‘Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed thinking in Germany profoundly,’ wrote Sarah Rainsford, the BBC’s Eastern Europe correspondent, enthusiastically from Berlin this week. Explaining how a huge increase in debt-based spending on the German military is a break with the country’s pacifist post-war outlook, she declared that ‘Germany decides to leave history in the past and prepare for war.’

I can see why Rainsford has come to this conclusion. She was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent until she was expelled from Russia in 2021 as a supposed ‘threat to national security.’ This has been a painful personal experience during which she’d had to rethink her relationship to Russia, a country she’d grown to love over many years. I’ve just read her deeply personal account of this called Goodbye to Russia, and could feel the shock at what she saw in Ukraine leaping off the pages. This war has made her see Russia in a different light. The assumption is reasonable that this happened to others, too, even Germany.

But I’m not so sure. Germany is a lot of things, but it isn’t a country that ‘leaves history in the past’. The recent boost to military spending is indeed a big step for a country that had managed to convince itself that history ended in 1990. Polling indicates that most Germans now acknowledge there are threats to their security and that the Bundeswehr should be strengthened as a result. What hasn’t changed is the country’s ongoing fascination with Russia.

A certain eastern outlook is baked into the national soul. Two World Wars, Stalin, the Cold War – none of the horrors of the 20th century changed that. True, the 21st-century war in Ukraine is horrific and has shocked many Russophile Germans. In 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion began, one of the older East Germans I interviewed for Beyond the Wall told me: ‘I would never have believed that Russia would attack a brother state!’ – ‘brother state’ was official GDR jargon for a friendly fellow socialist country. Quite how he made that conviction work in light of historical events like the brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 by the Soviets was beyond me. However, the disillusionment was real at the time.

It was temporary, too, though. The shock didn’t take long to wear off. Soon, German Russophiles began to convince themselves that Russia was in fact defending itself against Western aggression in its sphere of influence: NATO expansion, the westernisation of Ukraine and the arrogance of the Western victors of the Cold War in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union were all cited as reasons why Russia had every right to feel aggrieved. My East German interviewee soon began to attend events in Berlin that styled themselves as peace rallies, calling for an end to the war in Ukraine at all costs.

Alongside this ideological affinity sit very powerful economic dynamics. Both East and West Germany imported fossil fuels from the Soviet Union. The recent debates around energy dependencies, especially the Nord Stream pipelines, are the continuation of a much longer trend that has always involved conflict with the US, too. Beyond coal, Germany barely has any natural resources it can exploit for energy production, so getting the import balance right to supplement renewables always has economic and security-political implications.

Sanctions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine have seen Germany cut itself loose from those all-important energy imports – Russia had previously supplied a third of Germany’s oil, half of its coal imports and over half of its gas. That has not just been painful for the country and consumers, but also for many politicians who had their fingers in that particular pie. The most prominent example is Gerhard Schröder, a close friend of Putin’s and former German Chancellor, turned chairman of the board at Nord Stream and Rosneft. The roots of the fruitful German-Russian business relationship reach deep into Germany’s political soil.

It’s therefore not really surprising that now that German coalition talks are underway for its new government, several prominent politicians have piped up, arguing for a resumption of the economic relationship with Russia. I’ve written about this in UnHerd this week if you’re interested in the details. Many elements of the powerful industrial lobby in Germany will want to get back on Russian gas and oil as soon as possible, and with no alternative energy strategy in place or even on the horizon, it’s clear why they harbour hopes that this will happen soon.

But perhaps the biggest factor that journalists tend to underestimate is that the affinity to Russia sits much deeper in Germany than it does in any other Western country. Germany’s very soul is central European – it’s a country that looks both West and East for orientation, hopes, dreams and fears. This goes all the way back to the country’s creation as a nation state in 1871, when the first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, tried to make this inherent conflict work by suspending Germany between the power blocs in the role of ‘honest broker.’ Under him, the country would not take sides but would stay friendly with both the East and the West. But the fear of encirclement, Bismarck’s ‘cauchemar des coalitions’ or ‘nightmare of coalitions’ never lost its grip on him.

This fear contributed much to the outbreak and the course of the First World War. The Nazis too were divided between those who feared the Soviet Union as a racial threat in a Darwinist fight for resources, land and people and those who despised the Anglo-American-dominated West for its liberalism and capitalism. After the war, the country was literally split into East and West. But even in the West, the first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer encountered fierce opposition with his declared intention to bind his country to the West (‘Westbindung’).

On a more cultural level, Germans still tend to fall into one of two categories, easterners or westerners. Both Russia and America have long held huge allure due to their vastness, fascinating cultures, and respective rich cultural heritages. Over time, the US has attracted more German emigrants than Russia, but Russia has had its fair share, too, from the Volga Germans to 20th-century socialists and communists. I meet Germans all the time who are absolutely fascinated with Russian literature, music, culture and heritage – a fascination that is now usually carefully ringfenced against ‘Putin’s Russia’.

The affiliation with one of these two sides often comes with a strong rejection of the other. Adenauer, for instance, was a firm ‘Westerner’, an Atlanticist who was happy to largely align West German interests with those of the US. He referred to all the lands beyond the River Elbe as the ‘Asiatic steppe’ and happily sacrificed reunification and a friendlier relationship with the Soviets for closer American ties. Vice versa, ‘Easterners’ like Schröder are often critical of the US to the point of anti-Americanism — a strain also found in the AfD and the two far-left parties today. It will be interesting to see if the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz — in many ways a classic ‘Westerner’ — will follow the pull of many in his party who’d rather look East again for economic gain.

This is all a gross simplification of the complexities of the German-Russian relationship, of course – I haven’t even begun to talk about the immense impact the Second World War continues to have on this. But I hope it gives a glimpse of how deep those historical roots are. I’m convinced that they haven’t been torn out, cut or even trimmed by the current-day war in Ukraine. It may be that in time something different will grow from them, but the fundamental dynamics won’t change. Germany will remain a country on the fence. It won’t ever truly say goodbye to Russia.