I grew up in Germany. I still think in German. Yet Germany’s political psychology feels increasingly alien to me.
Perhaps I was always destined to drift westward. Growing up in Cold War West Germany, the West was my anchor of freedom. I spent many early holidays in England. I did part of the research for my PhD in Sydney. Then I worked in London, Sydney and now Wellington. I never harboured the romantic longings for Russia that infected so many of my countrymen.
I first realised how far I had travelled from mainstream German thinking in November 2006. I was living in London when Russian agents murdered Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, a few tube stops from where we lived. State-sponsored nuclear terrorism, right there in my adopted city. The British were outraged. So was I.
Yet Germany’s response was procedural, almost embarrassed. While the assassins had come through Hamburg, leaving polonium traces in several Hamburg locations connected to the suspects, Berlin’s political leadership avoided any serious confrontation. While Britain still fumed, Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who would later become President, was soon to champion a “Modernisation Partnership” with Moscow.
That was the moment I understood: my outrage was British. The German response was something else entirely.
Yet Germany’s position was not just naïveté. It was a relapse into Germany’s Sonderweg: the old temptation to define itself against the liberal West.
Germany’s Russia policy thus represents something far older and more dangerous than simple misjudgement. It marks the return of the Sonderweg, the “special path” that historian Heinrich August Winkler, perhaps Germany’s pre-eminent contemporary historian, identified as the central tragedy of German history.
The definitive story of this resistance to the West is Winkler’s monumental, two-volume Der lange Weg nach Westen (The Long Road West). Winkler’s thesis, though contested by historians who rightly argue that no nation follows a ‘normal’ path, remains the most powerful conceptual model for understanding Germany’s recurring temptation to define itself in opposition to the liberal West.
Winkler’s argument is simple: Germany’s “long road West” was a painful, 150-year battle to align a powerful nation-state with Western political ideas: liberal democracy, the rule of law, popular sovereignty. The great German temptation (and its recurring historical sin) was to reject this path. To choose instead an anti-Western Sonderweg that defined itself against the liberal order.
This German ‘special path’ was not just political. It was philosophical.
The West was built on the Enlightenment: universal reason, individual rights and the rule of law, with the state as a servant of the law, designed to protect the individual from power.
Germany’s intellectual tradition, from Romanticism onwards, countered with Kultur (a deep, spiritual culture) over Zivilisation (understood as a shallow, materialistic civilisation). Thinkers like Herder and Fichte championed a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ German Volksgeist (the ‘spirit of the people’) against the ‘shallow’, ‘legalistic’ West.
This tradition also idealised the Machtstaat (the power state) in direct opposition to the Western Rechtsstaat (the state based on rule of law). In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right the state becomes ‘the march of God in the world’ – the realisation of a collective ‘ethical life’, not simple absolutism.
This anti-Western idea found its perfect echo in Russia because Russia had its own, identical intellectual battle: the Slavophiles against the Westernisers. Much like their German counterparts, the Slavophiles rejected Western rationalism and materialism. They argued that Russia’s unique spiritual destiny was rooted in its Orthodox faith and communal peasantry, making it superior to a “fallen” and individualistic West. If you like, it was the precursor to today’s Putinism.
Here lies the true, dangerous root of Germany’s Seelenverwandtschaft (soul kinship) with Russia. It was not just a fantasy of poets admiring the “soul”. It was a shared, illiberal philosophical project. It represented a belief in a unique, spiritual destiny for two “special” nations, united in their contempt for a corrupt and materialistic West.
Winkler’s epic history concludes with Germany finally ‘arriving in the West’ in 1990, having overcome such illiberal temptations. With reunification, he argued, the Sonderweg was closed at last. Germany was, finally, a normal Western country.
If that reminds you of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, you get the idea. And it was a beautiful, hopeful idea.
But it was still wrong because after 1990, Germany quickly returned to its special path, especially in its dealings with Russia. This continued right up to February 2022, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Then, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s resulting Zeitenwende (turning of the times) speech was not just a turning point; it was a confession. A stunning public admission of national failure.
Now two of Germany’s top journalists, Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo, have published the autopsy. Their book’s title says it all: Das Versagen (The Failure). With access to internal files, they document three decades of “Wegsehen, Beschwichtigen, Verdrängen” – looking away, appeasing, repressing. The warnings from intelligence services were constant. The pleas from allies were ignored. The failure was systemic.
