Something remarkable happened this week: Germany launched its first military strategy since the Second World War. The Bundeswehr, as Germany’s post-war military is called, has decided who its main adversary is (Russia) and what it needs to do to stand up to it (build the largest conventional army in Europe). That’s so new and ambitious that I don’t think we’re overstretching the word “historic” here.

It’s true that both post-war German states once had sizeable armies and conscription during the Cold War, and that the current rearmament efforts could be seen more as a restoration of this status than as something new. But I disagree. What we’re seeing now is fundamentally different in three key ways:

A) Neither post-war Germany had to think strategically.

B) Their forces weren’t expected to be deployed in earnest on larger combat missions.

C) Having lost two World Wars and remaining shellshocked by the crimes that accompanied the Second one in particular, neither East nor West Germany developed a military ethos that celebrates military service in the way that other countries, including the US, Britain, France and Russia, do. For good historical reasons, German post-war culture has been wary of all things military and even the very idea of patriotism itself.

The current national effort to rearm by building a huge military force of 460,000 people, including 200,000 reserves, all following the first-ever post-war strategy made in Berlin, is entirely new. It will require a careful rethink and reform of established attitudes toward war, service and country if it is to succeed. It’s worth examining how Germans rearmed after the Second World War to understand the roots of the Bundeswehr we see today.

When Nazi Germany lost the war in May 1945, its military, the Wehrmacht, surrendered unconditionally and was dissolved wholesale by the Allies shortly after. In fact, demilitarisation was one of the few principles regarding Germany's future that all sides could agree on.

This means that when East and West Germany were established in 1949, they didn’t have their own military forces. Both contained soldiers from the countries that continued to occupy them. It would have probably stayed like that much longer if it hadn’t been for the emergence of the Cold War, which triggered a rethink in the US in particular. Washington needed West Germany to help bolster the European front lines against communism.

As early as 1951, West Germany began to build up paramilitary police units to help guard the inner-German border (the long one in the middle of the country, the Berlin Wall would not be built for another decade). Vague plans to rearm West Germany had been underway for a few years already, pretty much since tensions began to escalate in 1947/8. But this specific development stemmed from a new kind of urgency triggered by the Korean War, which began in 1950 and not only tied the Americans down but also confronted them with the reality of communist expansion by military means. They needed West Germans to help hold the line in Europe.

Regardless of the practical necessities, it is absolutely astonishing in hindsight how this process unfolded. In the autumn of 1950, a meeting took place at Himmerod Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in the far West of the country. There, former officers of the dissolved Wehrmacht met, tasked by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to outline options for the rearmament process.

The resulting memorandum reckoned the new West German army should have around 500,000 men, so more than today’s plans foresee, based on a much smaller population. In spirit, the memorandum argued that the only way to build a new German military was to rehabilitate the old one to maintain a degree of continuity in personnel and traditions. “Western nations,” the chairman of the meeting demanded, “must take public measures against the ‘prejudicial characterisation’ of the former German soldiers.”

In January 1951, Dwight D. Eisenhower did just that, declaring that “I have come to know that there was a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler and his criminal group ... For my part, I do not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honour.” This helped create and maintain the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”, a concept that still triggered significant debate in the 1990s and early 2000s when a famous two-part Wehrmacht exhibition challenged it by focussing on the crimes committed by regular armed forces during the war.

In the early 1950s, the clean Wehrmacht myth unlocked the path for rearmament. But, importantly, under the condition that Germany would not make strategic decisions on its own. Western European integration was underway, and in 1955, West Germany joined NATO. The latter happened at the beginning of May, i.e. almost to the day, 10 years after the end of the Second World War.

It was a done deal. There would be a new and large German military force: the Bundeswehr. It was officially founded on 12 November 1955. But it was going to be contained by the Allies’ decision-making, most importantly that of the US. Adenauer’s plans to develop nuclear weapons for West Germany were also shut down immediately.

