This time the Chancellor formulated something more cautious.
"We want to dare more progress," he said full-bodied nine months ago at the presentation of the coalition agreement between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP.
At his first summer press conference, after a good eight months of governing, it now sounded more reserved.
"The issue of making progress in Germany is still a major task for us," he formulated somewhat awkwardly.
In terms of foreign policy, however, he is not deluding himself, he added: Russia's attack on Ukraine is a relapse into "categories of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, into imperialist power politics".
This addition then no longer sounded like progress at all.
Ralph Bollman
Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of business and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.
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Hardly any government was confronted with such a comprehensive change in its business basis so soon after taking office as the traffic light alliance with the war, which began two and a half months after it was sworn in.
Certainly, after his re-election in 2002, Gerhard Schröder was forced to switch to an agenda course.
Angela Merkel was confronted with the euro crisis shortly after the 2009 election and with the Russian annexation of Crimea soon after the government was formed in 2013.
But the attempt by a European state to wipe out a neighboring country, as it were, has a different quality, along with all the economic consequences that follow.
It has become difficult to recognize the perpetual progression of the human race for higher and better in current events.
Last year there were definitely indications that what belonged together came together in the traffic light coalition.
Historically, since their formation in party politics in the 19th century, social democrats and liberals have always agreed on at least one thing: their belief in progress.
Karl Marx was also convinced that the unleashing of capitalist forces was a gain over the static system of old feudalism.
And on the eve of the First World War, even the Social Democrats shared the liberal conviction that one only had to give free rein to the game of forces so that the tide would turn for the better: one was allowed to make the “big slapstick”, like the legendary chairman August Bebel called the collapse of capitalism,
not actively bring about a revolution, you just have to wait for it.
Later historians referred to this attitude as "revolutionary attentism".
The Greens find it easier to deal with the turning point than the FDP and SPD
The Greens were on the other side, at least during their formative phase in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
They tended toward an old-conservative historical pessimism that saw modernity more as a process of decay.
While the 1968ers may have turned against the “must have been for a thousand years”, the next generation of Greens protested against the modernization fury of the social-liberal governments in the 1970s.
The fact that social emancipation must go hand in hand with the construction of city freeways and nuclear power plants, that happiness lies in light-flooded modern social housing and not in old buildings with their coal smoke: the Greens did not want to accept that.