One of the most successful political slogans of all time was Konrad Adenauer’s in the Federal Republic’s third election since its founding in 1949: Keine Experimente! (‘No experiments!’). That year, 1957, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian allies topped the polls with more than 50 per cent of the vote— a higher share than ever before or since. One might with hindsight see 1957 as the year when German risk aversion reached its apogee.

Yet the truth is that German history has been one long list of experiments. Over a thousand years the Germans tested the idea of empire, not once but three times, to destruction. What Karl Leyser called Europe’s first revolution, between emperor and pope, was fought out primarily in Germany. Luther’s Reformation was another experiment on a continental scale, one of the consequences of which was the capitalist dynamic that Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. Enlightenment Germany’s fissiparous geography gave birth to a rich diversity of academic and cultural experimentation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Germans unleashed transformative experiments of every kind upon the world, culminating in that veritable laboratory of human existence, the Weimar Republic – Hitler’s term of contempt that has since become a badge of honour.

It was, of course, Hitler’s own infernal experiment to which Adenauer’s slogan alluded: 12 years of mass megalomania and unprecedented savagery, culminating in die Deutsche Katastrophe, in the words of the patriarch of the historical profession, Friedrich Meinecke — who had himself been intoxicated by victory over France in 1940. In the immediate aftermath of defeat, the Germans came up with a neologism: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, ‘overcoming the past’ — an ambiguous phrase, implying both the moral imperative to confront the Nazi nightmare and the psychological need to banish it. Most Germans, though, were still caught in the collective pathology of denial diagnosed as Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (‘the inability to mourn’) by the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. Such was the state of mind that proved so receptive to Adenauer’s soothing slogan: Keine Experimente!

Yet in 1961 the Germans would subject themselves to yet another experiment: the Berlin Wall. The hermetic bisection of a nation had already been seen in Korea, and the whole of Europe was by now divided by an Iron Curtain, but the amputation of East Germany from its torso and the predicament of Berlin in particular captured the collective imagination. The Cold War had begun here in the former capital, with the blockade and the airlift. Who could foresee that it would end here, too? For over the course of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Berlin lost its status as the cockpit of confrontation between armies and became instead one of conflict between generations: the scene of student protests and the emergence of Europe’s first Green Party. The eclipse of Berlin made possible the retrospective characterisation of the West German state from 1949 to 1990 as ‘the Bonn Republic’. Adenauer’s choice of Bonn, ‘a small town in Germany’ in John Le Carré‘s ironical phrase, as the new German capital was intended as a rebuke to the imperial pretentions of a now defunct Prussia. Culturally, it was a conscious choice to return to the pluralism of the period before the unification of 1871, rejecting the metropolis in favour of the Provinzstadt. Berlin was still haunted by the grand German intellectual tradition that drew me there in 1979-80 to encounter the ghost of the Geist.

By the time I arrived in Bonn as the Telegraph’s correspondent in 1987, the Federal Republic had known stability, peace and prosperity for nearly four decades – longer than at any time since Bismarck’s Kaiserreich. On the other side of the Wall, East Germans had at least enjoyed peace, even if they had fallen far behind in prosperity. But the stability of the so-called German Democratic Republic rested on the unspoken assumption that it was not, in fact, democratic at all. Indeed, there had been a brief uprising on 17 June 1953 when the whole edifice had tottered and only Soviet tanks had rescued the Communist nomenklatura from the workers. Skulking in his country cottage at Buckow, stricken with guilt for his silence, Brecht finally came out with the truth in an ironical elegy for the socialist experiment now bloodied and abandoned:

Die Lösung (‘The solution’)

After the uprising of 17 June

On the orders of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union

Leaflets were distributed in the Stalinallee

Which read: that the people

Had forfeited the government’s trust

And only by working twice as hard

Could they win it back. But would it not

Be simpler if the government

Dissolved the people and

Elected another one?

That people, of course, rose up again in November 1989. And this time the tanks and troops stayed in their barracks. Looking back on the fall of the Wall, Germans now see it as the most miraculous moment in their history – perhaps, indeed, as the only one.

That it happened at all was due to yet another failed experiment, albeit a seemingly trivial one. The Central Committee called an international press conference and their spokesman, Günter Schabowski, took the opportunity to announce its decision to liberalise emigration procedures. In other words, the intention was to allow a limited number of people to leave under controlled circumstances – not to throw the checkpoints wide open. But the regime had miscalculated by allowing the press conference to be broadcast live – a more or less unprecedented occurrence. Schabowski had no experience of being scrutinised by the western media and he did not seem to have understood the paper that he suddenly produced, five minutes from the end, part of which he proceeded to read out.