East Germany responded to the process by building its own military, the National People’s Army, starting with military police units in 1952 and culminating in the official formation of the NVA on 18 January 1956. Ten days later, it joined NATO’s communist counterpart, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, often referred to as the “Warsaw Pact”. Both the Bundeswehr and the NVA introduced male conscription, and both received comparatively large proportions of GDP.

By and large, the young men (and in the case of the GDR, women too) who chose military service as a career did so because they enjoyed the stability and camaraderie of this kind of life. Those who were forced into it for a time (especially in the East, where there was no civilian alternative to military service as there was in the West), often resented the experience. But both groups could expect to avoid active combat.

One example that illustrates the point is the suppression of the Prague Spring, a reform movement in Czechoslovakia under the leadership of the Slovak politician Alexander Dubček. When, in the late hours of 20 August 1968, an invasion force of 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops threatened to crush any resistance in the Eastern European country, the GDR’s NVA forces were among the support units. East German leader Walter Ulbricht had wanted to send them in fully to prove his country’s worth to the Soviets, but even they were cautious not to deploy German soldiers in Eastern Europe just one generation after WWII. NVA troops never actually crossed over the border into Czechoslovakia, but were nonetheless helping directly under Soviet command. It was a decision made in Moscow not to deploy NVA troops in open combat, not in Berlin.

The practical implications and relationships were different, but the principle of following the grand strategy set by their Allies was similar in West Germany. After unification, Germany also didn’t develop its own strategy paper. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz kept emphasising that his country would “not go it alone” when it came to supporting Ukraine, but would wait for cues from the US. Scholz also emphasised that Germany would never be a “party” in that war.

Those founding principles of German rearmament after WWII are now changing:

A) By developing its own comprehensive military strategy, Germany is beginning to think strategically for the first time since 1945.

B) Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said that he wants Germany to be “kriegstüchtig” or “war-ready”, clearly expecting soldiers to be deployable.

C) There are small-scale attempts to celebrate military service more, for instance, with Germany’s first Veterans’ Day last year.

This is a huge shift for any number of reasons, and it will have to be carefully thought through and managed. The launch of the new military strategy certainly should be a much bigger news item than it is, given the vast cultural, political, economic and social transformations that will have to underpin it.

There is no easy way to solve this conundrum. Germany will have to strike a very careful balance when trying to reconcile the need for military strength with a deep-seated reluctance to let militarism take hold again.

When people think of German history, the German colonial empire is not typically the first thing that springs to mind. I think that applies to most Germans, too. When I think back to my own school days, I can’t remember having been taught much about it. We learnt about the British, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch empires in passing. I also remember reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and finding it an intense and harrowing introduction to the idea of Belgian colonialism. But I very rarely came across mentions of German colonialism, fictionalised or otherwise. That’s despite the fact that, at its largest extent, Germany had built the third-largest colonial empire in the world after Britain's and France's.

Awareness of this history has changed massively in recent years and decades – or at least it has in academia. There’s been a flurry of research activity, especially looking into the structures and experiences of the German colonisers and the people they colonised. This is a very sensitive field charged with present-day debates over what we should remember and how.

To name but one example: fierce arguments have broken out over how to describe the genocidal policies enacted against the Herero and Nama people in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908, in which around 80% and 50% respectively of their pre-war populations died. Germany recognised this as genocide in 2015 and agreed to pay reparations. Some historians have compared the racialised violence and genocidal intentions to the Holocaust, while others have pushed back hard against drawing a direct line between the two historical events.

I found myself deeply immersed in this history and the attendant debates while discussing with my podcasting partner, Chris Dillon, how to approach this subject in a future episode of Reichs and Republics. The complexity of the matter, the vast amount of fresh research and the sensitive nature of this field of scholarship make this an incredibly challenging topic to address in a compact and accessible format. There are just so many angles to it as well, and all are morally and historically complex.

