Introduction

Why is it that Europe’s biggest economic power refrains from taking a leadership role on the world stage? Why are German politicians tiptoeing around issues of war and peace? This CMI Insight will explain this reticent behaviour with Germany’s ambivalent political culture and show how it affects its uneasy relationship with the use of armed force, and the experience of soldiers.

‘German angst’ is proverbial and German governments have been derided for shirking the use of military assets through checkbook diplomacy (Zudeick, 2012). A typical example for avoiding military means and leaving the ‘dirty work’ to others was the financing of the US-led coalition operations during the Gulf War in 1990-1991. In the context of Russia's war against Ukraine, this stereotype revived. ‘Scholzing’ was coined for the gap between the German chancellor's bold claims about support for Ukraine and his slowness and hesitancy in delivering heavy weapons for the country’s defense (Garton Ash, 2023). Once more, allies were frustrated that Germany has refrained from bringing military capacities up to the level of its economic power. And while careful, meticulous decision-making is suitable for peacetime requires wartime resolute action.

The reason for Germany’s remarkably unremarkable posture on the world stage is neither a principled opposition to the use of military means nor an inclination to complicate matters unnecessarily. Rather, matters of war and peace are highly complicated for German politicians: they are subject to a political culture that hosts an inherent tension between military self-restraint and international responsibility.

This political culture makes the German state not only a complicated international counterpart but also an uneasy environment for soldiering. German soldiers live in a ‘post-heroic society’ (Münkler, 2006, 310 ff) in which the politics of remembrance regarding its militarist past and the peace movement have promoted the spread of anti-militarist convictions and a fear of militarisation (Tomforde, 2019, p. 101).

What ideas about the state, society, and military power shape Germany’s approach to security today? How do these ideas influence the expectations placed on the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) and its members?  Understanding the traditions and assumptions embedded in Germany’s political culture helps clarify why its armed forces are organised the way they are and why German soldiers must reconcile conflicting demands.

Questions about public trust in and legitimacy of the armed forces are highly relevant in a country where the use of military means remains a delicate issue. While survey data shows high levels of support for the Bundeswehr, the lived experiences of service members adds a more nuanced view on civil-military relations. These perspectives emerge from conversations with thirty-five current and former Bundeswehr personnel, complemented by observations at veterans’ gatherings, visits to Bundeswehr installations, and the Bundeswehr Day 2022 in Warendorf.

The status of the armed forces has gained new relevance against the backdrop of the ‘Zeitenwende’ speech by Chancellor Scholz in February 2022 with which he marked Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a historical rupture. The implications of this turning point for Germany’s foreign and security policy, and for soldiering as a profession, continue to take shape.

Germany’s political culture

After the Second World War, German society has cultivated a collective identity that is defined by a negation of the past. The rupture with the Nazi regime was encapsulated in two political maxims: ‘Never again war’ and ‘Never again Auschwitz’ (Schwab-Trapp, 2002, p. 364). There is a certain tension between the two since the first maxim suggests military self-restraint, while the second demands taking responsibility to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity. In combination, they have led to a foreign and security policy that has long been characterised by anti-militarism and multilateralism (Hellmann, Wagner and Baumann, 2014, pp. 200–201). Anti-militarism is not exactly the same as pacificism. Indicative of this is the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) established a new armed force, named the Bundeswehr, as soon as it evaded its international pariah status in 1955 (Neitzel, 2020, p. 313). In the context of the unfolding Cold War, the former enemies tolerated the German remilitarisation since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Western European Union (WEU) offered a framework to integrate the Bundeswehr in a system of collective defence and security and tame its misuse for pursuing nationalist, let alone expansionist, goals (Collmer, 2009, pp. 163–164). Instead of complete rejection entails anti-militarism that the use of military force is considered an illegitimate means of foreign policy except for self-defence and also as not very effective in shaping international relations. In line with this, Germany has preferred cooperation with other states rather than taking a self-confident, independent, or leading position on the international stage. Due to this reluctant and diplomatic approach, the country has gained the reputation as a ‘civilian power’ (Maull, 1990).

Germany’s political culture was up for negotiation when the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the two German states united in 1990. In particular, the structure and role of the military changed to accommodate the new national and international political situation. On the one hand, the Bundeswehr had to integrate soldiers from East Germany’s National People’s Army (NVA). On the other hand, new tasks replaced deterrence as the military’s raison d’être and the Bundeswehr started to engage in operations outside NATO territory including mandates for peacekeeping, nation-building, capacity-building of foreign forces, and counter-insurgency (Leonhard, 2019, pp. 311–312). After small contingents had been sent to Cambodia (1992) and Somalia (1993–94), the discursive shifts that redefined the country’s relation to the use of military force happened in the course of the decision-making process on the German participation in military interventions in the Yugoslav wars (Schwab-Trapp, 2002, pp. 364–365). In the parliamentary debates on the massacres in Srebrenica in December 1995, the maxim ‘Never again Auschwitz’ was reinterpreted as an imperative to intervene and stop atrocities in the present and surpassed the principle of military self-restraint. Thus, the period of National Socialism no longer served as a restraint but as a justification for action. As a result, the parliament approved the deployment of German soldiers to the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina and decided to support the NATO airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999.

