By SheerPost-Patrick Lawrence / April 26, 2025 

Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history. 

BERLIN— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.” 

In Biden we have a man calmly matter-of-fact as he states his intention to destroy the expensive industrial assets of the country represented by the man next to him. We note his perfect aplomb, the dismissive wave of his hand, as he puts on full display his indifference to a close ally’s interests and, indeed, sovereignty. 

I have until recently attributed Biden’s astounding coarseness as he stands with Scholz to the gracelessness that has marked the whole of his, Biden’s, political career. But I reflect now, as I think of this occasion in the light of all that preceded it, there is another way to judge it: After decades of overweening dominance within the Atlantic alliance, Biden saw no need any longer to disguise America’s hegemonic prerogative. Indeed, in the C–SPAN recording linked above we see the face of a man who takes malign pride in this exercise of raw power. 

For his part, Scholz stood at a separate lectern, per protocol, and said nothing in response to Biden’s remark. His demeanor, Scholz’s, indicates he was neither surprised nor angry. He seems, rather, resigned, apprehensive, faintly regretful, faintly submissive. In his face we read the apprehension of a soldier who has just accepted his commanding officer’s baleful battle plan. My guess is he was also wondering what in hell he would say to his government and to Germans on his return to Berlin.

The best way to understand this very pregnant occasion, which has to count as unique or very nearly in the annals of trans–Atlantic diplomacy, is to look backward and then forward from it. 

What a long span of time lay between the Germany of the early 1980s, Helmut Schmidt’s Germany, and Olaf Scholz’s Germany, the Germany that fairly cowered as it stood on a dais with America 40 years later. Schmidt, a Social Democrat given to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had stood with other Europeans to defend Germany’s interests against President Ronald Reagan’s blunt attempts to impose America’s Cold War disciplines. Scholz, a Social Democrat of a very different kind, was not inclined to defend Germany against Joe Biden even when its very sovereignty was at issue. 

How did Germany come to this? I grew convinced, after some days’ reporting here, a city the Iron Curtain long divided, and more time elsewhere in Germany, that Cold War and post–Cold War politics do not of themselves give an answer to this question. No, as I found often during my decades as a correspondent, one must resort to psychology and culture fully to understand politics and history, the latter being in some measure expressions of the former.

The Allies’ plans for the nations they vanquished in 1945, which in a brief time amounted to America’s plans, were never short of ambition. At the Potsdam Conference, a few months after the fall of the Reich, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin divided Germany into four occupation zones: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union would administer one each. Berlin was in the Soviet zone but was similarly divided. Millions of German settlers had to be repatriated from lands the Nazis had conquered—a messy undertaking marked by never-now-mentioned suffering. A de–Nazification program began immediately, and the German military was to be dismantled, although both of these objectives were complicated, to put the point mildly, as the wartime alliance with Moscow gave way to the Cold War the Truman administration insisted on provoking. 

But it was in the matter of German hearts and minds that the remaking of the Reich into another kind of country tilted from ambition in the direction of hubris. This was a psychological operation the sweep and magnitude of which may never since have been matched. Only the post–1945 Japanese have undergone anything similar to it. This project was at first shaped and executed by Rooseveltian New Dealers. It was a year or two before Cold War ideologues dispensed with the high ideals in favor of the rigors of late–1940s, early–1950s anti–Communism. The Japanese, not without a subdued bitterness, call this “the reverse course.” 

I do not know what the Germans call it, but the postwar volte-face amounted to the same thing. The project was the same across both oceans. It was not to engender authentic experiments in democracy, bottom-up attempts, as the orthodox historians advertise this period. It was to enlist Germany and Japan as Cold War soldiers. Democratization became mere pretext, inasmuch as democracy by its very definition can be neither exported by any country nor imported by any other. In this way, I may as well add, these two nations were the templates Washington applied in many other places during the Cold War. Pretend to democratize, cultivate submission: This was the true postwar project. 

To put this point another way, to the extent Germany and Japan made themselves democracies in the postwar decades, this was not because of America’s influence so much as in spite of it.       

In the U.S. zone, administrators in and out of uniform assumed control of all forms of information. All newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters were shut down. American journalists (some of whom went on to illustrious careers) were assigned to reinvent German media to suit what was to be a new democracy. The propaganda programs accompanying this reinvention of mass media, in time heavy with anti–Soviet messaging, were immense, extending from reeducation projects and radio talk shows down to mass-distributed leaflets. The literature about this period gives the impression of an undertaking that excluded no uttered or written word and no image from official scrutiny. 

A brief digression. 

One of the memorable television programs of my early childhood was a popular law-and-order serial called Highway Patrol. I remember it well even after many years. There was something charismatic about the weekly episodes and their star. Broderick Crawford was the jowly, gruff, sloppily dressed chief of police in a never-named California town. He would sweep into crime scenes and fling open his patrol car’s door amid sirens and clouds of dust, barking orders into his hand-held radio—famously responding to his officers with the unforgettable “10–4.” 

Highway Patrol ran for 156 episodes, 1955 to 1959. On the face of it the series was a glorification of official authority. It was about the need to maintain order amid constant threats to it. But, text and subtext, Highway Patrol was about postwar America; each installment was a reiteration of what it meant to be American during those years. The Cold War was never once mentioned, but the Cold War seemed to hover in every one of those episodes. Among the programs running themes were the ever-presence of fear and the necessity of allegiance. 