Take the Askaris. These were African soldiers who served in Germany’s colonial army, mainly in German East Africa, before and during the First World War. Their story exemplifies the sheer length of the German colonial empire's afterlife. So let’s look at it back to front.

In 1964, half a century after the start of the First World War, a small group of elderly men, all former Askaris, gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They wore simple clothes. Some were leaning on sticks. They wanted due recognition and their pensions. They had come to prove they had once been soldiers of the German Empire.

This proved tricky. There were few uniforms left, even less official documentation of any kind. That was lost a long time ago, nearly five decades earlier, when Germany lost its colonies. There was only one way for the men to prove that they had once been Askaris, and that was to act in a way that only they could. So the men were asked to perform drill commands. This involved marching, presenting arms and responding to orders barked in German. They could all still do it. And that was enough to prove they had once fought for Germany.

The story of the Askaris is intricately interwoven with Germany’s colonial ambitions.

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Wednesday was a long day for me. I had woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning in a dodgy hotel in East London, made my way to the airport, flown to Berlin, whizzed into the city for an interview, whizzed back out on a train to Erfurt and then boarded another one to Weimar. But here I was sauntering down the familiar avenue from the train station to the old town centre in the late evening sunshine of a mild spring day. I took a deep breath and felt the day's rush dissipate.

I’ve spent so much time in Weimar during the last few years that it’s become comfortably familiar. After the hustle and bustle of London and Berlin, of airports and train stations, the streets of Weimar seemed wonderfully calm and tranquil. The last few birds that hadn’t gone to bed yet were still singing their spring songs, quiet chatter emanated from an Italian restaurant where guests had just sat down for dinner, and a single bus rattled by, taking train passengers to the town centre who had been less keen on a walk.

I dropped my bag in my hotel room and soon found myself down in the lobby, shaking hands with a journalist who had come to Weimar to interview me about my new book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. “Let’s have dinner somewhere historical,” he said. No problem. That’s very easily done in Weimar.

I could have taken him back up the hill towards the station, for instance, where the Hotel Kaiserin Augusta has offered food and accommodation since the 19th century, when it was named after the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Augusta was born in Weimar to the Grand Ducal House of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach before finding her roles on the national stage as Queen of Prussia and the first Empress of Germany.

The hotel that bears her name also played a role during the period I’m looking at in the book. Adolf Hitler spoke here in 1930 – three years before he became Chancellor of Germany – addressing an audience of 300 “bigwigs”, as his propaganda man Joseph Goebbels put it. Hitler was speaking to politicians and businessmen to convince them that Germany's future lay in National Socialism. “It reeks of poshness,” Goebbels, who came from a working-​­class background, somewhat resentfully wrote in his diary that night. But “Hitler speaks fabulously. I rarely see him like this.” After the talk, he sat with Hitler and the other senior Nazis long into the night. “We had much cause for laughter,” Goebbels mused.

After the war, the Hotel Kaiserin Augusta took on an entirely different role. It had survived the war almost unscathed and became a headquarters for Soviet officers. There are many places like this in Weimar, a small town in central Germany that remarkably often attracted the movers and shakers of German history. On Wednesday night, I opted to take the journalist to a different historical venue, the tavern Zum Weißen Schwan or The White Swan.

The White Swan is first mentioned in historical sources in 1688 and became even more famous when Germany’s most famous poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, moved in next door in the second half of the 18th century. The Swan not only became Goethe’s local, but many of his illustrious guests also stayed there when they visited him in Weimar, where he would stay for the rest of his life and die in 1832. “The White Swan,” Goethe once wrote, “always greets you with open wings.”

In 1919, the Swan welcomed the delegates of the National Assembly with open wings. This was Germany’s first parliament elected through free and universal suffrage. All adult men and women had had a vote, and the first delegates they had elected met in Weimar rather than Berlin to write and pass a constitution for the new Germany that was supposed to emerge from the First World War. They convened at the theatre a short walk away, but met in taverns, pubs and restaurants in the evenings to continue their discussions. The White Swan was one of them, making its guest book of the time a fantastic source for the mood of the meetings.

