Aaron Gasch Burnett

Angela Merkel left the German chancellery at the end of last year with a bunch of flowers, a standing ovation in the Bundestag, a fist bump from her successor Olaf Scholz, and an approval rating of 68 per cent. Rarely for a national leader, she left office on her own terms, remaining Germany’s most popular politician until the week she stepped down, set to become the country’s elder stateswoman. Less than three months later, Russia invaded Ukraine – immediately throwing her legacy into doubt. The 21st-century Germany she built is extraordinarily dependent on Russian energy thanks to years of dovish engagement with Vladimir Putin’s regime, placing German business interests firmly above concerns from eastern EU allies.

Berlin, Germany Germans have a complex relationship with their Erinnerungskultur, or ‘culture of memory’. Whenever the word appears, it almost invariably refers to how the country thinks about its difficult past. Determined never to forget the horrors of the Nazis, Germans have spent decades reflecting on the evil that their forbears unleashed upon the world. And yet this process isn’t helping us understand our present. As a German-Canadian whose grandparents spent their childhoods in bomb shelters, I’ve long respected German memory culture. But events in Berlin on VE Day this past Sunday have shaken my faith. Today, Ukraine is revealing how little we actually understand about our history in Germany.

Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. 'We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,' Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. 'If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.' Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself.