The poisonous icons emerged, like viral online memes, in the late Middle Ages, carved onto church walls and choir stalls. Each showed Jews suckling, or sometimes having sex with, a pig. The theologian and antisemite Martin Luther described one at his own church in Wittenberg using highly offensive graphic imagery.
For decades now, German Jewish groups have sought to have the Wittenburg sculpture, and some two dozen similar works removed. The courts have declined, nothing that the works are near explanatory plaques giving context. Luther, the author of savagely anti-semitic propaganda, is celebrated by statues that loom over the country.
And this, in a country where displays of Nazi insignia or even pro-Palestinian slogans can be punished with prison terms.
Last week, Germany’s conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and his social-democratic allies, tore up decades-old restrictions on borrowing, to enable a massive growth in military power, as well as a $545 billion infrastructure fund. The spending will restore Germany—Europe’s largest economy and nation—to its once-central place in the continent’s security and growth.
That ought to be a good thing. Last week, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, wryly noted that “500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.”
And yet, there’s this: A fifth of the voters in Germany’s just-concluded elections voted for the neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland, which wants to take the country out of the European Union. The compound noun for self-defence, Verteidigungsfähigkeit, has been replaced in public discussions with Kriegstüchtigkeit, or being good a war-making, scholar Almut Rochowanski observes.
The question is a stark one: Is a militarised Europe, which led the world into two great wars, in fact, a good instrument to maintain peace? The survival of the antisemitic icons in Germany’s churches reminds us that what we see as Europe’s liberal culture today is not all that the world ought to be observing.
Also read: Trump-induced Europe crisis of today is India’s crisis tomorrow
The rearming of Europe
From the dawn of the Cold War—as Allied cargo aircraft struggled to sustain Berlin through the Soviet blockade of 1948-1949—Generals in the United States had begun to consider rebuilding shattered European militaries to face the threat from communism. The result was the North Atlantic Treaty, the framework for a mutual self-defence system in Europe. Germany was not, however, included in this grouping. This left a hole in defensive arrangements against the Soviet Union: Germany had the largest manpower and military-industrial base.
Late in 1950, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that they were “firmly of the opinion that, from the military point of view, the appropriate and early rearming of Western Germany is of fundamental importance to the defence of Western Europe against the USSR.” There was just no other way to stop a Soviet offensive across the Elbe river.
This argument received firm pushback from the country’s political leadership. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Harry Truman responded, were “not realistic.” “We certainly don’t want to make the same mistake that was made after World War I when Germany was authorised to train one hundred thousand soldiers, principally for maintaining order locally in Germany,” Truman reflected, “that hundred thousand was used for the basis of training the greatest war machine that ever came forth in European history.”
For its part, the State Department also chided the Generals, saying, “It is to our advantage to delay the remilitarisation of Germany in any form, at least until we have had more time to develop democratic tendencies on the part of the German people.”
This was, of course, common sense. Nazi insurgents had continued to fight on after 1945, historian Perry Biddiscombe’s work reminds us, and there was no certainty a liberal-democratic Germany would emerge soon. The reintegration of former Nazis into the Federal Republic of Germany’s bureaucracy had begun, but the outcomes were uncertain. French and British leaders were—with good reason—deeply concerned with building up powerful German forces.
Also read: Europe is imploding. Blame liberals for German elections, not Nazi terror
An American dilemma
Like blows from a hammer, the crisis of the Cold War ended up forcing Europe to let Germany rearm. Even though plans for a European military drawn up by French Prime Minister Rene Pleven did not materialise, Germany joined NATO in 1955 and built its new national army, the Bundeswehr. From the outset, though, there was a tension built into United States aims. Even as it sought economically-thriving and militarily robust allies, a now-declassified CIA paper observed, it was reluctant to cede to its partners the right to make their own strategic decisions.
The transatlantic partners soon realised they were not always on the same side. In 1956, Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden, allied with France’s Guy Mollet and Israel’s David Ben-Gurion to attack Egypt and occupy the newly-nationalised Suez Canal. The operation was a disaster, historian Yagil Henkin has recorded—notably firming up American determination to keep Europe out of the affairs of former colonies.
France, for its part, complained bitterly of the lack of American interest in its long and brutal counter-insurgency campaign against nationalists in Algeria.
A decade later, during Vietnam War, American insistence that the cost of warfighting be shared irked Europeans. The allies never could agree on how many ground troops the Europeans ought to provide to the common NATO defence effort or how large their financial contribution should be, analyst Klaus Larres has observed.
Even as the transatlantic partnership grew, larger European powers hedged their bets. The United Kingdom and France, notably, developed their own nuclear weapons programme, making sure they could confront the Soviet Union, even if the United States abandoned Europe.
Also read: Germany’s support for far-right AfD has much to do with its urban-rural divide. New maps show
A turning point?
For many, it seems as if Trump’s turning away from Europe leaves countries like Germany with no choice but to rearm. The debate isn’t new, though. Former United States Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who served under President Barack Obama, warned in 2011 that Europe was “apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defence.” An assurance by European states to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence was never delivered on.
To create a genuine European power, capable of defending its interests, seemed completely out of reach—until Germany announced it was course correcting.
European leaders of an older generation were far from enthusiastic in their embrace of a larger, resurgent Germany. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later reveal that both France’s François Mitterrand and the United Kingdom’s Margaret Thatcher “insisted that the unification [of Germany] should not go on, that the process should be stopped.” Thatcher even irked her American allies with her trenchant resistance to unification.
European monetary union, Alan Philps has argued, provided a tool to temper the power of a reunified Germany and enmesh its fortunes with the rest of Europe. Germany emerged as the economic heart of Europe nonetheless.
Today there are doubts over how durable the new Europe will prove to be. Europe’s peoples are in the middle of an intense political convulsion, that has seen far-Right parties rise from France to Italy and Hungary. Like Trump, the leaders of these parties are determined to sweep aside élite liberal values they believe have led to the degradation of their national cultures. The European Union, and currency union, could conceivably be swept aside.
Germany’s culture isn’t just about Luther, whose antisemitism was matched, the controversial historian AJP Taylor reminded us, by his untiring calls for complete deference to kings. Liberalism has deep roots in Germany, and it is culturally among Europe’s most plural nations. Yet, the survival of the cult of Luther ought to remind us that the past does not easily give up its grip on our imagination. A generation ago, no one would have predicted neo-Nazis would once again be occupying seats in the Reichstag.
The liberal European values which kept the peace after 1945 might survive the political chaos now being played out. Then again, they might not—and the armies Europe is now building will then be at the vanguard of nightmares we today cannot even imagine.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
An earlier version of this article referred to Harold Macmillan as the PM of the UK during the Suez crisis. This has been corrected.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)