The President of the National Assembly and future German Chancellor Constantin Fehrenbach ate and drank here, writing in the guest book: “We fled from Berlin and found a secure and cosy site here; may there be better days ahead soon for beautiful Weimar and for our dear fatherland.”

“Hear, hear,” I thought as I sat in the same place over a century later, beer in hand and a plate of Thuringian sausages with sauerkraut in front of me. I talked with the journalist about the incredible story of how the Weimar Republic was founded in this town and how the newly elected politicians had hammered out a framework for its brand-new democracy right here where we were sitting, with no idea of the horrors that lay in the future. In fact, Fehrenbach himself would never see that future. He died in 1926 at the age of 74, still in office as the leader of the parliamentary group of the Catholic Centre Party.

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After dinner, we stepped out onto the cobbled Frauenplan square. The sound of water tinkled in the air from the nearby Goethe Fountain, and it was still surprisingly mild for the time of year. It was easy to forget that the day had started many hours ago and miles away with a rushed journey to the nearest Tube station. We decided there was still time that day for a drink at the Hotel Elephant, which was just around the corner on the historic market square.

The original Hotel Elephant is almost a contemporary of the Swan. It was founded in 1696, just eight years after the Swan was first mentioned. Goethe had also dined here, as had his friend and fellow writer Friedrich Schiller and many other celebrities such as the composers Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. More recently, during the period my book covers, the architect Walter Gropius and many of his Bauhaus colleagues and authors had met, slept, eaten and drunk at the Elephant. In 1926, Adolf Hitler checked in for the first time, naming his profession as ‘Schriftsteller’ or ‘author’ upon registration

From 1926 onwards, the Elephant became Hitler’s base in Weimar. It was ideal. Local Nazi Hans Severus Ziegler described Hitler’s accommodation there as “simple and plain … in the early years, one room, which served as both living room and bedroom”. But crucially, the ​­set-​­up gave Hitler privacy with windows facing the garden to the back while also being located directly at the busy market square, allowing the “Führer” to appear right in the centre of Weimar for public speeches or to greet his followers. Ziegler regarded Hitler’s room at the Elephant as his “headquarters in the centre of Germany”.

Almost exactly a century after Hitler first checked in here, we walked through the door and sat down in the elegant armchairs in the lobby. When you’ve just written a book about this, it’s hard to push the thought aside that this is where Hitler convened his followers during the important 1926 Nazi Party rally, less known than the later Nuremberg ones, but crucial for the consolidation of the movement at a time when it didn’t do well in elections.

It was at the Elephant that Hitler held a “political tea” in 1930 to discuss his party’s first-ever participation in a state-level government in Germany. It was here that the conservative parties agreed to give the notorious Nazi Wilhelm Frick the two most important ministries of the state of Thuringia, of which Weimar was the capital. It was here that Hitler stayed during every one of his many Weimar visits from 1926 to the Second World War.

Today, the Elephant oozes understated luxury. It’s a well-designed hotel with clear lines and a stripped-back kind of classiness that gives it a timeless appeal. But this is not the same building that Hitler slept in in 1926. He loved the Elephant so much that the centuries-old building was torn down for him in 1937 and rebuilt from scratch.

What we were sitting in now is the brainchild of one of Hitler’s most favoured architects: Hermann Giesler. Giesler promised to make the new Elephant “Europe’s most modern hotel”, which would be “trailblazing in its facilities and architecture”. Hitler loved the idea and helped finance the project from Nazi Party funds. In exchange, he expected to get an exclusive apartment with garden views, in a quiet part of the hotel that would never be used by other guests. There would be a balcony out onto the market square, complete with flagpoles and the eagle emblem of the Reich.

That’s the building we were drinking “Elephant Beer” in now. The balcony is still there, as are the flag poles. The eagle emblem has gone, and now a famous Goethe quote hangs above the balcony: “Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein!” – “Here I am human, here I can be“. But the 1930s elegance is still the same.

