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 to praise Germany, but to chastise it for learning the wrong lessons. “What is the historical responsibility worth if you still don’t regret what happened 80 years ago?” As he spoke, the interpreter’s voice appeared to crack. To what extent was Zelenskyy correct in his analysis? To what extent was he resorting to a time-old reflex among many to use Germany as the whipping boy for much that is wrong in the world? After all, merely two weeks earlier, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had performed one of the most spectacular geostrategic U-turns of recent history, turning every facet of his country’s foreign and security policy, of its energy and economic policy, on its head.  Scholz’s promises were staggering: a €100 billion fund to upgrade the armed forces; a commitment, finally, to meet the Nato target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence; an upgrade of fighter bombers; a commitment to sharing the nuclear burden with the United States; and the sending of combat weapons directly to Ukraine. These followed an agreement to close off most bank transfers to Russia and to halt the once-sacrosanct Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Any one of these announcements would, before February 24, before Putin’s invasion, have been deemed unconscionable. Germany was, for the first time in its history as a democracy, embracing hard power as a tool to defend democracy. In subsequent days a series of opinion polls showed that three quarters of voters approved of the rearming, with around 15 per cent against. This is an almost exact reversal of the past. Germans have taken to the new reality with gusto, seizing oligarchs’ super-yachts, kicking out Putin-supporting music conductors, even removing Russian vodka from shelves.  It was a stunning political coup by Scholz, barely three months into office. He had bounced pretty much everyone into what is now called the Zeitenwende, the generational change. He had kept most of his cabinet in the dark. The two top Green cabinet members, economics minister (and vice-chancellor) Robert Habeck and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, had been told the bare bones. Only the finance minister and leader of the liberal Free Democrats, Christian Lindner, had been consulted on the money to be spent, and only on the night before.  The transformation has gone far deeper than Scholz’s specific policy announcements. It has challenged pretty much everything German citizens were brought up to believe in: that peace was their country’s highest calling, and that no price was worth paying if it came to war.  Germans’ coming to terms with the past – or, to use the compound noun, Vergangen-heitsbewältigung – has been part of their identity. It also became a badge of pride that clouded their judgement. On Russia – and possibly on China, too – they followed two mistaken mantras. The more well-meaning one: “We are so terrible, we couldn’t trust ourselves in the field of battle ever again”. And the less endearing variant: “We, unlike you [Americans, Brits, whoever], have got over war. We are better than that.”  Germans have been fastidious about building a democracy that is second to none, both in architecture as in practice. Yet the very idea of fighting to maintain it has been anathema. Russia was a particular blind spot. In a speech in June 2021, Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, invoked Germany’s “monstrous, criminal war of aggression and annihilation” against the Soviet Union, apologising repeatedly for the death of 27 million of its citizens.  Marking the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, he declared: “Only those w...