The sign in the window of the German army’s storefront career center in downtown Berlin suggested it would be open all afternoon for inquiries about joining the armed forces, or Bundeswehr. But the doors were locked on a cold November day, with no lights on and no one inside. The same was true the next day when I tried again. “What kind of message does that send?” my friend, a former soldier who accompanied me, asked scornfully. “It’s like so much about the Bundeswehr these days—underfunded, undermanned, underequipped, and undervalued by the public, which still doesn’t really understand why Germany needs an army.”
Eighty years after the end of World War II, as Russia escalates attacks against Europe and the U.S. threatens to turn away from the transatlantic alliance, Germany is undergoing a historic shift. In 2022, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it a Zeitenwende—a “watershed moment”—and mandated a one-off infusion of €100 billion in defense spending, nearly doubling Germany’s previous annual allocation. The first thing his successor, Friedrich Merz, did after being elected last year was to amend the constitution’s “brake” on borrowing to pay for weapons and ammunition. Germany is now on track to spend €650 billion on the military over the next five years, more than doubling the amount disbursed in the previous five years.
Just days before I visited that closed army career center, Merz’s coalition government agreed to a new conscription law that could double the number of men ready to fight, growing the Bundeswehr from 180,000 to 260,000 soldiers and building the reserve force to 200,000. (Women aren’t required to comply with the new requirements but may volunteer.)
There is no longer any doubt that Germany is broadly committed to rearmament. A prospect that might once have provoked anxiety in Europe and North America is now broadly welcomed in the West. But that doesn’t make it easy for the German people, shaped by decades of post-World War II pacifism.