How could a nation so intelligent be so blind?
The answer is unsettling. This was not a mistake. It was a relapse. The special-path thinking simply swapped its military uniform for a business suit.
Gerhard Schröder’s chancellorship revived the Sonderweg directly. As Das Versagen documents, it was a deliberate, careful seduction based on personal, clubbable bonds with Vladimir Putin. A policy that explicitly bypassed Western allied concerns. Most shamefully, Schröder celebrated his 70th birthday with Putin in St Petersburg in April 2014, just weeks after Russia had annexed Crimea.
Angela Merkel continued this approach with soberer rhetoric. She laundered the Sonderweg through the language of economics. For years Berlin styled Nord Stream 2 a ‘private-sector project.’ The logic extended beyond gas, embedding German industry deep within the Russian economy and making interdependence the de facto national policy.
But it was just the old Sonderweg by pipeline: a bilateral German-Russian deal that bypassed the security interests of key EU and NATO partners.
From Berlin’s perspective, Ukraine became an obstacle to be managed. It was just a disposable pawn in the grand German-Russian accommodation, and Kyiv’s desperate warnings of energy blackmail were dismissed as hysteria.
West Germany’s post-war identity had been built on “Wandel durch Handel” – change through trade with the Soviet bloc. This policy originally drew heavily on post-war pacifism and a real wish to civilise power through entanglement – honourable motives that met a ruthless adversary.
But what Germany did post-1990 was more than mere pragmatism in dealing with Russia. A purely pragmatic policy would have diversified energy sources, especially as Russia became more authoritarian and imperialist. Instead, Berlin doubled down. Perhaps the Germans feared to acknowledge the failure of its own redemptive pacifist identity.
Faced with an aggressive Putin, this bias kicked in. Germany engaged in a refusal to see hostile intent. Berlin replaced statecraft with a compulsive performance of moral peace-making.
The endless faith in “change through trade” was not a strategy; it was a symptom of the new, post-modern Sonderweg: moral superiority not through power (Machtstaat), but through a performance of pacifism. Peace blurred into appeasement. Germany’s moral cleanliness outranked allied security.
A national bias needs a comforting story to sustain itself. That story was the Russian soul.
German leaders refused to see Putin as the man he was: a creature of the KGB. Instead, they projected their own romantic fantasy onto Russia – the “soul kinship” Gloger identified – the land of poets and philosophers.
This was not just passive error; it was a narrative curated by an active German commentariat of Russlandversteher (Russia-understanders). In forums like the Petersburg Dialogue, influential business figures promoted a special framework of “understanding.” But such empathy was always only granted to Moscow and rarely to Warsaw, let alone Kyiv. Meanwhile, critics of excusing Putin’s aggressions were labelled “Russophobes”.
All this explains the disconnect I felt during the Litvinenko murder. It also explains why German intelligence warnings of Putin and his old KGB connections were systematically ignored. As Mascolo and Gloger reveal, German intelligence had the file. They knew Putin from his Dresden KGB days. They knew his cynical worldview and his methods.
Like few other politicians, former Chancellor Angela Merkel embodies this mindset.
In her memoirs Freiheit: Erinnerungen 1954–2021, Merkel defends her 2008 veto on a NATO path for Ukraine. It was not appeasement, she writes, but prudence. Kyiv was not ready, Merkel still maintains. A promise would have only provoked Moscow. She also notes Putin personally told her he “wanted” to prevent it. Merkel is the authentic voice of the Sonderweg, that conviction of superior moral insight, reducing Ukraine’s sovereignty to a factor in Russia’s “security interests”.
A Moscow-first policy left no room for Kyiv’s agency. The pleas from Warsaw and the Baltic states were not treated as legitimate security concerns from equal partners. They were dismissed as the historical traumas of lesser nations, an annoying distraction from the grand, historic task of German-Russian reconciliation.
Merkel, like Schröder before her, refused to see the regime’s nature. She treated Putin as a difficult partner when he had already declared himself an adversary of the West.
The clearest warning came in 2007. At the Munich Security Conference, Putin effectively declared a new cold war, attacking a “unipolar” world order.
When Russian agents then used a chemical weapon in Salisbury in 2018 (Litvinenko all over again), the UK expelled 23 diplomats. The US expelled 60. And Merkel’s Germany? Four.
