Between the Silence and the Spectacle

I arrived in America in 1981. Reagan had just taken office. The hostages were home from Tehran, the malaise speech was being buried, and the country was telling itself it was back. One of the first things I noticed was the presence of the military.

Fighter jets flew over football stadiums before kickoff. Recruiting ads ran on television between sitcoms. Men wore caps naming their ships and their wars, and strangers thanked them. The veteran was an honored figure. None of this was hidden or apologized for. It was woven into the texture of ordinary life, and nobody around me seemed to notice it.

I noticed it. I had just left a country where the military was invisible by design, and where we apologized a lot for the past.

In the Germany I grew up in, the Bundeswehr existed in the background. I don't remember a single flyover at a football match. I don't remember recruiting ads. Even the policemen of my childhood carried their pistols hidden under the uniform jacket. Armed, but out of sight. The country sought to separate itself from the militarism of the past. The whole apparatus was kept deliberately modest and wrapped in something close to embarrassed silence.

I knew the silence from inside. In 1970 I was drafted for eighteen months of compulsory military service, the most unproductive and boring stretch of my life. Like my fellow draftees, I did what I was told to do, learned how to shoot, to march in formation and not much else.

We counted the days, and for the last hundred we counted them in centimeters. Every conscript bought a tailor's measuring tape, an Ausscheider-Maßband, one hundred centimeters long. Each morning we cut one off, and we made sure the men with more time left saw exactly how short ours had become. It was the only ritual I remember us having.

When it was over, nobody thanked me for my service. Nobody said anything at all.

The silence was intentional. After 1945 the Wehrmacht was dissolved, and the Allies debated banning its uniform outright. The ban was never adopted; millions of discharged men owned no other clothes. So the uniform of the defeated army spent the postwar years stripped of its insignia and dyed civilian colors, worn to work because there was nothing else to wear. When West Germany founded the Bundeswehr in 1955, it had to put men in uniform anyway, so it constructed a military designed not to be noticed. The soldier was defined as a Staatsbürger in Uniform, a citizen in uniform, an ordinary civilian who happened to be serving, in an army under parliamentary control, with no parades down boulevards.[1] A society that had learned, through the hardest possible lesson, exactly where collective martial enthusiasm leads, decided it would never again allow itself the feeling.

Heinrich August Winkler described it this year in an essay in Der Spiegel on Trump and the crisis of the transatlantic order.[2] It traces an arc that feels deeply personal: from Kant's ideal of a lawful relation among states, through the Federal Republic's painstaking postwar self-reinvention, to the comfortable assumption that all of it was permanent and irreversible. The rule of law would expand. Institutions would deepen. The nastier impulses of nationalism would change into something constructive. The political scientist Hans-Peter Schwarz had given the trajectory its name back in 1985: von Machtbesessenheit zur Machtvergessenheit. From obsession with power to obliviousness to power.

The entire postwar project demanded belief in its own permanence. If you had gone through that wrenching self-examination, you almost had to believe the destination was settled. Otherwise, what was the point of the journey?

So the comforts became self-reinforcing. The peace dividend was cashed. Defense was outsourced to America. The EU framework was assumed to have made great-power politics obsolete, permanently, as a category. The Naivität was the result of real suffering and moral work. But it mistook a historical achievement for a historical law.

The America I walked into in 1981 was the opposite, and it took me years to see that it had a logic.

Germany never had to sell me the Bundeswehr; it sent a letter. America had ended its draft in 1973, eight years before I arrived. A democracy that wants a volunteer military has to make service attractive. It needs people to sign up. It needs political will for budgets and it needs a public that does not treat defense spending as inherently wasteful. Some of the mythology-making, distasteful as I found it, serves that practical purpose. The flyby and the recruiting ad are how a free society staffs an army without conscription.

It took me longer to see the price. The same reverence that filled the ranks made questioning a war feel like questioning the men in it. Iraq was fought on fabricated pretenses and wrapped in heroism anyway.[3] The soldiers carried the honor while the policy escaped the audit.

