When I worked on German reunification in the 1980s, one of the core concerns was not simply whether the two German states could be brought together institutionally, but whether the deep historical and cultural gap between East and West Germany could be bridged in any meaningful way. The question was whether a population socialized on opposite sides of the Cold War’s dividing line could form a common strategic culture, above all, a shared understanding of threat and a shared will to defend a new, unified Germany.
When reunification finally came in 1990, there was a burst of optimism in Bonn, Washington, and other capitals that institutional, economic, and legal integration would, over time, pull strategic perceptions into alignment as well. The experience of the last three decades suggests that optimism was significantly misplaced.
The Germany that emerged under successive governments, and most notably under Angela Merkel, did not develop a single, coherent defense culture vis-à-vis Russia. Instead, it remained internally divided between different historical memories, political reflexes, and regional attitudes toward Moscow. One of the consequences was a Germany that repeatedly underinvested in defense and avoided drawing the logical conclusions from Russia’s trajectory after 2008 and 2014, even as allies in Eastern Europe recalibrated far more quickly.
Today, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany is engaged in something closer to a deliberate strategic-cultural refounding. Merz has framed Putin’s Russia as the central military threat to German and European security and has tied his chancellorship to transforming the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional army. In the process, he may be accomplishing something earlier generations did not manage: using the hard facts of Russia’s war in Ukraine and NATO’s eastern defense requirements to “finish” German reunification at the level of defense culture—and, critically, to complete the structural transformation of Germany’s own strategic role within the alliance.
Three Layers of Reunification
It is useful to distinguish three different layers of what we casually call “reunification.”
At the constitutional and territorial level, reunification was completed quickly in 1990. The former GDR entered the Federal Republic; institutions were extended eastward; NATO and the EU absorbed a larger Germany. At the socioeconomic level, reunification has been partial, uneven, and contested. Eastern regions lagged behind, producing enduring resentments and political fragmentation that still shape party politics today.
At the strategic-cultural level, reunification has remained incomplete. East and West Germans have continued to see Russia differently, to weigh military instruments differently, and to hold very different expectations about Germany’s role in Europe.
Survey data over the last decade have repeatedly demonstrated the fault line. East Germans have been more likely than West Germans to view Russia as an important partner, less likely to favor sanctions, and more inclined to interpret the Ukraine war as partly provoked by NATO. A 2020 analysis found that 21 percent of East Germans identified Russia as one of Germany’s most important foreign partners, compared with only 9 percent of West Germans. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a significantly higher share of eastern respondents believed NATO bore substantial responsibility for the conflict and were more open to the notion that Ukraine somehow “belongs” to Russia.
These attitudes did not translate automatically into policy, but they formed part of the political environment in which German leaders operated. They made any serious rearmament or starkly confrontational Russia policy riskier, feeding into a broader West German pacifist and “civilian power” tradition that already inclined Berlin toward restraint. Understanding this divide is not merely of historical interest; it is the precondition for understanding what Merz is now attempting to do—and what he is attempting to overcome.
Germany’s Strategic Position Transformed
The cultural divide matters the more because Germany’s strategic position within NATO has been fundamentally transformed by enlargement. During the Cold War, the inner German border was the front line. West Germany was the anticipated battlefield; logistical support flowed from the United States through British ports and, after Spain joined NATO, via a southern route as well. Germany was the destination, not the corridor.
With NATO’s expansion to include Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and others, Germany has become the alliance’s critical transit hub. With the Alps forming a natural southern barrier, virtually any NATO reinforcement of the eastern flank must traverse German territory. Germany is now simultaneously the deep logistics base for the alliance’s eastern defense and the nation whose unresolved strategic-cultural divide could, in extremis, impede that function.
This shift demands capabilities Germany never required during the Cold War—throughput capacity, infrastructure protection, host nation support on a massive scale, and domestic political cohesion sufficient to sustain the movement of hundreds of thousands of multinational troops. Operation Plan Germany (OPLAN DEU) focuses not on German units defending German soil but on how to move forces across German territory to fight to the east. The failure to develop a unified strategic culture is thus not merely a domestic German question; it is an alliance vulnerability of the first order.