Germany’s response to all the many warnings about Russia over the years had always been the same. Listen patiently. Manage the rhetoric. And then press on with the Nord Stream pipeline, which began construction in 2010 and was inaugurated in 2011.
Germany paid billions of Euros for Russian gas, year after year. In 2021, about 55 percent of its natural gas came from Russia. Germany may have thought that also bought it peace, but actually it financed Putin’s many wars.
But it was worse than just providing money. As Das Versagen also reveals, German-approved exports for a Rheinmetall-designed training centre at Mulino continued until Berlin revoked the licence in August 2014, five months (!) after Crimea’s annexation. Germany was not just a naive partner; it was actively helping to train the very army that would later be marching on Kyiv.
Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in 2022, therefore, was more than a policy shift. It was an involuntary awakening. Germany was finally forced to confront the reality it had repressed for decades.
But is this awakening real? Is it permanent?
The rise of parties with Russia-friendly positions, like the AfD, Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW and Die Linke, suggests not. In the 23 February 2025 federal election, the AfD topped the vote in all five eastern Länder, often taking around or above one third of votes cast. This support feeds on a unique legacy: forty years of GDR anti-Western identity combined with the post-1990 trauma of deindustrialisation, which left many feeling colonised by the West. The Sonderweg is far from dead. The anti-Western temptation remains potent.
This raises a harder question: is it all too late? The decades of failure were not cost-free. Germany’s desperate, peace-at-all-costs policy gave Putin the two things he needed most: time and money.
To be sure, since 2022, Germany has pivoted hard. It is today the second-largest overall donor to Ukraine after the United States, and the largest in Europe, providing over €15 billion in military aid (to March 2025) and crucial air defence systems for Kyiv.
All this, though, sits awkwardly alongside its prior record. And this is the ultimate tragedy of Germany’s “long road West.”
The estrangement I felt in 2006 was, in the end, not just personal. It was the precursor to this larger, strategic tragedy.
After two bloody centuries, Germany has finally, reluctantly, declared its arrival in the West. An unambiguous choice at last, just as Winkler hoped.
But it arrived just as the West itself threatens to disintegrate, fatally undermined by a US president with scant regard for democracy or the rule of law.
Germany spent a century avoiding the West. Now it has arrived at last – politically fragmented and in no state to lead – only to find the West fading.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
I first realised how far I had travelled from mainstream German thinking in November 2006. I was living in London when Russian agents murdered Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, a few tube stops from where we lived. State-sponsored nuclear terrorism, right there in my adopted city. The British were outraged. So was I.
Yet Germany’s response was procedural, almost embarrassed. While the assassins had come through Hamburg, leaving polonium traces in several Hamburg locations connected to the suspects, Berlin’s political leadership avoided any serious confrontation. While Britain still fumed, Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who would later become President, was soon to champion a “Modernisation Partnership” with Moscow.
That was the moment I understood: my outrage was British. The German response was something else entirely.
Yet Germany’s position was not just naïveté. It was a relapse into Germany’s Sonderweg: the old temptation to define itself against the liberal West.
Germany’s Russia policy thus represents something far older and more dangerous than simple misjudgement. It marks the return of the Sonderweg, the “special path” that historian Heinrich August Winkler, perhaps Germany’s pre-eminent contemporary historian, identified as the central tragedy of German history.
The definitive story of this resistance to the West is Winkler’s monumental, two-volume Der lange Weg nach Westen (The Long Road West). Winkler’s thesis, though contested by historians who rightly argue that no nation follows a ‘normal’ path, remains the most powerful conceptual model for understanding Germany’s recurring temptation to define itself in opposition to the liberal West.
Winkler’s argument is simple: Germany’s “long road West” was a painful, 150-year battle to align a powerful nation-state with Western political ideas: liberal democracy, the rule of law, popular sovereignty. The great German temptation (and its recurring historical sin) was to reject this path. To choose instead an anti-Western Sonderweg that defined itself against the liberal order.
This German ‘special path’ was not just political. It was philosophical.
The West was built on the Enlightenment: universal reason, individual rights and the rule of law, with the state as a servant of the law, designed to protect the individual from power.
