Ukraine war: turning point of a generation

We post-Wende children always grew up feeling that we were born into an age without really big wars. For our parents, the Cold War and the nuclear threat that came with it were fading memories; for us, they were just chapters in a history book.

Instead, a different feeling spread through us. It was the fallacious belief that our own world would always move in the right direction—toward peace, freedom, and prosperity.

The end of the story that never came

When I now try to describe this feeling that determined my life more precisely, a thesis by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama comes to mind. In the early 1990s, Fukuyama published a book about his assessment that the end of the Cold War would also mean an “end of history”. The battle of the systems ended with the Eastern bloc. The world is going into a final state that would no longer tolerate illiberal systems. That’s what Fukuyama really thought at the time. And we wanted to believe it from then on.

Today we know: Fukuyama did not make any predictions at the time, but rather precisely described the zeitgeist of the time. A zeitgeist that shaped post-reunification children like me.

Because we only looked at world wars, East-West conflicts and nuclear threats in retrospect. Accompanied by my own experiences of an expanding European Union, in which passports were needed less and less to travel.

For my generation, Europe was above all an adventure playground to be explored. My Erasmus semester took me to Romania because I found it more exciting than the well-known travel destinations in Western Europe. My time in Cluj-Napoca was marked by new friendships, travel and parties.

Until that bloody Thursday, Russia and the Ukraine were also popular destinations for me and many other, especially for the brave. Kyiv was known as the “new Berlin” because of its party scene, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a speech to the citizens of the German capital. Today, the people of Kyiv instead lived with the sound of the constant bomb alarm.

Peaceful worldview as a privilege

At least now I realize: My worldview has always been a huge privilege. Young people in Central Africa, the Middle East or Central America have always been aware that freedom, peace and prosperity are rare commodities. Worse still: goods that could remain a distant dream for the rest of their lives.

Now, in the face of the horror that is pouring into my world from Russia, is our perspective now the same? Is the big catastrophe now part of the possible?

I don’t know the answers yet. But I suspect that the feeling of self-controlled life was probably a privilege and could now become an illusion.

This is another reason why the pictures of the corpses from Bucha are so hard to bear. They are evidence of an arbitrariness that brings death where normal life had previously reigned. When the mundane blurs with unimaginable cruelty as people get shot while they’re fetching bread, we question our own power to make decisions.

return of imperialism

However, the fact that I suddenly begin to fear for my personal well-being is not due to a supposedly sudden return of the war to Europe. On the contrary: I never knew a Europe without war.

Because in the year I was born, 1991, a series of bloody conflicts broke out around the state structure of Yugoslavia, in which more than 200,000 people fell victim. Europe has also seen war, displacement and genocide in the last 30 years.

But this was a confrontation between different religions and ethnic groups – a convenient excuse for young people who saw the world from a German perspective. Because they didn’t live in a country like that. To fall victim to a massacre like that in Srebrenica – that didn’t seem like a real danger to me at the time.

The situation is different when a Russian army indiscriminately murders people in the Kiev suburbs. Could I, my friends, face a similar fate? Shot on the bike, raped, buried?

It is the return of imperialism to European soil that shakes my confidence. We Germans know this particularly well, because no state, no matter how peaceful, can feel safe from despots with great power fantasies.

I’m now having conversations with friends that would have seemed absurd just a few weeks ago. Where could we flee to in an emergency? How might we behave in a nuclear war? Would we take up arms to defend our family? And if so, how do you actually use it?

When I was born, conscription was suspended. We were therefore the first in decades not to have to deal with the question of military service. We could afford to be pacifists – another privilege that is suddenly being called into question.

More on the consequences of the war in Ukraine:

Now the Bundestag applauds a special fund for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr, and I applaud inwardly. If, in the worst case, there is a risk of death by force of arms, I too prefer a functioning army.

No new value compass yet

At the same time, I notice that I am not yet able to derive an inner maxim for action from my shifted world view. What does all this mean for my own principles?

From pacifism to militarism? From the belief in a peaceful European community that keeps growing to an anxious look to the East? How much are my assets actually worth?

That hurts. Because it challenges the belief that we have always been on the right side of history. Because suddenly it feels as if pacifism only means naivety. As if insisting on diplomatic solutions might even have always been an excuse to look the other way.

Anyone who has never met a person with a weapon and malicious intent finds it easy to self-satisfiedly reject their own armament. And to ignore the pleas of others for help. The pleas of the Syrians, Afghans or Bosniaks, for example.

However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Ukraine’s current pleas when the Ukrainian President joins the Bundestag straight from the war. At home in front of the screen, I, too, move around in my chair, shocked and embarrassed, together with the Members of Parliament. Maybe a symbol for my current emotional state, I think to myself. Touched but unable to act.

So should I be in favor of a NATO mission? So far I have not brought myself to adopt this attitude. I oppose it to prevent an escalation of violence and the global catastrophe of nuclear war. But also because I fear that my newly acquired fear of the future could turn into reality for me personally.

Should I get ready to take up arms myself one day? Perhaps. In any case, I can no longer afford to judge people who do it. Not if I have previously agreed to a special fund for rearmament out of the egoistic desire to be protected myself.

The fact that I have only had to ask myself this question theoretically so far shows how much my worldview is shaped by privilege. At least compared to the Ukrainians, whose own world is going up in flames. Because for me the horror of war is still just that: an image that only looms as such into my everyday life.

Privileges are positive

And I hope it stays that way. Even if there are millions of people in the world who already live in horror.

The crux of peace, freedom and security is that we only realize their value when they seem threatened. And as with anything we recognize as fragile, it deserves extra protection. If I can draw a conclusion for myself after the shift in reality over the past few weeks, then this is it.

Because I and all those who were born after the Cold War will have the responsibility now and in the coming decades to end this crisis and to ensure a peaceful Europe again.

With diplomatic solutions, with a new economic sense of reality, which does not first see opportunities for earning money all over the world, but also questions their origin. But also with military means. Only then will future generations in Europe have the privilege of growing up with a naïve worldview. The more there are, the better.

More: The war is changing the world again – seven theses on the long-term consequences of the Ukraine conflict