The large meeting hall next to where we were sitting is familiar to me from historical photographs, for example, of the writers’ conventions that Goebbels convened here. The first one was in 1938 and featured one of Germany’s best-selling authors, Ernst Wiechert. Wiechert had been critical of the regime, and Goebbels loathed him for it. He’d thrown him into the Buchenwald concentration camp, right on the outskirts of Weimar, where he was badly maltreated. Then he’d forced him to take part in the poetry summit at the Elephant, where he turned up physically broken and with his head shorn down to a short stubble. Everyone knew why he looked that way.

Hitler, Weimar and Germany were excited when the hotel was reopened, complete with an exclusive 80-square-metre Führer suite. Hitler had an emotional attachment to a hotel in which, as one Nazi newspaper put it, “many a decision of historical importance for the movement and therefore for Germany” had been made. The Berliner Tageblatt reported after the opening: “That Adolf Hitler in these times demanded to be kept abreast of all phases of planning, that he was the first guest to move into the transformed rooms, shows the importance of this architectural feat. It is not only a part of the party buildings which the Thuringian capital is erecting, but at the same time it is the most modern hospitality enterprise in Europe.”

Hitler had not only decided on the style, materials and details of the new Elephant but also made conceptual decisions on pricing and image. According to the architect Giesler, he’d said to “make sure that the costs for overnight stays remain low. Guests who have to save up must not be excluded from the Hotel Elephant… Hire good staff who get paid decently... Everything has to be so good that word gets round.” It’s jarring to sit in a hotel today that is exactly what he’d intended it to be, well, apart from the price points.

The market square had been empty when we walked here, but I had told the journalist about the crowds of Weimarers that had turned up for opening day. As Hitler was shown around the hotel, the people outside shouted themselves into a frenzy. The crowds wanted Hitler to come out on the balcony and speak to them. They began to chant: “Dearest Führer, pretty please – ​­Direct your feet to the balcony.” He obliged, briefly appearing to frenetic applause. He’d barely gone back inside when the crowds started chanting again, coming up with increasingly creative slogans, right down to: “Dearest Führer, can’t you hear, we’re running out of breath down here!”

The Hotel Elephant marks a stark contrast to the hotel where Hitler stayed during his earliest visits in Weimar, the Hohenzollern by the train station. The handsome white building had twenty-three rooms with gas heating and electric lights. There were flushing toilets. In 1912, a cinema had been installed. It was by no means Weimar’s finest address. It didn’t have the old-​­fashioned grandeur and legendary reputation of the Hotel Elephant in the town centre, but it had been the perfect base for Hitler’s early stays. He liked the neat, tidy establishment. Its managers, Arthur and Rosa Schmidt, ran a respectable establishment. Hitler was so impressed that he returned there again and again. He had no idea that Rosa was Jewish, and Rosa had no idea what Hitler’s regime would one day do to her and her family.

Hotels are odd and evocative places for historians. They often find themselves at the heart of events, as places where people slept, ate, drank, met and debated. Nowhere is this more true than in Weimar, where history so often came to stay.

***

If you would like to stay at the Hotel Elephant and explore it and other places in Weimar with me, please allow me to engage in some more shameless promotion. I will be conducting a guided four-day tour of Weimar later this year, where we’ll explore the town’s fascinating history between 1919 and 1939, from the founding of the eponymous republic and the establishment of the influential Bauhaus school of art and architecture to the rise of the Nazis and the foundation of the Buchenwald concentration camp on Weimar’s doorstep. The group will, of course, be staying at the most historic hotels of them all: The Elephant.

If you’re interested in joining us, you can find the details here.

I was in Berlin yesterday and on my way to a recording studio to give a long-form interview about my new book Weimar. My head was full of thoughts about how I might answer the questions, and it was also busy re-adjusting to the German language. So I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings until I literally stumbled upon some history.