Germany’s intellectual tradition, from Romanticism onwards, countered with Kultur (a deep, spiritual culture) over Zivilisation (understood as a shallow, materialistic civilisation). Thinkers like Herder and Fichte championed a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ German Volksgeist (the ‘spirit of the people’) against the ‘shallow’, ‘legalistic’ West.
This tradition also idealised the Machtstaat (the power state) in direct opposition to the Western Rechtsstaat (the state based on rule of law). In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right the state becomes ‘the march of God in the world’ – the realisation of a collective ‘ethical life’, not simple absolutism.
This anti-Western idea found its perfect echo in Russia because Russia had its own, identical intellectual battle: the Slavophiles against the Westernisers. Much like their German counterparts, the Slavophiles rejected Western rationalism and materialism. They argued that Russia’s unique spiritual destiny was rooted in its Orthodox faith and communal peasantry, making it superior to a “fallen” and individualistic West. If you like, it was the precursor to today’s Putinism.
Here lies the true, dangerous root of Germany’s Seelenverwandtschaft (soul kinship) with Russia. It was not just a fantasy of poets admiring the “soul”. It was a shared, illiberal philosophical project. It represented a belief in a unique, spiritual destiny for two “special” nations, united in their contempt for a corrupt and materialistic West.
Winkler’s epic history concludes with Germany finally ‘arriving in the West’ in 1990, having overcome such illiberal temptations. With reunification, he argued, the Sonderweg was closed at last. Germany was, finally, a normal Western country.
If that reminds you of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, you get the idea. And it was a beautiful, hopeful idea.
But it was still wrong because after 1990, Germany quickly returned to its special path, especially in its dealings with Russia. This continued right up to February 2022, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Then, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s resulting Zeitenwende (turning of the times) speech was not just a turning point; it was a confession. A stunning public admission of national failure.
Now two of Germany’s top journalists, Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo, have published the autopsy. Their book’s title says it all: Das Versagen (The Failure). With access to internal files, they document three decades of “Wegsehen, Beschwichtigen, Verdrängen” – looking away, appeasing, repressing. The warnings from intelligence services were constant. The pleas from allies were ignored. The failure was systemic.
How could a nation so intelligent be so blind?
The answer is unsettling. This was not a mistake. It was a relapse. The special-path thinking simply swapped its military uniform for a business suit.
Gerhard Schröder’s chancellorship revived the Sonderweg directly. As Das Versagen documents, it was a deliberate, careful seduction based on personal, clubbable bonds with Vladimir Putin. A policy that explicitly bypassed Western allied concerns. Most shamefully, Schröder celebrated his 70th birthday with Putin in St Petersburg in April 2014, just weeks after Russia had annexed Crimea.
Angela Merkel continued this approach with soberer rhetoric. She laundered the Sonderweg through the language of economics. For years Berlin styled Nord Stream 2 a ‘private-sector project.’ The logic extended beyond gas, embedding German industry deep within the Russian economy and making interdependence the de facto national policy.
But it was just the old Sonderweg by pipeline: a bilateral German-Russian deal that bypassed the security interests of key EU and NATO partners.
From Berlin’s perspective, Ukraine became an obstacle to be managed. It was just a disposable pawn in the grand German-Russian accommodation, and Kyiv’s desperate warnings of energy blackmail were dismissed as hysteria.
West Germany’s post-war identity had been built on “Wandel durch Handel” – change through trade with the Soviet bloc. This policy originally drew heavily on post-war pacifism and a real wish to civilise power through entanglement – honourable motives that met a ruthless adversary.
But what Germany did post-1990 was more than mere pragmatism in dealing with Russia. A purely pragmatic policy would have diversified energy sources, especially as Russia became more authoritarian and imperialist. Instead, Berlin doubled down. Perhaps the Germans feared to acknowledge the failure of its own redemptive pacifist identity.
Faced with an aggressive Putin, this bias kicked in. Germany engaged in a refusal to see hostile intent. Berlin replaced statecraft with a compulsive performance of moral peace-making.
The endless faith in “change through trade” was not a strategy; it was a symptom of the new, post-modern Sonderweg: moral superiority not through power (Machtstaat), but through a performance of pacifism. Peace blurred into appeasement. Germany’s moral cleanliness outranked allied security.
A national bias needs a comforting story to sustain itself. That story was the Russian soul.
German leaders refused to see Putin as the man he was: a creature of the KGB. Instead, they projected their own romantic fantasy onto Russia – the “soul kinship” Gloger identified – the land of poets and philosophers.