As soon as he had finished, Schabowski was besieged by questions. One in particular caught him unawares: when would the new rules come into effect? Peering at the paper, he blurted out the words Sofort, unverzüglich (‘immediately, without delay’). More questions followed, clarifying that West Berlin (which had a special legal status) was included. By now the journalists sensed that this was a historic moment, but nobody had asked what it all meant. And nobody had yet mentioned the Wall.

With the advantage of a microphone, I stood up and in full view of the TV cameras, asked: Herr Schabowski, was wird jetzt mit der Berliner Mauer geschehen? (‘What will happen now with the Berlin Wall?’) Suddenly the room was hushed. For what seemed a long pause, Schabowski fell silent. What indeed could he say? Could he admit that the decades-long experiment of a divided capital, country and continent had manifestly failed? That if they were going to let people go, it made no sense to keep the Wall? No, he could not say anything of the kind without admitting that the game was up. For us journalists, for the watching East Germans, and for Schabowski himself, the pfennig had dropped. For the Wall and for the Cold War, it was game over.

When he finally broke the silence, Schabowski ended the press conference. He added a few perfunctory remarks about how this ‘fortified border of the GDR’ must remain pending negotiations with Nato, but before he had finished, the room was dispersing to report the story. Within hours crowds had gathered at the checkpoints demanding to leave and, in the absence of orders, one local commander opened the floodgates. A day later the demolition of the Berlin Wall began. Less than a year later came German reunification. The ordeal of a divided nation was over, but 36 years later the trauma – of a tyranny that tore families apart, of unfulfilled hopes and disappointed dreams – is still with us. In a verse series entitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)’, Durs Grünbein, the most prominent younger poet of the former East, reproaches his compatriots:

And you?

Have you forgotten where you’re from?

Is it starting to dawn on you how much damage was done

By so many years of humiliation and slapstick?

The fall of the Wall was and remains the fulcrum of postwar German history. But the energy that reunification unleashed could not be sustained. The third largest economy in the world, which had once dominated the Continent, lost its competitive edge, relying on 20th-century engineering and chemicals to navigate a 21st century dominated by digital technologies and AI. Germany became so dependent on Russian gas and its industries have been so thoroughly overtaken by China that a recent book about its economy by Wolfgang Münchau is entitled simply: Kaput. The German model that functioned so smoothly for generations, that was the envy of its neighbours — especially the British — is now broken. The land of Vorsprung durch Technik morphed into the sick man of Europe.

It did not happen all at once: that is not how national decline works. The 1990s was a decade of reconstruction, during which some €1 trillion was transferred in subsidies or capital investment to the neue Bundesländer, as the former GDR was now known. Helmut Kohl promised blühende Landschaften, ‘blooming landscapes’, and the Wessis exchanged the worthless currency of the Ossis on a one-for-one basis. The resulting boom, fuelled by lavish welfare payments and grants, disguised the fact that much of the new population had been made redundant and in many cases never worked again. Across the border in Poland, where there was no accumulated wealth to cushion the transition from communism to capitalism, Leszek Balcerowicz applied shock therapy, with results not unlike Ludwig Erhard’s ‘economic miracle’. This time, however, Germany had no Erhard. The long term effects of these contrasting policies are visible today: for the past decade the Polish economy has been on a trajectory of rapid growth, while Germany has largely stagnated.

One factor that helped to mask the underlying structural weaknesses was European economic and monetary union. The shift from the Deutschmark to the euro enabled German companies to export goods and services more cheaply. In effect, the weaker single currency gave Germany a comparative trading advantage, while depriving competitors such as Greece of the chance to devalue their currencies.

The illusion of global commercial ascendancy, the mythology of the Germans as Exportweltmeister, the satisfaction of taking pride in the label ‘Made in Germany’: this was collective psychotherapy for a nation that was transforming the processing of the guilt from a uniquely heinous past into a vast complex of public commemoration and family self-examination. During the decades after reunification, Vergangenheitsbewältigung gave way to Erinnerungskultur: from overcoming the Nazi past to reclaiming the cultural legacy of the victims.

There was still resistance to confronting unwelcome facts: survivors of slave labour camps were denied compensation until the late 1990s, for example. I myself encountered a case of selective amnesia when I investigated the publishing house Bertelsmann in an assignment for the New Yorker in 1998. The company history claimed that it had been closed down by the Nazis, omitting to mention that this was not for opposing the regime but on account of fraud. The real story, which was concealed from me by the staff – including the CEO, though he may have been in the dark too – was that the firm had grown rich during the war by printing huge editions of Nazi propaganda for the Wehrmacht. I suspected a cover-up – hence the headline ‘Springtime for Bertelsmann’ – but the truth only emerged after the firm appointed a panel of historians to go through its archives. Had I been in possession of the facts about its Nazi past, Bertelsmann would not have been able to close the deal with Random House whereby they became the biggest publisher in America.