There, in the ground in front of my feet, was a narrow line of cobblestones and a plaque that read “Berliner Mauer 1961-1989”. Isn’t that remarkable? Here was a line that had once divided people, ideologies, a country, worldviews, families and the city itself. And I had very nearly crossed that line without giving it so much as a thought. That didn’t seem right. After all, here, where I was standing now in the spring sunshine, a cup of takeaway coffee in my hand and a pair of subglasses on my nose, had once been a heavily fortified border where people were killed if they tried to cross.

Between 1961 and 1989, the Berlin Wall encircled West Berlin, cutting it off from East Berlin and from East Germany itself. What had begun as a ramshackle collection of barriers consisting of bricks, barbed wire, bodies of water and soldiers with weapons developed into a vast, deadly and near-impregnable fortification over the years.

Berlin learned to live with it. I have vague memories of visiting my uncle in East Berlin as a small child in the late 1980s and being told that there were certain routes we couldn’t take on afternoon strolls because “we just can’t go there”. Close to four decades later, here I was walking from East Berlin into West Berlin without a second thought.

In many ways, that’s a very good thing, of course. The Berlin Wall kept people apart who never asked to be kept apart. It curtailed the freedom of movement of East Germans on pain of death. It brutally cut a city in two that had never been designed that way. The fact that Berlin is overcoming this trauma so successfully that people walk across the former border every day without realising it is remarkable in itself.

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But there is a fine line between overcoming an aspect of the past and forgetting it. Berlin is very keen to ensure that it marks and remembers its history, and the Wall is no exception. Of the once-155 km-long installations, only around 2km remain today. It would simply have been neither practical nor desirable to retain the entire thing, since this would have kept the city physically divided. The Wall cut through existing infrastructure like roads and houses, over bridges and along the Brandenburg Gate. It had to go.

So today, only individual segments remain. The longest and most famous is the East Side Gallery, a 1.3km stretch on which artists have painted a series of murals. This is the bit tourists usually ask for and photograph a lot. There is also a smaller remnant at Bernauer Strasse and a 200-metre-long original piece on the grounds of the “Topography of Terror” exhibition. But that’s pretty much it. Otherwise, Berliners and visitors can walk freely and unimpeded from one part of the city to the other. As well they should.

To allow people to move freely without forgetting that they once could not, 5.7km of the former Berlin Wall are now marked with cobblestones and plaques like the one I stumbled upon. What happened to me yesterday is exactly the desired effect. You’re walking from A to B, not consciously looking around or thinking of history, and then you stop and look down. I think it works well. I certainly get a strange feeling each time I cross these markers so easily today, markers that once denoted the fault line between two worlds.

It’s a small thing, but it reminds me of the huge impact history has on our lives. I was born to the east of that line, born on the side that that line kept cut off from the other. Where those cobblestones act as a memorial today, once stood a structure that would have prevented me from travelling to England, never mind setting up a life for myself there. Today, it’s a line I cross easily and regularly, several times a year. That would have been unthinkable when I first stood there as a small child, wondering why we couldn’t walk down a certain road after having coffee at my uncle’s flat.

The rest of the former Berlin Wall is marked in other ways. There is a Berlin Wall Trail that traces the entire 160km of the Wall around West Berlin. Some sections have information plaques. Others display remnants of the military installations that were once used. Yet others have crosses or memorial plaques dedicated to the victims, people who were killed or died trying to cross the Wall. Another stretch is lined by cherry trees, which were donated by Japanese citizens. They are now a tourist attraction in their own right when they bloom.

If it seems odd that people are walking the Wall today amid the splendour of parks and cherry blossoms, the same idea was applied on a much greater scale along the long inner-German land border separating East and West Germany. Since setting up the border involved leaving a broad belt of “no-mansland” between the fortifications during the Cold War, wildlife flourished there undisturbed. It was a strange side effect of the deadly installations and the brutal shooting orders: nature was left to its own devices, and a unique biotope emerged.