Germany had built a culture that could not celebrate its soldiers. America had built one that could not hold its wars to account.

The German defense-spending problem was indefensible long before Trump named it. NATO members agreed on the 2 percent target at the Riga summit in 2006. They reaffirmed it at Wales in 2014, after Crimea, in writing.[4] Germany, chief among the delinquents, ignored it. The Bundeswehr deteriorated to the point where German soldiers mounted painted broomsticks on their vehicles during a NATO exercise because the machine guns were missing.[5]

When Trump said the arrangement was a bad deal, he was stating what the Bundestag's own records already showed. The Wehrbeauftragter, the parliament's commissioner for the armed forces, had been documenting the Bundeswehr's decay in annual reports, year after year: the equipment that did not work, the readiness that existed on paper.[6] The criticism did not need to be imported. It was already on file, in German, in the official record. His motivation was probably transactional: arms sales, leverage, the instinct to renegotiate any deal where he sees the other side riding free. Winkler quotes a note Bismarck scrawled in the margin of a diplomatic report in 1884: motive does not change the effect.[7]

The reckoning should have been forced by the end of the Cold War, which was treated as a reason to cash out rather than a strategic question. It should have been forced by the Yugoslav wars, which happened in Europe while Europe watched. It should have been forced by Crimea. Even Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced less than it appeared to: a speech, a new word, Zeitenwende, a hundred-billion-euro fund, and then the old back-and-forth while the money crawled through procurement. The commitment that stuck came in 2025, with Trump back in office, when the Bundestag amended the Grundgesetz itself so that defense spending could escape the constitutional debt brake.[8] Germans write their commitments into the constitution.

So the reckoning was forced, in the end, by a man who does not believe in the alliance's founding values, which meant that when the bill finally arrived, it was presented by someone the Germans could dismiss as the problem rather than the messenger. Machtvergessenheit ran that deep.

Now the voices calling for Germany to rearm and lead Europe grow louder every month. The historical vertigo in this is extraordinary. Three generations were raised on the understanding that German restraint was not weakness but moral achievement. Almost overnight, restraint is being reframed as irresponsibility.

What is being asked is something the postwar framework never prepared Germans for: a responsible relationship with power. Not the renunciation of it. Not the worship of it. The sober, unglamorous maintenance of it, in service of the liberal order Germany spent decades internalizing.

The voices calling for German strength do not all come from the same place. Some see no alternative: NATO's leadership, the government in Berlin, the Bundeswehr's own chief of defense, who has warned that Russia could be capable of testing the alliance by 2029.[9] Some are opportunists; Rheinmetall's share price has multiplied since 2022, and rearmament is now an industry with a lobby.[10] And some are calling for a national reawakening. They are using the moment to rehabilitate exactly the nationalist energy the postwar project was designed to contain. In English, a call for national reawakening sounds like a campaign speech. In German it is not. Deutschland erwache, Germany awake, was the slogan the Nazis stitched onto the standards of the SA; the vocabulary of awakening is a no-go.[11]

Now the money is moving. The culture is not. Germany does not have the military culture, the institutional knowledge, or the political stomach that European defense leadership would require, and none of those can be amended into existence the way a debt brake can. It is a generational project, and it demands a kind of national self-confidence the Federal Republic deliberately suppressed, for reasons that were correct.

So the question, for a country I still carry a passport from: is there something between the silence and the spectacle? A way to take defense seriously without building a culture that is dominated by it. A society that can fund an army, staff it, and honor the people in it, while keeping the wars themselves fully available for question.

I have lived under both. I do not know whether the middle ground exists. But Germany spent seventy years proving that a nation can rebuild its relationship to power from the ground up. It has run that experiment once, and we know the results.

Now it must run it a second time.

