Germany has a special responsibility

Changing times is the word of the moment. The unanimity with which it was received in the German Bundestag indicates that with the Russian attack on Ukraine, reality has finally arrived in the decision-making areas of politics. For decades there was talk of the modernization partnership with Russia. The construction of the gas pipeline was touted as a private-sector project from Schröder to Merkel and until recently also from Scholz. The question arises as to how it was possible for so long to belittle or even conceal the fact that the pipeline created dependency relationships from the outset and could be used as an energy policy weapon. What must it be like for a government that swears by dialogue to the last, while Putin has long since demonstrated his contempt for diplomatic speeches and positioned his troops?

Russian kitsch

Putin’s escalation dominance and the West’s delayed reaction speed belong together. How difficult it is, especially in Germany, to say goodbye to a world that has become obsolete has not only become apparent in the shock of the Russian war. You didn’t have to understand much about Russia if you only had something to say about the mistakes of the West. In apology for Putin, there was a lesson on Russia’s historical deficits in terms of civil society and the need of “the” Russians for the strong hand of a tsar. Russian propaganda didn’t need agents, it got Russian kitsch delivered to it free of charge.

The alliance of understanding Putin interpreters from Gregor Gysi to Sahra Wagenknecht to Matthias Platzeck was cross-party. It ranged from the left, which claims to stand in the tradition of anti-fascism, to Alexander Gauland’s AfD. They liked to refer to Bismarck and the 19th century and cultivated contacts with the orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who financed the separatists in Donbass. Gerhard Schröder is probably a special case in which almost everything that makes up the German Russia complex comes together: the trauma of war and the loss of a father or the eros of power.

The wake-up call of the present

The Moscow leadership knows the German mental state of guilt, fascination for the Russian soul and economic interests well enough to play the keyboard with virtuosity. Most Germans still live with the idea that the crimes of the Wehrmacht and the Sonderkommando were directed solely against the Russians. The Ukraine and Belarus, the main theaters of Hitler’s barbarism, did not appear in this perception. Even after the end of the Soviet Union three decades ago, after the uprisings in Kyiv and the popular movement in Minsk, it is difficult in Germany – and even more so further west – to recognize that the map of Europe has changed radically.

The Germans have reason enough, in view of their past, to feel a special responsibility towards the people they oppressed, that is, to support them with weapons in need instead of teaching them morals. The monstrosity of the crimes committed by the Russian army, which are now under our eyes, no longer allows us to persist in a culture of remembrance and commemoration that has long since become a substitute for confronting the present. One cannot credibly commemorate the victims of the German occupation in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and remain silent about the victims of the Russian war today.

The powerful wave of spontaneous sympathy and helpfulness for the threatened and struggling Ukraine in Germany and in the world has overwhelmed the frozen forms of historical memory, an experience from which we cannot go back. It helps to become immune to the manipulations of Moscow propaganda, which exploits German guilt, and to learn to call things like they are.

It starts with this difficulty. We don’t even have a name for the man who started the war against Ukraine, or for the system Ukraine is to be incorporated into. Semantically subtle differences are relevant here. We are talking about a president who was elected by the people, as is usual in democratic societies, an autocrat, despot, an authoritarian ruler, a new tsar, a dictator who can be named in the same breath as Stalin and Hitler – or also not. The system will soon be post-Soviet, neo-imperial, neo-Stalinist, fascist, Euro-Asian, kleptocratic, totalitarian, a mafia state, a conglomerate of secret service and oligarch capitalism – to name just a few.

The literature about the time and the regime of Putin already fills entire libraries. Analytical restraint can be felt everywhere. No one wants to be lured into the trap of analogy, no matter how striking the parallels between Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin may be. Nobody wants to be misunderstood and point out the parallels between the annexation of the Sudetenland and the annexation of Crimea, between the policy of appeasement then and now. Everyone knows that totalitarianism was a Cold War combat term and prefers to avoid the word even though it’s back in vogue. Multiperspectivity and relativity are popular.

overload and fear

The long-held indecisiveness about Russian aggression is reminiscent of the situation in the 1930s, faced with the rise of fascism and Nazism. At that time, too, there was a time of uncertainty, waiting, suppression and hesitation in acknowledging the seriousness of the situation. This was expressed in the intellectual overload and in the laborious build-up of resistance against fascism, National Socialism and – not to forget – Stalinism. The best minds of a generation have struggled to gain clarity about this new adversary. International congresses, analyses, and publications in the 1920s and 1930s revolved around the question of who they were dealing with.

There were the warners who trusted their direct experience but were not taken seriously. There was the betrayal of intellectuals, which the French philosopher Julien Benda denounced. There were quite a few intellectuals of whom Hannah Arendt said she was amazed at how much they could think of about Hitler. The struggle for clarity, for descriptive categories in a time of general confusion, was overtaken by the “break in civilization” (Dan Diner). It seems to me that the situation of being overwhelmed, of fear, of powerlessness and the associated paralysis is repeating itself today.

The face of the “Third Empire”

Perhaps Putin’s appearances in the days leading up to the attack on Ukraine are scenes in which the whole of Putin unfolded. His speech makes it clear what is important to him and has long been known – the destruction of a free and independent Ukraine –; much more revealing than the what, however, is the how. These include: the seclusion and isolation of his wood-panelled cabinet, the desk he now clutches, now leans back, the telephone that seems almost like a piece from the past, the intensity with which he talks to the imaginary viewers, the contemptuous one and sarcastic tone in which he speaks of the “partners” in the West, the hatred with which he attacks the Ukrainian government – “narcomaniacs and neo-Nazis of the Kiev junta”.

The ambience, the tie, the flag in the background can be staged, but not such anger, such exaggerated expression, such contempt. Here Putin is completely himself, driven and overwhelmed by a hatred that doesn’t come from reading books, tormented by an insult and a complex that he also tries to persuade his compatriots. The desperate loser whose only victory is to show that he has the power to take everyone, including his own people, with him into the abyss.

core of violence

Putin embodies the tragedy he led his country into and the tragedy he brought upon Ukraine. The unresolved history of the fallen empire, the dissolution of which he does not have the strength to recognize and whose reestablishment as the “Third Empire” he pursues with all the power at his disposal. To this day, this man embodies the empire in its innermost and still intact core of violence, the KGB, the Soviet domestic and foreign secret service from which he emerged.

Putin cannot envision a post-empire Russia and beyond, and managing all the traumas of Russia’s unresolved 20th-century history is the foundation of his model of rule, the core of his destructiveness.

The doomed empire is more important to Putin than Russia’s survival. He hates Europe, which he also despises as weak, and he hates the West, whose way of life is a threat to his rule. He hates Ukraine, which wants nothing more than to be a normal country. He enjoys forcing the West to stand by and watch Ukraine go to pieces.

Karl Schloegel is a historian of Eastern Europe and a publicist. Most recently he published: “The scent of empires” (2020).