Since the start of 2025, Germany’s Verfassungsblog academic blog has been running a series of thought-provoking pieces looking at how history, collective memory, law and politics all tangle together in today’s world. The writers explore how competing historical narratives — and what gets deliberately forgotten — can shape legal systems and drive political decisions, often becoming powerful tools in the hands of those chasing influence.
One recurring theme is “competitive victimhood” and the ongoing reckoning with responsibility for the crimes of the Second World War — a legacy that still looms large over foreign policy. The contributors also ask whether traditional ways of remembering, like memorials and museums, really do much to prevent future violence or help societies heal. There’s a sharp focus, too, on the role of digital tech — how it’s shaping, warping, and sometimes hijacking our collective memory — and the danger of trying to pin down a single, tidy version of history in an age of algorithms and AI.
The first article in the series, “The Ubiquity of Historical Narratives in Law and Politics,” begins with a striking statement: “Contemporary politics is shaped to an unprecedented degree by the struggle over how to remember the past: Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is being waged in the name of history.”
Germany’s internal debate over whether to send weapons to Ukraine in its fight against Russia is closely tied to the country’s collective memory.
A standout contribution in this context comes from historian Martin Schulze Wessel, professor of East European history at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and co-founder of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission, established in 2014. Wessel explores the gradual shift in how both the German government and the public view the legacy of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He highlights how Germany has made significant progress in recognising Ukraine and its history as separate from that of its neighbours: Ukraine as a battlefield during the Second World War eighty years ago, and Ukraine today. For much of the postwar period, Germany’s sense of guilt over the crimes committed during the Nazi occupation was primarily associated with Russia — rather than Ukraine or Belarus. It wasn’t until Russia’s full-scale invasion that a sense of responsibility toward Ukraine, rooted in the memory of the Second World War, started to take shape at the highest political levels.
Wessel argues that the German government’s long-standing hesitation to supply weapons to Ukraine stemmed from a narrative of guilt and responsibility toward Russia, as the successor to the Soviet Union, while ignoring the histories and agency of Ukraine and Belarus — despite the fact that these countries suffered the heaviest toll from the war and occupation.
In the early 1980s, when Germany was debating whether to respond to the Soviet Union’s deployment of intermediate-range missiles, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt emphasised what he saw as the Soviet leadership’s fundamentally peaceful nature. He argued that Brezhnev and the Politburo sought peace, shaped by their memory of the horrors of the Second World War. In reality, it’s hard to think of a state more militarised than the USSR, which launched one military intervention after another.
Fast forward to June 2016, two years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, when another former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, gave an interview to Süddeutsche Zeitung urging Germany to adopt a friendlier stance toward Russia. Once again, the reasoning was steeped in a phantom historical memory: Schröder claimed that Russia had suffered immense losses during the Second World War. Four years later, he reframed this memory as a political obligation for Germany, telling Der Tagesspiegel that Nazi Germany had sought to erase Russia from the global political stage. “We must never forget this — and Germany’s policy towards Russia must reflect it more,” he insisted.
It’s hard to comprehend: a call to side with the aggressor as some sort of compensation for events that unfolded eighty years ago. Once again, it overlooks a critical point: Nazi Germany did not invade Russia, but the Soviet Union — while Ukraine and Belarus endured far more under Nazi occupation than Russia did.
After the full-scale Russian invasion, Chancellor Olaf Scholz only made the obvious clear in August 2024: the suffering Ukraine endured during the Second World War places a unique responsibility on Germany for the country’s fate today. “Given our responsibility for our own history, there can be only one place for Germany in this situation: on the side of Ukraine,” Scholz declared in a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
In Germany, memory and foreign policy are tightly connected — something the Kremlin knows all too well and has learned to manipulate with considerable success.
Since the 1960s, intellectual circles in the West have tended to view the problem not as a specific enemy, but as enmity itself. The lesson drawn from the two world wars was unusual: not to stay alert and prepared, but to be cautious and restrained. This mindset has led to a persistent, almost ingrained, drive to reconcile, to equate, and to blur the lines between aggressor and victim. And it remains stubbornly resistant to change.
Germans still struggle to draw comparisons between Putin’s Russia and Nazi Germany, despite many recognising the parallels. The challenge stems from the post-Second World War consensus that established the Holocaust as a unique and unparalleled genocide, one that must never be repeated or compared to any other atrocity. There’s a concern that labelling the war in Ukraine as genocide could undermine the horror of the Holocaust. As a result, even terms like “war of annihilation”—used to describe the Third Reich’s brutal campaign in the East—are generally avoided when discussing Russia’s actions.
However, Martin Wessel notes a shift in perspective. German narratives about the Second World War are changing. The idea that “never again” should not only apply to avoiding aggression and genocide, but also to standing with the victims of such crimes, is gaining traction—even if, in the past, Germany fought against both the aggressor and the victim.