Sources

[1] The Wehrmacht was formally dissolved by Allied Control Council Law No. 34 (August 20, 1946). An August 1945 Control Council proposal would have forbidden discharged soldiers from wearing "military uniform in its present color and all badges of rank whatever"; Field Marshal Montgomery objected that in the British zone roughly two million men had no other clothing, and no unified ban was adopted. See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. III, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v03/d618. The Bundeswehr was founded in November 1955; the Staatsbürger in Uniform concept is the core of its founding doctrine of Innere Führung, developed by Wolf Graf von Baudissin.

[2] Heinrich August Winkler, "In Time of Trump, Can the West Still Be Saved?", Der Spiegel (English edition via DER SPIEGEL – The German View, February 25, 2026), https://derspiegel.substack.com/p/in-time-of-trump-can-the-west-still. The Kant reference is to "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784). Hans-Peter Schwarz's formulation is from Die gezähmten Deutschen: Von der Machtbesessenheit zur Machtvergessenheit (1985).

[3] The Iraq Survey Group's final report (the Duelfer Report, 2004) found no weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles. On the character of the prewar case: the July 2002 Downing Street memo recorded that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found in 2008 that key public statements were not substantiated by the underlying intelligence.

[4] The 2 percent guideline was agreed by NATO defense ministers in 2006 and pledged at the Riga summit that year, though it does not appear in the Riga declaration; it was first laid down in a summit document in the Defence Investment Pledge at Wales, September 2014, in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea. See NATO, "Defence expenditures," https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/defence-expenditures-and-natos-5-commitment, and House of Commons Library, "The two NATO targets," https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/the-two-nato-targets-which-countries-are-hitting-the-mark/.

[5] September 2014, during a NATO Response Force exercise: soldiers of Panzergrenadierbataillon 371 mounted broomsticks painted black on Boxer armored vehicles in place of machine guns. The battalion at the time lacked roughly a third of its MG3 machine guns and 41 percent of its P8 pistols. Reported February 2015. See The Washington Post, February 19, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19/germanys-army-is-so-under-equipped-that-it-used-broomsticks-instead-of-machine-guns/; the Defense Ministry maintained the specific vehicles were headquarters vehicles not intended to be armed.

[6] The annual reports (Jahresberichte) of the Wehrbeauftragter des Deutschen Bundestages are archived at https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/wehrbeauftragter/jahresberichte.

[7] Quoted in Winkler (note 2): "'Motive does not change the effect,' Chancellor Otto von Bismarck noted in 1884 in a note scrawled in the margin of a diplomatic report."

[8] Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Zeitenwende speech: February 27, 2022. The €100 billion Sondervermögen was constitutionally anchored in June 2022; by mid-2023 the ifo Institute estimated only about half of it was effectively usable for its stated purpose (https://www.ifo.de/en/press-release/2023-07-10/only-half-german-armed-forces-special-fund-usable). On March 18, 2025, the Bundestag amended Articles 109, 115, and 143h of the Grundgesetz to exempt defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the debt brake; the Bundesrat approved on March 21. See Noerr, https://www.noerr.com/en/insights/bundestag-approves-exemption-from-the-debt-brake-for-defence-spending-and-special-funds-for-investments-in-infrastructure-and-climate-protection.

[9] General Carsten Breuer, Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, has warned repeatedly since 2024 that Russia could be capable of attacking NATO territory by 2029, possibly earlier, based on alliance threat assessments. See Euronews, December 3, 2025, https://www.euronews.com/2025/12/03/ready-for-war-in-2029-is-a-russian-attack-on-nato-a-real-possibility.

[10] Rheinmetall traded at roughly €101 in late February 2022; through 2025 and 2026 it traded in the €1,200–1,600 range, a peak increase of roughly twentyfold. See Rheinmetall investor relations, https://ir.rheinmetall.com/investor-relations/share/share-price.

[11] "Deutschland erwache," from Dietrich Eckart's Sturmlied, was carried on the NSDAP's "Deutschland erwache" standards introduced in January 1923 and used on SA and SS standards and banners; the slogan is banned in Germany today under §86a of the Criminal Code. See United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Culture in the Third Reich: Disseminating the Nazi Worldview," https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/culture-in-the-third-reich-disseminating-the-nazi-worldview.