Anna Sauerbrey: 'Socially, economically, politically and even morally, Germany has been questioned, its fundamental moorings subject to intense scrutiny. What these 10 months have revealed is a country reconceiving of itself, without the old certainties.'
,” a watershed moment or epochal turn, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz termed it. Such a move, of course, merits little when set alongside the heroic endurance of the Ukrainians. Even so, for a country that seemed unable to do without Russian gas, it ranks as an achievement that the Christmas lights are on.
And yet the sense of normality feels provisional, even phony. Because this year has been anything but normal. Socially, economically, politically and even morally, Germany has been questioned, its fundamental moorings subject to intense scrutiny. What these 10 months have revealed is a country reconceiving of itself, without the old certainties.
The invasion came at the very time when Germany was about to forget what war means. The generation that lived through World War II, more than 75 years ago now, are in their 90s or have passed away; those born in its shadow, the baby boomers, have a dwindling hold in public life. In fact, the second postwar generation, born in the ‘60s and ‘70s, took the political reins after the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure in the fall of 2021, just months before Russia invaded Ukraine.
That matters. It’s a generation that hardly remembers the Cold War and was raised after its ideological struggles had ended, free from fear of nuclear conflict. It came of age in the ‘90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany’s reunification and what seemed to some to be “the end of history.” To this generation — my generation — war was a distant and gloomy impossibility, something that happened elsewhere, if at all.