Equally significant is the hybrid dimension. Russia’s strategy specifically targets Germany’s role as NATO’s connective tissue—through sabotage, cyberattack, and disruption below the threshold of armed conflict. Domestic political fragmentation and unresolved strategic-cultural divisions create potential vulnerabilities to influence operations that a more cohesive strategic culture would resist. The cultural gap left by incomplete reunification has, in this sense, a direct military relevance.
Merkel and the Management of a Fragmented Strategic Culture
This backdrop helps explain the Merkel years. Merkel’s Russia policy is now widely acknowledged, even by Merkel herself, to have underreacted to Moscow’s revisionism and left the Bundeswehr in poor shape for deterrence. Despite Russia’s war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and the 2014–2015 fighting in the Donbas, Germany under her leadership never met the NATO two-percent defense spending pledge and remained deeply entangled in energy dependence on Russia through Nord Stream 2 and related infrastructure.
Some of this reflected personal and political style; Merkel specialized in incrementalism and damage limitation. Some of it was coalition politics with partners skeptical of military solutions and higher defense budgets. But a deeper dynamic was at work: there simply was not a unified German strategic culture that would support a decisive pivot away from Russia and toward a hard NATO deterrence posture. Instead, three subcultures coexisted uneasily.
A West German “civilian power” strand, strongly anchored in post-1945 pacifism and committed to Wandel durch Handel, remained reflexively wary of anything that resembled militarization. An East German strand, drawing on GDR-era ties and post-1990 disillusionment with the terms of unification, was more empathetic to Moscow’s perspectives and more suspicious of Western narratives about Russia. A smaller Atlanticist-expeditionary community in political, military, and expert circles understood the Russian threat and took NATO obligations seriously but lacked the numbers and public backing to drive policy.
Merkel governed by triangulating among these camps. The result was a Germany that talked of responsibility, supported sanctions and reassurance missions, but never truly configured its force posture, its energy mix, or its strategic narrative around long-term confrontation with a revisionist Russia. Defense dropped down the hierarchy of priorities not because no one understood the risks, but because there was no shared national identity built around the idea of defending the new Germany against the new Russia. Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in February 2022 represented a rhetorical break, but the institutional and cultural follow-through remained halting until Merz.
The Merz Moment: Toward a Common Defense Culture
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has moved quickly to invert many of these assumptions. In his first government statements, he defined Putin’s Russia as a direct threat to Europe and German security and committed to providing the Bundeswehr with the resources required to become “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” He has tied this rearmament explicitly to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank, most notably through the decision to establish the first permanent foreign deployment of German combat forces, a full brigade in Lithuania.
This shift is about more than budgets and basing. In speech after speech, Merz frames Russia not as a difficult partner to be managed but as an adversary engaged in hybrid and military efforts to destabilize European democracies, including Germany. He has endorsed successive sanctions packages on Russia as necessary for European credibility and has warned against illusions that a quick return to pre-war “business as usual” is possible. The rhetoric matters because strategic culture is not simply inherited; it is shaped by political leadership, by concrete deployments, and by the narratives that link those deployments to national identity.
By stating in the Bundestag that Germany must “be able to defend ourselves so that we don’t have to defend ourselves,” and that higher military investment is not done “to do the United States a favor, but because Russia actively threatens the freedom of the entire Euro-Atlantic area,” Merz is positioning defense as a central expression of German national identity in this era. That is qualitatively different from what his predecessors were willing to do.
The domestically most interesting dimension of Merz’s approach is its internal geography. During the Cold War, West Germany was the political and economic hub while East Germany was the forward glacis of the Warsaw Pact. After 1990, the disparities in prosperity and political culture that emerged between East and West hardened into cultural fault lines. Russia policy was one of the sharpest: western Germany’s commercial networks and the Ostpolitik tradition inclined Berlin toward engagement; eastern Länder, more exposed and historically more alert to Russian imperialism, often held different instincts but lacked political weight.
