Rearming Germany

Berliners are maintaining customary freedoms but geopolitical shifts have upended their country's post-war self-image.

- BY CATHRIN SCHAER

There's a war going on about a day's drive from where I live in Berlin, historic alliances are being torn asunder, Germany's far-right is rapidly rising and the “international rules-based order” isn't really following the rules any more. But heck, you wouldn't really know it.

It's been one of the warmest springs on record so far and, as usual after a long, grey winter, local bars and restaurants have moved tables and chairs back onto Berlin's streets. Cycling back from a canal-side beer garden as the sun goes down, you wonder (as you always do at the end of winter) where all these delightful, laughing, beer-quaffing people were hibernating up until now.

In other words, it’s pretty much life as normal here in the crowded, dirty, always-entertaining capital of Europe's biggest economy.

But of course, as anyone who reads the news is well aware, it’s not. Although Berliners are doing all the usual things - working, booking summer holidays, buying groceries, walking the dog - there’s an uneasiness running through daily life.

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it feels a bit like a crack has opened up somewhere below us. We can't quite see it, but the earth is shifting beneath those café tables. And we're not sure if the crack is going to close again quietly or whether it will widen into a deep, dark chasm that we'll all eventually be sucked into.