This was not just passive error; it was a narrative curated by an active German commentariat of Russlandversteher (Russia-understanders). In forums like the Petersburg Dialogue, influential business figures promoted a special framework of “understanding.” But such empathy was always only granted to Moscow and rarely to Warsaw, let alone Kyiv. Meanwhile, critics of excusing Putin’s aggressions were labelled “Russophobes”.
All this explains the disconnect I felt during the Litvinenko murder. It also explains why German intelligence warnings of Putin and his old KGB connections were systematically ignored. As Mascolo and Gloger reveal, German intelligence had the file. They knew Putin from his Dresden KGB days. They knew his cynical worldview and his methods.
Like few other politicians, former Chancellor Angela Merkel embodies this mindset.
In her memoirs Freiheit: Erinnerungen 1954–2021, Merkel defends her 2008 veto on a NATO path for Ukraine. It was not appeasement, she writes, but prudence. Kyiv was not ready, Merkel still maintains. A promise would have only provoked Moscow. She also notes Putin personally told her he “wanted” to prevent it. Merkel is the authentic voice of the Sonderweg, that conviction of superior moral insight, reducing Ukraine’s sovereignty to a factor in Russia’s “security interests”.
A Moscow-first policy left no room for Kyiv’s agency. The pleas from Warsaw and the Baltic states were not treated as legitimate security concerns from equal partners. They were dismissed as the historical traumas of lesser nations, an annoying distraction from the grand, historic task of German-Russian reconciliation.
Merkel, like Schröder before her, refused to see the regime’s nature. She treated Putin as a difficult partner when he had already declared himself an adversary of the West.
The clearest warning came in 2007. At the Munich Security Conference, Putin effectively declared a new cold war, attacking a “unipolar” world order.
When Russian agents then used a chemical weapon in Salisbury in 2018 (Litvinenko all over again), the UK expelled 23 diplomats. The US expelled 60. And Merkel’s Germany? Four.
Germany’s response to all the many warnings about Russia over the years had always been the same. Listen patiently. Manage the rhetoric. And then press on with the Nord Stream pipeline, which began construction in 2010 and was inaugurated in 2011.
Germany paid billions of Euros for Russian gas, year after year. In 2021, about 55 percent of its natural gas came from Russia. Germany may have thought that also bought it peace, but actually it financed Putin’s many wars.
But it was worse than just providing money. As Das Versagen also reveals, German-approved exports for a Rheinmetall-designed training centre at Mulino continued until Berlin revoked the licence in August 2014, five months (!) after Crimea’s annexation. Germany was not just a naive partner; it was actively helping to train the very army that would later be marching on Kyiv.
Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in 2022, therefore, was more than a policy shift. It was an involuntary awakening. Germany was finally forced to confront the reality it had repressed for decades.
But is this awakening real? Is it permanent?
The rise of parties with Russia-friendly positions, like the AfD, Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW and Die Linke, suggests not. In the 23 February 2025 federal election, the AfD topped the vote in all five eastern Länder, often taking around or above one third of votes cast. This support feeds on a unique legacy: forty years of GDR anti-Western identity combined with the post-1990 trauma of deindustrialisation, which left many feeling colonised by the West. The Sonderweg is far from dead. The anti-Western temptation remains potent.
This raises a harder question: is it all too late? The decades of failure were not cost-free. Germany’s desperate, peace-at-all-costs policy gave Putin the two things he needed most: time and money.
To be sure, since 2022, Germany has pivoted hard. It is today the second-largest overall donor to Ukraine after the United States, and the largest in Europe, providing over €15 billion in military aid (to March 2025) and crucial air defence systems for Kyiv.
All this, though, sits awkwardly alongside its prior record. And this is the ultimate tragedy of Germany’s “long road West.”
The estrangement I felt in 2006 was, in the end, not just personal. It was the precursor to this larger, strategic tragedy.
After two bloody centuries, Germany has finally, reluctantly, declared its arrival in the West. An unambiguous choice at last, just as Winkler hoped.
But it arrived just as the West itself threatens to disintegrate, fatally undermined by a US president with scant regard for democracy or the rule of law.
Germany spent a century avoiding the West. Now it has arrived at last – politically fragmented and in no state to lead – only to find the West fading.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
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