Merz’s security agenda recasts this internal map. By anchoring German strategy on the premise that the security of Lithuania is Germany’s security—and backing it with the permanent stationing of a Bundeswehr brigade—he implicitly relocates the Republic’s strategic center of gravity eastward and northward. This valorizes the threat perceptions that eastern German Länder have held for decades and reframes what was once a regional division as a shared national stake in NATO’s eastern border. The rebuilding of heavy land forces—Leopard 2 tanks, Boxer infantry carriers, organic artillery—resonates with army units and bases concentrated in eastern Germany, reinforcing a material connection between the defense buildup and the communities that host it.
At the same time, the generational structure of eastern Germany is changing. Younger East Germans, who have lived only in a unified, NATO-anchored Germany, do not carry the same personal memories of the GDR or the same instinctive identification with Moscow as a protector or reference point. Survey data still show a gap between East and West in threat perceptions and attitudes toward sanctions, but the distance is narrowing as Russia’s aggression continues and its costs become more palpable across Europe.
The Risks: Fragmentation and Fatigue
None of this is guaranteed. The same structural factors that constrained Merkel have not disappeared. Political fragmentation is intensifying, with antisystem parties on both right and left often combining hostility to NATO, skepticism of Ukraine support, and varying degrees of sympathy or “understanding” for Russia. These parties draw disproportionately on eastern discontent, leveraging the socioeconomic and historical divides that have made a unified strategic culture so elusive.
Sustaining high defense spending over multiple budget cycles will require hard tradeoffs. If Germans come to see rearmament as a zero-sum competitor to social spending rather than as the precondition for preserving social and economic stability, the current political consensus will erode. The burden of proof will lie with the government and the Bundeswehr to show that the new resources translate into real capability, readiness, and credible deterrence—not merely into procurement headlines.
There is also the question of memory politics. For many East Germans, NATO and the West were not experienced as a smooth liberation but as the beginning of a period of deindustrialization, social disruption, and loss of status. If the new defense culture is perceived as one more West German project imposed from above, rather than as a genuinely shared endeavor rooted in the security of the eastern Länder themselves, it will reinforce rather than heal the strategic divide. The framing matters enormously: collective resilience against renewed Russian imperialism lands very differently from an alliance obligation negotiated in Brussels and Washington.
Germany’s role as NATO’s logistical backbone also creates a vulnerability that amplifies the stakes of domestic cohesion. If political fragmentation permits the kind of disruption whether physical, cyber, or through parliamentary paralysis that degrades Germany’s ability to function as the alliance’s transit hub, the consequences extend far beyond Germany itself. The eastern allies are acutely aware of this dependency. The Lithuanian brigade commitment is in part an answer to their concern: Germany is not just a logistics base, but a frontline participant.
Completing the Strategic Chapter of Reunification
The alternative to the risks outlined above, drifting back into a divided German strategic culture at a time of open Russian revisionism, is worse. The core of the argument presented here is that reunification, as a historical project, cannot be considered complete until the Germans of the East and West share a basic, internalized understanding that defending NATO’s eastern frontier is synonymous with defending their own country.
That requires more than policy shifts; it demands a narrative that links Germany’s post-1990 identity as a unified, democratic, European state to the concrete military measures now being taken on the eastern flank. It requires acknowledging past missteps—including the overoptimistic belief that economic integration and goodwill alone would converge strategic cultures—and recognizing that the hard lessons of Russian behavior since 2008 must now be fully integrated into German self-understanding.
From that perspective, Merz’s emphasis on Russia as a direct threat, his pledge to transform the Bundeswehr, his willingness to take on the political costs of rearmament, and his decision to station German forces permanently in Lithuania are not just policy corrections. They are an attempt, conscious or not, to complete the strategic dimension of German reunification: to forge a single German defense culture out of historically divergent experiences, memories, and political reflexes.
The question I asked in the 1980s—whether a population socialized on opposite sides of the Cold War’s dividing line could form a common strategic culture—is, thirty-five years later, still open. The answer being written today, in the Bundeswehr brigades deploying to the Baltic, in the defense budgets passing the Bundestag, and in the slowly shifting survey data in the eastern Länder, will shape not only Germany’s future but the security architecture of the entire Euro-Atlantic area.