The former border was nearly 1,400km long and stretched all the way from the Baltic Coast through the centre of Germany and to the border with Czechoslovakia. From 1989 onwards, groups campaigned to protect this unique area as a nature reserve, Germany’s largest connected group of protected environmental spaces.

So I will leave you on this Thursday morning with the beautiful thought that the old Death Strip is now a Green Belt — a great symbol for our ability as humans to move on without forgetting.

“And so it begins”, my brain whispered a tad overdramatically as I was giving the first pre-recorded interview…

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Countries by and large don’t like being occupied. The idea that foreign soldiers are stationed on one’s own soil for control and regulation stands in direct contrast to national sovereignty and independence. Yet Germany’s case is unique.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany was a vanquished country that had lost the political, economic, social and moral capacity to govern itself. The victorious Allies took on a curious hybrid role as occupiers and re-builders — with far-reaching ramifications that continue to have a huge impact today.

The story of the Red Army in the GDR is particularly complex and full of contradictions. It’s also a story that my own family has experienced.

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I have visitors over from Germany this Easter, and it’s been great fun to show them around. We travelled the length and …

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When I tell people I’m a historian, one type of response I get every now and then is: “What do historians actually do these days? Surely, there…

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Germany’s long history of a fractured political landscape is still very visible in current affairs. One day, you’ll have the Bavarian Minister President Markus Söder complaining about how Berlin is wasting Bavarian money. On another occasion, you see a Hamburg politician frowning at election results in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg because they seemed to him to be “from another planet.”

Yet in the face of external threats, like the war in Iran, which is having a huge impact on the cost of living in Germany, you hear politicians appeal to some sort of national solidarity, condemning companies exploiting the situation as “unpatriotic”. The German pendulum continues to swing between regional diversity and national unity.

I think today, most Germans are okay with that tension. Being a decentralised nation-state has become part of the post-war identity. That’s also how Otto von Bismarck had set up the first incarnation of the modern German state in 1871. But in his day, people were much more nervous about the fragility of German unity than they are today. So the German Empire busied itself in building monuments to ancient legends that were supposed to give meaning and collective memory to the newly formed Germany.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the Kyffhäuser Monument in the mountains of Thuringia in central Germany. Erected between 1890 and 1896, shortly after the death of the first German Kaiser Wilhelm I, it aimed to declare him the reincarnation of the medieval king Frederick Barbarossa, whose powerful legend had long been a feature in central European political myth-making.

A kind of German King Arthur, Barbarossa was said to be asleep under the Kyffhäuser mountains in Thuringia. His red beard was said to be growing longer and longer as it wrapped its way around a stone table while he sat there dormant, destined to wake up one day and restore Germany to its greatness.

The vast monument there depicts this story, showing the medieval emperor in an enchanted sleep while an equestrian statue of Wilhelm I towers above him, adorned with a Pickelhaube and an Iron Cross. Both sit among the ruins of Kyffhausen Castle, which is associated with Frederick Barbarossa, as it reached its most impressive phase during his reign.

The divergence between the real Barbarossa and his legend reveals a lot about German history, so I think it’s worth going into this a bit: Who was Barbarossa, and why were 19th and 20th-century Germans so taken with him?

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I spent a lovely weekend in Lichfield. It’s a delight…

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When I was growing up in Germany, history was all around me, but it never felt particularly special. As children, we were taught that the woods were still full of World War II ordnance and what to do…

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My uncle has bought himself a bicycle. An actual, honest-to-God, real-life pushbike. That may not be big news to the rest of the world, but it is to me. When I was a kid, I used to think it was the coolest thing ever when my Berlin uncle rocked up on his big motorbike… now here he is, a plastic helmet on his head and a wide grin on his face. “Sod Super Unleaded,” he says. “I’m getting super legs.” Well, that’s a consequence of the Iran war I did not see coming…

In Norfolk, where I live, people have also responded in different ways. Local firewood suppliers say they are experiencing panic buying. Many households are on oil-fired heating, and as oil prices have doubled, neighbours are telling me they are trying to get through March by putting on extra layers of clothing and hoping to delay their next oil order until calmer times prevail.