While the Bundeswehr has performed its new role already in the missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1996–2012)^[1] and Kosovo (since 1999), it was the twenty-year-long German operation in Afghanistan (2001–21) that made the broader public aware of it because it exceeded the previous deployments of German troops in terms of scale and nature. Regarding the new quality of the operational reality, the so-called ‘Good Friday Battle’ on 2 April 2010 marked a turning point: it was the first extended experience of combat by German soldiers since the Second World War. But the anti-militarist culture was still so ingrained that German politicians did not want to confront the public with the reality that German soldiers were fighting and risking their lives: when German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg afterwards suggested for the first time that soldiers had faced a ‘war-like’ situation, even his tentative formulation sparked criticism in the German parliament (Shim and Stengel, 2017, p. 333). 

The ‘citizen in uniform’

The fact that an antimilitarist stance has become the norm in political debates and a cornerstone of German identity was the outcome of a deliberate effort to incorporate the break with the past in the collective German mindset. Illustrative of the contested process to create the new political culture is the evolution of the Bundeswehr’s line of tradition and soldier model.

At its core, the dispute about the official soldier model happened between two factions with divergent conceptions of the military profession (Leonhard, 2018, pp. 14–17). The ‘reformists’ held the view that soldiering was an occupation like any other. In contrast, the ‘traditionalists’ believed that the military stood out by its distinct ethos and status. Accordingly, they claimed an assigned area of responsibility that required special virtues such as courage, discipline, sense of duty, and comradeship. While reformists thus aimed for the civilisation of the military profession, traditionalists advocated for a concentration on core competences.

To mark the rupture with Prussian-German militarism, the Law on the Status of Soldiers that was adopted in 1956 abolished privileges for soldiers and put them on the same level with all other citizens (Neitzel, 2020, p. 315). While some traditional soldierly virtues such as obedience and comradeship were preserved, heroic attributes such as honour, courage, and the readiness to fight and die disappeared. From then on, soldiers were subject to the system of values enshrined by the FRG’s Basic Law. However, the break with past was not as radical as the Western Allies who had fought Nazi Germany and now helped to resurrect Germany as a democratic, peaceful and prospering country would have liked. On the one hand, the government refrained from a resolute replacement of military personnel (Neitzel, 2020, p. 319). On the other hand, the tradition decrees that formulated the guiding principles for German soldiers only incrementally moved away from their predecessors (Neitzel, 2020, 506, 509-510). The first decree in 1965 was closer to the traditionalist notion of the military profession and emphasised the importance of distinctively soldierly competences including the determinacy to fight. While the decree in 1982 still mentioned the readiness to fight, it also evoked an own tradition of the Bundeswehr and distanced it more clearly from the Wehrmacht, the armed force that had served the Nazi regime alongside its SS militias. The most recent decree in 2018 stipulated that the tradition of the Bundeswehr derived first and foremost from its own history since 1955 (Neitzel, 2020, p. 748). Individual German soldiers who served the state prior to 1945 could only be taken as a role model if they had acted in accordance with the values of the FRG’s Basic Law. Hereby the current tradition policy primarily refers to those officers who resisted the Nazi regime.

The soldier model that conceptualises the Bundeswehr’s own distinct tradition is the ‘citizen in uniform’. In 2008, the ‘reformists’ finally asserted themselves and the ‘citizen in uniform’ was adopted as the official model in the Bundeswehr’s inner leadership philosophy (Zentrale Dienstvorschrift: Innere Führung. Selbstverständnis und Führungskultur 2008). The model envisions the soldier as the member of a democratic society who is politically and historically educated and hence takes responsibility for human dignity, freedom, and the rule of law. It creates “a German-specific, civil form of military masculinity” (Stengel and Shim, 2022, 618) stripped of distinct soldierly - especially martial - attributes. In practical terms, the model implies that soldiers do not foster an internal military culture that contradicts their society’s shared mindset. Therefore, German soldiers face the dilemma that they are torn between the ideal of the ‘citizen in uniform’ and norms, practices and requirements of soldiering that deviate from civil life (Johais, 2024).

