployed troops a handful of times, almost always in a peacekeeping role. And while it recently increased its military budget, under Chancellor Angela Merkel it has also ended its mandatory service requirement and cut the number of active-duty service members.
For Americans, these caveats may be particularly hard to understand. Historically, many in the United States have come to see war as a force for good, at least in the right hands. A “good” war, for example to end crimes against humanity, is a point of pride.
In Germany, war is always a shame, a sign of failure. The memory of war is inextricably linked to the collapse of civilization as such, to crimes so horrific and traumatic that they pose an eternal moral legacy on the Germans: never again.
In 1999, when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, from the pacifist Green Party, argued in favor of using German arms during the Balkan wars, a fellow party member threw a balloon filled with red paint at his head. The message was clear: All war is murder, and making the case for war is the argument of a murderer.
In 2014, the chairwoman of the Protestant church in Germany, Margot Kässmann, refused to exempt even the Allied invasion of 1944 that liberated Nazi Germany from the pacifist dogma. “It certainly was a war with a good intention,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to justify war. There is only a just peace.” This is the mentality that Germany’s allies are up against.
In a 2018 poll, 72 percent of Germans said that their country shouldn’t join military action against the Syrian regime, even if the dictator used poison gas against civilians. In the words of the historian Heinrich August Winkler, Germans have become used to a dubious, yet strongly felt “right to look the other way” — a right that other Western democracies cannot claim.
Not that Germany has recused itself from world affairs. It has used its economic power to stand up to Russia, organize a response to the refugee crisis and shepherd the continent through the Great Recession.
Still, Germany’s decades-long effort to learn from history, and to be on the guard against slipping into another moral abyss, has produced an unintentional byproduct: moral arrogance. Behind closed doors, it doesn’t take long for diplomats from neighboring countries to decry what they see as the sanctimony of the Berlin Republic. Moralism has become the new nationalism.
This attitude may indeed be annoying. But the best that others can expect from Germany is to behave like a nonneutral Switzerland. German pacifism is here to stay, and there’s no use asking the country to be what it isn’t. Instead, allies would do better to encourage German leadership by means of its real strengths, economic clout and diplomatic credibility — the ability to speak softly while carrying a big carrot.
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