Such revelations, however, were a symptom of success in exorcising the demons of the Third Reich. Germans now made films about Hitler, such as the much-acclaimed Untergang (‘Downfall’), and even felt able to laugh at him for instance in the novel Er Ist Wieder Da (‘He’s back again’). But what seemed to be the national consensus on how to deal with the Nazi past did not extend to endorsing the attitudes of the Berlin intelligentsia. A vast Holocaust Memorial was erected around the turn of the century on a central site; nearby, the remains of the Führerbunker still lurked just below the surface. The powerful symbolism of this spectral subterranean presence was a compelling use of the no-man’s-land where the Wall had once bifurcated the capital, but not everyone was gratified by this and other gestures of atonement.

In 2017 Björn Höcke, a prominent far-Right politician in Thuringia, one of the new Eastern states, caused an outcry by saying out loud what others in the former GDR privately thought about the Berlin monument to the Shoah: ‘The Germans are the only people in the world to plant a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital.’

Höcke was only the most demagogic public figure of a recent insurgent force in German politics: the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD. Founded by Eurosceptic economists, the AfD quickly evolved from a ‘professors’ party’ into a populist anti-immigration one, drawing much of its membership from supporters of the anti-Muslim Pegida movement. By the time Angela Merkel opened the borders to admit more than a million Syrian refugees in 2015, the AfD was emerging as a fully-fledged nationalist party.

The AfD is merely the latest in a long line of parties on the extreme Right of German politics. Some were unashamedly neo-Nazi and occasionally banned as such; others, such as the Republikaner of the 1980s, claimed to be merely mainstream conservatives, discontented with the centrist drift of the CDU. I recall Franz Schönhuber, who was dismissed as an oafish Bavarian rabble-rouser, but who got himself elected to the European Parliament and, like Nigel Farage a generation later, tried to use it as a springboard into national politics. As a television talkshow host turned politician, he also anticipated Donald Trump. But his murky background in the Waffen-SS was a better guide to his real views and he eventually abandoned the Republicans in favour of the DVU, an openly neo-Nazi and antisemitic outfit financed by the wealthy publisher Gerhard Frey. In Germany, as elsewhere, the extreme Right has always been as fissiparous as the extreme Left; indeed Schönhuber wrote a book – significantly entitled Enough of German Self-Hatred – jointly with Horst Mahler, one of the founders of the Red Army Faction (better known in Britain as the Baader-Meinhof Group). Mahler served ten years in prison for terrorist crimes, but after his release and return to legal practice, Mahler converted to neo-Nazism. By the time Mahler died in 2025, he had personified the adage that the extremes of Left and Right ultimately converge.

My own acquaintance with such outsiders was merely indirect. I did meet Otto Schily, one of the lawyers who, along with Gerhard Schröder (later a Social Democratic Chancellor), defended Mahler in court. He also acted for Gudrun Ensslin, the most intelligent of the gang and one of three terrorists, including Andreas Baader, who killed themselves in Stammheim prison in 1977. This was the period when the RAF campaign of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings (covertly supported by the Stasi) almost brought the Federal Republic to its knees. Schily, who like many of the far-Left had helped form the Greens, became a prominent figure in the party and also successfully defended Erich Honecker, the East German Communist leader, in his trial. Having left the Greens for the Social Democrats under Schröder, he became Interior Minister from 1998-2005, responsible for counter-terrorism and controversial for ordering a raid on the offices of the conservative magazine Cicero. The irony here is that this incident recalled the notorious Spiegel Affair some 40 years before, when the right-wing Defence Minister Franz-Josef Strauss engineered a raid on the offices of Der Spiegel and its publisher and editors were accused of treason. The case collapsed and almost brought down Adenauer’s government, creating a precedent that is still a bulwark of the freedom of the press in the Federal Republic. Schily was no Strauss, but his career shows how, once in high office, even liberal lawyers can become surprisingly authoritarian.

My other brush with the legacy of Baader-Meinhof was an interview with one of their last victims. In 1988, Alfred Herrhausen was the most prominent and powerful banker and captain of industry in the Federal Republic. That October, he accompanied Helmut Kohl on a visit to Moscow; I was a member of the press pack. A colleague at the Financial Times who knew Herrhausen let me join him for an interview in the plush Deutsche Bank office near the Kremlin. He was undoubtedly the most important person in Kohl’s delegation: Gorbachev needed hard currency and Herrhausen was there to provide soft loans to prop up the Soviet economy, which – despite glasnost and perestroika – was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, not to mention the falling price of oil. At this point, the Germans had the Russians at their mercy. Herrhausen – tall, handsome, charming – patiently explained the strategy that he and Kohl had developed. The long term goal might — one day – be reunification, but Herrhausen didn’t talk about that. For now, it was the repatriation of the Russian Germans, millions of them, who had been settled in Russia by Catherine the Great, harshly treated by Stalin and were now to be allowed to move to the Federal Republic. As for the opportunities opening up in the crumbling Soviet Union for German business: they were almost infinite. The message was: ‘Go East, young man!’