Civil-military relations

Theoretically, the ‘citizen in uniform’ model suggests that there is no gap between civil and military life since soldiers are well-integrated in their democratic society. However, the reality of civil-military relations in Germany has turned out to be ambivalent with the civil population’s attitude towards soldiers and the military ranging between appreciation, disinterest, and rejection.

At first glance, civil-military relations are in good order: the public has constantly held the Bundeswehr in high esteem and largely expressed positive feelings for soldiers. In surveys in 1970, 1988, and 2024, the majority of respondents considered the Bundeswehr as an important and highly trustful institution and its members to be likeable (Stengel, 2025, 419, 422). But such surveys do neither allow for conclusions on the basis of respondents’ views nor on the quality of real-life civil-military interactions.

On the one hand, the Bundeswehr’s public presence and social embedding has decreased since it has transformed from a territorial defense force into a professional intervention army. During the Cold War, the troop strength comprised 500,000 active military personnel compared to about 180,000 in 2024 (Bayer, 2024; Stengel, 2025, p. 419). Moreover, the military used to be permanently visible, for instance in the form of armoured columns on highways or overflying aircrafts during military exercises (Interviews with German soldiers on 20.10.2022).

The result of the Bundeswehr’s new role from 1989 onwards was a public attitude that former Federal President Horst Köhler summarized as “friendly disinterest” in a speech to Bundeswehr officers in 2005 (Köhler, 2005). And the military’s embeddedness in German society eroded further after universal conscription was suspended in 2011 (Stengel, 2020, p. 196). While this decision freed young men from inevitably facing the question whether they wanted to serve in the armed forces, it concomitantly removed an automatic point of contact between civil and military life and terminated the frequent recruitment of new soldiers without prior inclination for the military. Due to the expected lack of interest and understanding, soldiers close off their professional life from outsiders including family and friends without a military background (Interview with two former German soldiers, 22 July 2022).

Worse still than disinterest, the cultivation of antimilitarist convictions has instilled negative stereotypes of soldiers as a social group (Kempf, 2013). In contrast to the equalising ideal that undergirds the ‘citizen in uniform’ concept, the public framing of soldiers in Germany has rather reinforced the civil–military distinction because it consists of an othering process that separates the ‘experts of violence’ from the normalised ‘civil self’ (Tomforde, 2019, p. 105). In the pacifist view, the soldier represents the enemy that threatens society’s peaceful and democratic order. As a result, soldiers have experienced being dismissed ‘as murderers’ (Tomforde, 2019, pp. 108–109). To avoid such confrontations, soldiers conceal their identity, especially in supposedly anti-militarist milieus. By way of example, two soldiers recounted a visit to a garden party with ‘remaining hippies’ (Interview with two former German soldiers, 22 July 2022):

‘And she [name of companion] whispered to me: Don’t let on anything by all means! We won’t get out alive!’ 

The ignorance and hostility towards soldiers gave way to a more nuanced public attitude as an effect of the increased media coverage of the twenty-year-long deployment of German troops in Afghanistan (Tomforde, 2019, 102–103, 110-111). German citizens could no longer ignore the fact that soldiers applied military violence in the name of the German state, were exposed to mortal dangers, and were involved in combat action. Therefore, soldiers now appeared as individuals with emotions and experiences. Although more differentiated, the public perception of soldiers serving in Afghanistan was still selective and shaped by representations in the Bundeswehr’s communication and the media. The dominant depiction in German media reports portrayed the soldiers as victims suffering from death, physical or mental injury, and harsh conditions (Herzog et al., 2012). An alternative image reconciled the new tasks of German soldiers as international interveners with the ‘citizen in uniform’ model. German soldiers deployed in Afghanistan – as well as in other peacebuilding operations - have often been presented as ‘armed social workers’ who countered the insurgency by strengthening the state through civil reconstruction measures (Herzog et al., 2012, pp. 154–155; Neitzel, 2020, p. 582). If soldier appeared in media reports as warriors at all, then their use of military force was mostly described as an act of self-defence (Herzog et al., 2012, pp. 155–159).

With the end of the ISAF mission in 2014, the public interest in soldiers’ experiences declined because other operations such as the UN mission in Mali were not equally covered in the media (Tomforde, 2019, pp. 110–111). Attention has instead increased to the ‘emerging social group’ of veterans who have returned from missions abroad culminating in the introduction of a National Veteran Day that was first held on 15^th June 2025 (Daxner, Näser-Lather and Nicola, 2018; Bundeswehr, 2025a). However, the predominant framing of returning soldiers amounts to another process of othering: returning soldiers are singled out as ‘marginal men’ who suffer mental health problems and fail to reintegrate back into society (Tomforde, 2019, pp. 112–113). Thereby, society has pathologised war experience as an individual, psychological problem and protected itself from discussing its relation to violence (Tomforde, 2015, pp. 240–241). 

