Germany – Reluctant Giant

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why is Germany such a reluctant military power? Germany’s grown in international influence. And its potential military role has been hitting the headlines. US President Donald Trump’s criticised Germany in particular for not spending enough on defence. And Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that Europe can no longer completely depend on the US - or the UK after Brexit. Germany, she argues, must do more in the military sphere. But Germans themselves are very reluctant to do this. As Chris Bowlby discovers in this documentary, German pacifism has grown since World War Two, when Nazi armies caused such devastation. Today’s German army, the Bundeswehr, was meant to be a model citizen's force. But it’s often poorly funded and treated with suspicion by its own population. Some now say the world of Trump, Putin and Brexit demands major change in German thinking - much more spending, more Bundeswehr deployments abroad, even German nuclear weapons. But most Germans disagree. So could Germany in fact be trying something historically new - becoming a major power without fighting wars?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Chris Bolby and this is Germany reluctant giant on the BBC World Service.
0:07.0	Germany is becoming an increasingly important European and world power, apart from in one
0:12.2	key area, the military. It's an increasingly uncertain world for Germany. There are concerns
0:18.0	about Vladimir Putin's intentions to the east, instability and mass migration from the south,
0:23.8	or Donald Trump's questioning of the NATO alliance. Many among Germany's leaders, including
0:29.2	Angela Merkel, want to take a more active role, but the German people are very reluctant.
0:35.0	And that attitude, I've been discovering, has deep historical roots.
0:43.5	One afternoon, I just went for a walk and literally round the corner. There was the
0:50.0	Admiral Mikhail Kazena, the barracks of the former German Army, as far as I was concerned
0:56.3	this was an empty building. There was no German Army. There was no German Army. And as
1:01.4	I came round the corner, a whole column of black Mercedes drew up outside.
1:08.0	He was in Bonn, capital of West Germany, where a new West German democracy was still emerging.
1:14.4	Suitably dressed in civilian clothes, people of obvious prominence were walking through
1:21.2	the gates of this former barracks. So I walked through these large gates, to find an
1:28.7	army drawn up in the courtyard.
1:31.8	Just a hundred or so soldiers, but this was the moment when West Germany was allowed for
1:36.4	the first time to have any kind of military, a decade after the end of the Second World War,
1:42.2	in which the armed forces of Nazi Germany had devastated Europe and beyond. This new
1:47.7	army, the Bundeswehr, promised to be very different, banishing the demons of the German military
1:53.4	past.
1:54.4	They looked like a bunch of civilians dressed up in a uniform, in other words. They hadn't
2:00.9	yet learnt the drill. It was all very amateur, very low-key. There was no military music.
	...

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