Herrhausen, like the rest of the German political and economic establishment, had no notion at all that a peaceful revolution was about to turn their world upside down. The fall of the Wall and its consequences far exceeded their wildest dreams. Herrhausen himself, however, did not live to see their fulfilment. A few days after the opening of the Wall, he was killed when his car was blown up: the last victim of the Red Army Faction. The sophistication of the device has led to speculation that either the Stasi or even the KGB might have supplied it. While there is no evidence that he was involved in Herrhausen’s assassination, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin was then working in Dresden as a KGB intelligence case officer. In the days after the Wall fell, he personally destroyed large numbers of KGB files. Nobody has ever been charged with Alfred Herrhausen’s murder.

Moving forward to the present day, most of the Russian Germans who came in the late 1980s are among the Putinversteher (‘Putin understanders’) who are especially numerous in the Eastern Länder. They embrace supporters of the Left-wing parties such as Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht, plus elements of the Greens and Social Democrats, as well as many on the centre-right who long for cheap gas, access to Russian markets and the lifting of sanctions. Above all, there is the Alternative für Deutschland. In last year’s federal election it came second to the Christian Democrats and in current polling, the AfD has been neck and neck with the CDU, or even slightly ahead, for many months. The party’s Chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, has cultivated an alliance with Donald Trump, his Vice President, JD Vance, and with Elon Musk. She presents the AfD in America as a ‘libertarian nationalist’ or ‘patriotic’ party. Vance and other administration officials interfered in last year’s election, while Musk has supported the AfD on social media and with cash.

Others in the AfD leadership lean more towards Russia: last week Weidel’s co-chairman Tino Chrupalla urged Chancellor Merz to talk to Putin. He is on record as stating that ‘Putin hasn’t done anything to me. I don’t see any danger to Germany from Russia at the moment’. On the other hand, Chrupalla said, ‘Poland can also be a threat to us’.

The result of all this pro-Putin propaganda is that a majority of all Germans, West and East, now want Ukraine to sacrifice the regions occupied by the Russian army in exchange for a ceasefire. While most support Merz’s programme of rearmament, it remains to be seen whether they will be prepared to make sacrifices to pay for it. Willing the end, of peace through strength, is one thing; willing the means is another. Yet there is no point in complaining about the choices that German voters make.

About seven years ago, just before the pandemic, I recall another leading figure in the business world bewailing reunification as a curse disguised as a blessing. What irked him were the Ossis, whom he dismissed as pampered, benighted and unbelehrbar (‘unteachable’). Whether Communists or Nazis, they were more trouble than they were worth. We were sitting in a tall building overlooking Berlin, within sight of where the Wall had been. ‘Honestly, I wish it had never been demolished,’ he declared. Needless to say, his communications team refused to let me publish any of this under his name: it all had to remain ‘deep background’. What my interlocutor was saying amounted to an echo of Brecht’s poem, minus the irony: his solution was to dissolve the people and elect another one. The stakes are even higher today: the economic malaise, the war in Ukraine, the return of Trump and the rise of the AfD have only heightened the impression of a nation in crisis.

Speaking as one who has devoted most of his life to their history, culture and politics, I have the greatest confidence in and hope for the German people. Hölderlin’s great hymn, Patmos, written more than two centuries ago, is famous for its opening lines:

Nah ist

Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch.

Michael Hamburger’s translation renders these sublime words thus:

Near is

And difficult to grasp, the God.

But where danger threatens

That which saves from it also grows.

Germany may no longer be, as it once was, the land of Dichter und Denker, of poets and thinkers, par excellence. Even so, I doubt whether any other country could have staged a debate as profound as that which took place in 2004 between the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who a year later was elected Pope Benedict XVI. That encounter has bequeathed us the notion of a post-secular society: a world in which the divine may, as Hölderlin says, be difficult or even impossible to grasp, but in which threats to humanity summon forth salvation, perhaps in unexpected and even still unthinkable forms. Germany, divided or reunited, is at least as much in need of salvation as the rest of us. Yet, as so often — most recently in the pandemic, when they were the first to find an effective vaccine — the Germans will surely do as much as any people to save us from ourselves.