Nine months ago, most European Union member states took their biggest step yet toward a common European army. It was not, however, a moment that lent itself to easy symbolism: No common European uniform nor common weapons and equipment, nor even a joint high command. Militarily, what the EU now has is rules. They allow for cooperation between individual European states to jointly shape military facilities and capabilities.

At the …

The times when we could fully rely on one another are more or less over, so I can only say that we Europeans must take our fate into our own hands.” It was a rather uneven remark, but one that nonetheless resounded like a thunderbolt throughout the Western world. It came from German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a 20-minute speech on a hot Sunday afternoon over beer and pretzels in …

One of the low points of the trans-Atlantic relationship can be pinpointed precisely: June 19, 2018, 6:52AM EST. Presumably from his bedroom in the East Wing of the White House, US President Donald Trump clicked “send” in his Twitter app: “Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted.”

It sounds like a state conspiracy, one discovered by the American …

The final years are always the hardest. For nearly 13 years, Angela Merkel has been chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. No current head of government in the Western democratic world has held power longer than this woman from the former East Germany.

Merkel has led her party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for 18 years. Only Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of Reunification, served longer in that office. …

Like Moscow’s relations with the West more broadly, Russia’s ties with Germany – its most important European partner – have grown increasingly strained over the past few years. Previous hopes of Russia’s integration into a Greater Europe, from Lisbon in the west to Vladivostok in the east, have evaporated. The formerly cordial relationship between Moscow and Berlin has cooled off, as estrangement and even mutual alienation have set in. Yet, …

Maybe Europe will be all right in the end. Perhaps the little we can do within the structures of the EU will turn out to be just enough to steer us through these trying times. Maybe the realization that we indeed face an existential crisis will sink in quickly enough to respond to the challenges ahead.

But if we can agree that it is blatantly clear that the very core …

This time it was Chemnitz. News reports around the world showed beefy, baldheaded men in black raising placards and their right arms, chanting xenophobic slogans. Right-wing extremists, soccer hooligans and angry citizens gathered – of all places – around a big statue of Karl Marx after a man had been stabbed to death in this Saxon city of 250,000 residents, apparently by two men Germany had taken in after they …

Germany’s military is too small. That’s what the Poles say, and the French, and the Brits, and the Americans. Instead of fearing German military aggression, as they did in 1914–18 and again in 1939–45, they fear the country’s military weakness.

How times have changed. No state disarmed as thoroughly following the end of the Cold War in 1991 than reunited Germany. This was enshrined in the Two-Plus-Four treaty involving West …

The German Times’ editor Lutz Lichtenberger takes stock of their prospects to define the nation’s politics for the years ahead

THE WHIPPERSNAPPER

It should have been a crushing defeat, for the cause and for him personally. Kevin Kühnert wanted to prevent the center-left Social Demo­crats (SPD), the party whose youth organization he leads, from voting to reboot their current coalition with Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Demo­crats (CDU) and its Bavarian …

Karl Hilsenbek is worried. “No one knows what will happen tomorrow, or where migrant numbers go from here,” says the mayor of Ellwangen, a flourishing town in Germany’s prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. Unemployment there is under 2 percent. Large billboards advertise companies searching for new trainees. Little cause for worry, one would think.

But on the outskirts of town, on the grounds of an old army barracks, lies a …