I mention this because of something I learned many years later. It is amusing and highly instructive all at once. Highway Patrol was developed by an ambitious production company called Ziv Television Programs. Frederick Ziv, founder and principal, more or less invented TV syndications (The Cisco Kid, Bat Masterson, etc.). Ziv’s productions, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, were given to anti–Communist atmospherics in Highway Patrol fashion. And after Ziv signed Broderick Crawford, in 1955, Highway Patrol was the first American series to be broadcast on Germany’s new commercial television network.

To finish my point, how odd now to think that German families sitting in front of their televisions a decade after their terrible defeat in a world-historical war could watch the same cops-and-criminals drama that resonated with a young boy before his screen in a leafy suburb of New York.      

Highway Patrol is a small example of another dimension of the postwar project in Germany: It was an early case of what we now call soft power. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this assertion of American influence in postwar Germany or its consequences ever since. If occupation administrators controlled what Germans thought by way of their information and propaganda operations, importations of American cultural artifacts—films, music, food, social mores, and so on—came to control how Germans thought: how they thought about the world and about themselves.

The power of soft power, if I can put the point awkwardly, was more obvious in Japan at this time because the Occupation amounted to a confrontation between two different civilizations. From the Americans the Japanese learned billiards, ballroom dancing, big band jazz, Walt Disney movies, how to mix Martinis, how to carry themselves with the nonchalance of Americans. It was just this way in Germany but in a less abrupt fashion. Postwar Germans discovered blue jeans, hamburgers, Bill Haley and His Comets, John Wayne, how to drink Coca–Cola, and who can count how many other things. 

If I were to capture the essence of the postwar project in Germany, I would say its enduring outcome has been a remade consciousness. As a German-speaking Swiss friend put it the other day, “Germans, more than any other Europeans and first among them, learned to speak the language of the victor.” This brings me to a fateful error meriting brief explication. 

To take one step back, among the prevailing orthodoxies of the Cold War decades was called in the academy “modernization theory.” In a single phrase this held that modernization required Westernization. They came to the same thing, supposedly. For all those newly independent nations in what we call the Global South, if they wanted to make themselves modern they would have to follow the Westerners. In view of its countless consequences, all of them destructive, I consider this among the worst mistakes of the past eight decades. Only now are non–Western nations learning that becoming truly modern begins with becoming truly themselves. 

Germany made a roughly parallel mistake after its defeat in 1945. To advance beyond the disaster of the First World War and the barbarities that led to the Second meant becoming thoroughly modern at last. It meant to democratize. And to democratize meant to Americanize. You can count on the Americans to foist this harmful fallacy on the world: They have been doing so, I would say, since the Wilsonians of the early 20^th century. I do not wish to simplify the case, but this is at least approximately the trap into which postwar Germany fell.

As various German friends have remarked in conversation these past months, setting out to change the consciousness of a nation is, beyond the implicit hubris, a profoundly fraught endeavor. It is to tamper with a people’s very identity, their most basic understanding of who they are. The danger of a collective psychological unmooring of this kind—especially among people burdened with guilt due to their  prewar and wartime conduct—is to me obvious. In the cases of Germany and Japan alike, the circumstances of the postwar world seem to me to have defined the results. To go from defeat to the imperatives of the victor’s Cold War ideology was bound to produce, across both oceans, what I have for a long time called cultures of submission.

When the Iron Curtain bisected Germany in 1949 and as Americans directed the nation’s reconstruction, I mean to suggest, it was a kind of mutilation—on maps, but also in psyches. And neither Germany nor its people has yet recovered from this disturbance, as I think of it. This is to state what is bound to be evident to anyone who pays attention while walking to and fro in it. Germany has not been itself this past three-quarters of a century; Germans are, in psychological terms, in some measure separated from themselves, untethered. It is a peculiar condition for a people who have always seemed to me of strong character. 

Something Oscar Wilde observed long ago comes to mind—oddly, but not so oddly as all that. “Most people are other people,” Wilde wrote in De Profundis, the famous tract he composed while serving time in Reading Gaol. Wilde had very different matters on his mind, to put it too mildly, but this remarkable pensée seems to me perfectly to the point as we think of postwar Germans. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,” the passage continues, “their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

I think of this passage when I think back to Olaf Scholz as he stood in dull silence three years ago while the American president announced to the world he was about to abuse and humiliate Scholz all at once, giving not a thought to either. Who was Scholz in those moments? It is odd to consider the most persuasive answer may be, “Nobody.” There on the dais, nominally an equal but obviously otherwise, Scholz was the post–1945 culture of submission made flesh. To me he called to mind every Japanese premier who has paid a state visit to Washington since the Occupation ended in 1952: Like Scholz, they have all come to submit, leaving who they truly are at home.    

Among the few bright spots one detects in Germany today—here in Berlin, but more pronouncedly, I would say, in the villages and towns east of here in the former German German Republic—is the faint but detectable prospect that Germany and its people may in time find their way back to themselves. “We’re all looking for our country,” Dirk Pohlmann, the journalist and documentarian, said as we concluded our morning together in Potsdam late last autumn. It seemed the thing he wanted me most to see.

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This is the third of four reports on Germany in crisis. Part 1 of this series is here and Part 2 here.