However, the Kremlin’s tentacles are reaching much wider in the German economy than in the energy industry alone. Until the 2014 Crimean invasion forced Angela Merkel to impose limited sanctions and Putin turned to China’s Xi Jinping for technology, Germany was Russia’s biggest trading partner. And it was only after the tanks entered Ukraine two months ago that German companies such as Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and Adidas began limiting their exports to and to Russia’s manufacturing plants.
Russia’s cultural greatness in Germany and vice versa is impossible to exaggerate. Their story of mutual admiration dates back at least to the 18th century, when a vague German princess rose to become Catherine the Great. The queen invited Germans to settle in Russia to teach the peasants to engage in agriculture. Descendants of the Volga Germans were deported to Siberia by Stalin, but in the 1980s and 1990s millions of them emigrated to Germany, where they now form a pro-Putin lobby group.
The cardinal importance of good relations with Moscow has been an axiom of German statesmen since Otto von Bismarck, even if his sentence “make a good deal with Russia” is interpreted at times with the greatest cynicism. It was the Germans who brought Lenin through Europe to unleash the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918 imposed a Carthaginian peace on the Russians and created the first independent Ukraine, later crushed by the Red Army.
In Rapallo in 1922, German Foreign Minister and AEG electromagnet Walter Rathenau signed the first treaty with the Soviet Union that allowed Russian-German trade to flourish. Although Rathenau was assassinated by anti-Semitic terrorists, Hitler imitated him by concluding a deal with Stalin, the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that divided Poland and unleashed World War II.
The war of annihilation that began when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941 left terrible scars on all the peoples involved. To the extent that Hitler had a justification for his invasion and extermination of Jews and others that followed, it was his desire for the Lebensraum (“living space”) in Ukraine, the “granary of Europe”. Hitler had his headquarters there and even visited Mariupol in the winter of 1941.
The Nazi occupation left Ukraine devastated, but because it was seen simply as part of the Soviet Union, the Germans never felt the need to redeem what they had done there – as they did in Poland and especially in Russia. The fact that some Ukrainians, embittered by Stalin’s genocidal famine (Holodomor), collaborated with the Nazis contributed to Germany’s postwar lack of sympathy for Ukraine’s national aspirations. Conversely, the Russians were taught that Ukrainian nationalists were by definition Nazis; in 1959, their wartime leader, Stepan Bandera, was assassinated in Munich by the KGB.
After Ukraine became independent in 1991, the Germans paid little attention to it. Instead, they have doubled their long-standing investment policy in Russia. Even when Putin took power – intimidating, interfering and in some cases crushing his neighbors in the service of his imperialist projects – politicians in Berlin turned a blind eye.
Some even believed the Russian propaganda line that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazis, even though its president was Jewish and its parliament (unlike the German Bundestag) had no far-right parties. It was only when war and genocide returned to Europe, the prevention of which was supposed to be at the heart of their post-war system, that the scales fell out of German sight.
Ostpolitik
How could this happen? The answer lies in the German tradition itself, known as Ostpolitik (“Eastern policy”). The architect of this strategy was Willy Brandt, the charismatic statesman who also modernized the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and led its return to power in 1969.
As mayor of West Berlin when the wall was built in 1961, Brandt witnessed first-hand the tragedy of a divided city, state and continent. He stood by John F. Kennedy when the president told the besieged citizens of Berlin, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But he knew that the Americans would not risk a war to tear down the Berlin Wall, let alone unite Germany.
Realizing that these goals could only be pursued in an atmosphere of unloading, Brand set out to build bridges to the Kremlin and the East German Communists, beginning with a “small-scale policy” to improve life on both sides of the Wall. This “network” became known as Ostpolitik.
Brandt himself was overthrown by a spy scandal in 1974, but Ostpolitik survived and developed under his successor, Helmut Schmid. It was even adopted by their center-right opponent, Helmut Kohl, who was a fierce Cold Warrior but took advantage of the opportunities provided by Mikhail Gorbachev’s opening to the West.
As a correspondent for the Telegraph in Germany, I and other journalists accompanied Kohl to Moscow in 1988. I vividly remember the exalted sense of history with which the German chancellor permeated his relationship with the Soviet president by exchanging soft loans on hard currency for political concessions. This was the background to the opening of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall a year later.
Add Comment