Germany - Anxious Giant
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With angst over European security growing, why is Germany such a reluctant military power? Chris Bowlby discovers how German pacifism has grown since World War Two. The German army, the Bundeswehr, is meant to be a model citizen's army but is poorly funded and treated with suspicion by the population. Some now say the world of Trump, Putin and Brexit demands major change in German thinking, much more spending and Bundeswehr deployments abroad. But most Germans disagree. Could Germany in fact be trying historically something really new - becoming a major power without fighting wars?
Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Hugh Levinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:40.0 | Thanks for downloading analysis, the programme about the ideas behind the news. |
| 0:44.5 | This week Chris Bulby asks if a sleeping giant might be ready to awaken. In November 1955, |
| 0:55.0 | 1955, a young theology student, Paul Estrichia, |
| 0:59.0 | stumbled across a moment of history. |
| 1:02.0 | One afternoon, I just went for a walk and literally round the corner. |
| 1:07.5 | There was the Erm Mikhail Kasehanna, the barracks of the former German army. |
| 1:13.6 | As far as I was concerned, there was an empty building. |
| 1:16.4 | There was no German army. |
| 1:18.6 | And as I came around the corner, a whole column of black Mercedes drew up outside. |
| 1:26.3 | He was in Bonn, capital of West Germany, where a new West German democracy was still emerging. Suitably dressed in civilian clothes, |
| 1:35.0 | people of obvious prominence, |
| 1:38.0 | were walking through the gates of this former barracks, |
| 1:42.0 | so I walked through these large gates to find an army drawn |
| 1:47.8 | up in the courtyard. Just a hundred or so soldiers, but this was the moment when West Germany was allowed for the first time to have any kind of military, a decade after the end of the Second World War, in which the armed forces of Nazi Germany had devastated Europe and beyond. |
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