But then there is always one... “Ah, that’s nothing,” said a middle-aged man in the shop the other day. “I remember the oil crisis in the 1970s. We didn’t have petrol or oil back then. I had weeks off school because of it. Didn’t do me any harm.”

I’ve heard such stories often since moving to the UK. The oil crises of the 1970s, with their complex ramifications for the economy, society and politics, have left a deep imprint on collective memory in Britain and the Western world more widely.

It’s made me realise how different the historical backdrop to my own upbringing was because I happened to spend the first few years of my life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Sure, middle-aged and older East Germans will tell you plenty of stories of shortages and making-do, but they are different stories. None of them are obviously linked to the oil shocks of the 1970s. Stories of long petrol queues, sharply rising prices and sudden economic turmoil belong to others.

Yet the impact of the oil shortages reached far beyond the capitalist world. They just hit the Eastern Bloc with some delay and in a different form. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that these crises played a fundamental role in weakening the GDR's economic foundations, contributing to the conditions that eventually led to its collapse in 1989. This strand of the Cold War story has never been as evocative as that of rock music “shaking the Wall” or the spirit of freedom overcoming oppression, but it’s a crucial one.

To understand why, let’s go back to the oil crises themselves and observe how they destroyed the very premise upon which the GDR economy was built.

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Jürgen Habermas is dead. His passing away yesterday at the age of 96 marks the end of one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in modern …

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If you woke up on Tuesday and thought you could hear a faint,…

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It felt strange returning to Weimar earlier this week. I spent so much time there, mentally and physically, while researchi…

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I’m sitting at the airport as I type this, bright red in the face with an actual, real-life sunburn. Yes, in early March. No, unfortunately not …

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Is it ever right to erase history? That was the question we returned to time and again last Tuesday. I was sitting in a TV stud…

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It was still very dark in Norfolk when I set off on Tuesday to reach Berlin by mid-morning. As this was a short trip, I was travelling light. With just a rucksack on my back and my passport in my pocket, I felt strangely free and excited. I’m very lucky to have a job like this.

It didn’t take long, though, before my high spirits were taken down a peg or two. It quickly turned out to be one of those mornings despite the allure of international travel. Nonetheless, at the end of the journey lay a day in the German capital that would lead me through one of its most beautiful train stations and towards a challenging conversation about Berlin’s past and my own.

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I was in my car the other day, happily driving along and listening to whatever my music app chose to throw at me, when a ve…

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I know many people find cooking relaxing. I don’t. I experience it as a sequence of boring tasks interrupted by intensely stressful intervals where timing is everything. So I distract myself, often by listening to programmes about German current affairs. That may not be everyone’s go-to option for relaxation, but I find it intellectually engaging enough to take my mind off chopping root vegetables. The only problem is that I have begun to associate the smell of frying onions with bad economic news.

Anyway… This week, the onions were accompanied by a curious statistic: around half of the companies in the Dax, Germany’s leading stock market index, go back to the 19th century. We’re talking German giants like Siemens, Bayer and BASF, whose names evoke Germany’s economic success story. They speak of industry, engineering, machinery and chemicals. I’d heard the statistic before, but now it’s no longer used to point to things Germany is good at, but to argue that the country’s economic model is outdated.

Indeed, when commentators debate the weaknesses of the modern German economy, they often turn to the 1870s and 1880s. The argument usually runs that today’s model was forged in the age of coal and steel, under Otto von Bismarck and the early German Empire. It therefore belongs to another era. Heavy industry, big factories, protective tariffs and social insurance seem like relics of a world of steam, mines and spiked helmets. How could an economy forged in the 19th century still be relevant in the 21st? What could an economy designed for blast furnaces possibly teach a digital society? Quite a lot, I would say… and not just because I spend a lot of mental time in the 19th century.

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