Hostages to history

John Kampfner | Issue 6 | Comment, Magazine

From the Archive

Screenshot 2022-05-06 at 09.23.00

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced Germany to reconsider the penance it has paid to its past – and, unwittingly, to Putin

The past preys on Germany’s present. It guided the country’s lamentably indulgent approach to Vladimir Putin. It weighs heavily on its belated – but stunning – change of course. It ensures that the country always has to try harder than others.

In his recent video speech to the Bundestag, the latest of his many addresses from his military HQ in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had German MPs almost in tears as he upbraided past governments for getting Russia wrong. 

Germany, he said, had put “business, business, business” above all else. Invoking the Berlin blockade and American-led airlift of the late 1940s, and the 30 years of the wall dividing the city, Zelenskyy said Germans would be “ashamed” if they didn’t do more alleviate the plight of Ukrainians by ensuring that Nato impose a no-fly zone. 

A new wall was rising in the heart of Europe, he told them, between “freedom and lack of freedom”. This wall, he said, “is only getting bigger with every bomb that lands on Ukraine and with every decision that is not taken”. Invoking President Reagan’s famous exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, Zelenskyy declared: “That is what I want to say to you, dear Chancellor Scholz: tear down this wall. Show yourself to be the leader Germany deserves, so that your descendants will be proud of you.”

Zelenskyy then did what very few world leaders do. He invoked the Second World War, not …

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