The effects of the ‘Zeitenwende’: anti-militarism under pressure?

This repression of unpleasant questions of war and peace is certainly no longer a viable option since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In line with that, German chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledged the new world political situation by announcing several decisions that departed from anti-militarist principles: He pledged to increase the Bundeswehr’s budget, including a one-time additional sum of 100 billion euros, and reversed the long-held principle of not sending weapons to crisis regions by approving the delivery of weapons to Ukraine (Blumenau, 2022, pp. 1911–1912). While Scholz originally used the term ‘Zeitenwende’ in his speech on February 27, 2022, to mark the historical break of the Russian act of aggression against Ukraine, it soon became to signify a turning point in Germany’s foreign and security policy. The promise to boost Germany’s military capacities was appropriated by Scholz’ successor, Friedrich Merz, and followed through with several initiatives (Stengel, 2025, 417, 427-428): First of all, Germany’s military expenditure increased to the world’s fourth highest budget with 88.5 billion US dollars in 2024 (Liang et al., 2025, p. 2). Second, the German government demonstrated its commitment to collective defence in the Baltic region with the permanent deployment of a combat brigade to Lithuania in May 2025 (Bundeswehr, 2025b). Moreover, the Bundeswehr has reinforced its recruitment campaigns and the coalition government agreed on a new model of conscription to reach the target troop strength of 260,000 soldiers in 2035 (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, 2025a, 2025b). And although chancellor Scholz had been criticised for his hesitancy to send heavy weapons, Germany has turned out to be the strongest supporter of Ukraine among European states with military allocations worth 18.81 billion US dollars in the period from January 2022 to June 2025 and including the supply of weapons systems ranging from Leopard tanks to PATRIOT air defence systems (Antezza et al., 2025; Stengel, 2025, 428).

All these steps attest that the German government is serious about becoming “fit for war” as Defence Minister Boris Pistorius demanded in June 2024 (Deutscher Bundestag, 2024). And the obvious trigger for this militarisation was the Russian full invasion of Ukraine since it shattered long-held foreign policy beliefs and threw German society in an identity crisis (Bunde 2025). But it is less clear if the Zeitenwende has in fact had an incisive and lasting effect on German foreign and security policy, in particular, through eroding its underlying antimilitarist culture. Some political analysists find that German politicans have modified or even abandoned the role as a civilian power (Fix, 2024; Mello, 2024). Others claim, instead, that Germany’s Zeitenwende failed to deliver on the pretentious promise to equip the state for the contemporary geopolitical challenges and will not turn it into a military power (Helferich, 2023; Tallis, 2024). I would agree with those who highlight that the proclamation of the ‘Zeitenwende’ did not mark a radical rupture itself but initiated a political and societal struggle about the question of the use of military means (Dück and Stahl, 2023; Stengel, 2025).

A preliminary conclusion of the Zeitenwende effects on political culture is that German society has not abandoned the political maxim ‘Never again war’ altogether ’ (Bunde, 2025, p. 11; Stengel, 2025, p. 429). But the meaning of anti-militarism has changed, especially in light of the second maxim ‘Never again Auschwitz’. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has in fact – similarly to the massacres during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s – led to a revaluation of the two maxims: Military means are now considered acceptable when diplomatic means are ineffective for fulfilling Germany’s responsibility to prevent atrocities (Stengel, 2025, pp. 425–426). In this logic, it is not just legitimate but imperative that Germany supports the Ukrainian defense effort when it is assumed to be fighting an enemy accused of war crimes and deemed neither trustworthy nor willing enough to negotiate with (DIE ZEIT, 2024; Amnesty International, 2025; Gschoßmann, 2025).

Proponents of military support to Ukraine do still distinguish between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ weapons which appears awkward from a military strategic perspective (Bunde, 2025, 18). The struggle about the definition of what is acceptable is all the more controversial in the case of military assistance to the state of Israel where the commitment to support Israel’s self-defense served to justify the exports of arms – with a volume of almost EUR 500 million since the Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023 - that would potentially be used to commit war crimes in Gaza (Asseburg, 2025; Goldmann and Pfeifer, 2025; Lettl and Lovatt, 2025).

These interpretive intricacies and controversies indicate that German foreign and security policy remains a tightrope walk between domestic antimilitarist convictions and international expectations of a leadership role. It is not yet clear how the reinterpretation of Germany’s political culture is reconfiguring the status of the armed forces and if it will improve the societal recognition of soldiers.

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Notes

^[1] German troops withdrew from the operation EUFOR Althea in 2012 but were redeployed in July 2022 to counter a potential destabilisation of the Balkan states by Russia.