Ukraine: Nick Robinson on how Germany is reversing decades of closer ties with Russia

Just over three decades ago I stood atop the Berlin Wall which, for nearly three decades before, had separated friends and families, divided a country, and made Europe divided.

I watched and held my breath with thousands of people on that heady November night in 1989, when a brave young man dared to jump off the wall into what had been “no man’s land.”

Days before he would have been shot, joining all those who had paid with their lives for daring to try to build a bridge between East and West. Not the night the wall fell. He held out a flower to a bewildered-looking East German soldier who, after a pause that seemed to last a lifetime, held out his hand and accepted the gesture of peace. The crowd lining the wall cheered wildly.

They, we, dream that Europe could now be “free and whole”. People could soon be free to choose who would rule them, whether they lived in Berlin or Prague, Warsaw or Budapest and maybe, just maybe, Moscow and St. Petersburg too.

I am back in Berlin, a city facing the fact that that dream is now dead thanks to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and bomb its people into submission.

Germany’s leader, Chancellor Olaf Schulz, said this is a historic turning point. In German they have a word for that (they have a word for everything). It is zeitenwende.

Scholz announced that his country would now offer real military aid to Ukraine.

A few weeks earlier, his government had been mocked for its offer of 5,000 helmets to equip the Ukrainian army. The German army chief had to resign after observing that all Putin wanted was respect and that he probably deserved it.

The German chancellor has now pledged to spend more – a further €100bn (£84bn) – on defence. What that means is that this country will soon become the largest military power in Europe and the third largest in the world, behind only China and the United States.

Not long ago, that prospect would have been met with fear abroad and protest at home.

As a young man, a member of what he calls “the generation of 1989,” Nils Schmid studied in Ukraine in what was then part of the Soviet Union. These days, he is a German MP and foreign affairs spokesman for the ruling Social Democrats. He told me that he and his countrymen and women now had to accept that the “iron curtain” dividing Europe had simply moved.

He was once a few hundred meters from his office. Now, long after the fall of the wall, she is on the border between the NATO countries – whose defense the US guarantees – and those who look to Moscow.

Opposite his office is the large Russian embassy, ​​in what used to be East Berlin. Now it is protected by the police and there are barricades decorated with anti-war posters. A blanket lies on the floor and it is full of stuffed animals. The message to bystanders is that it could be their children dying in Ukraine.

There I met Michael, a motorcyclist from the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. He was shooting a video next to his Yamaha, which he had repainted in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. He had traveled for eight hours with a folder full of 600 messages to Vladimir Putin, from friends, neighbors and colleagues calling on the Russian president to stop the war.

The embassy staff had refused to accept it. Michael had realized that talking to Russia (what used to be called détente) was not enough. Germany now had to be prepared to face Moscow.

What that means is that the children of that generation of 1989 will not enjoy the same freedoms as their parents. They will not grow up believing that wars are what happened in the past. In fact, a recent poll showed that seven out of 10 Germans fear the expansion of this war.

And it’s no wonder Refugees driven from their homes by this conflict are arriving at Berlin stations at a rate of, according to some, 10,000 a day.

This war is changing the way of thinking of the most powerful country in Europe. That will have dramatic consequences that are just beginning to be thought of.

You have to be almost 40 years old to remember the day the wall fell in November 1989. These days in February and March 2022 are turning out to be just as momentous.