In April 2018, Angela Merkel was in Washington.

She visited the American President Donald Trump, the godsend of German politics.

Four years had elapsed since Vladimir Putin conquered Crimea, and it was four years before he attacked all of Ukraine.

After the meeting with Trump, Merkel almost casually recalled that a major war had taken place in Europe roughly every two generations for centuries.

Eckhart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

This is not mathematically exact, but all in all there have been about 50 to 70 years between the great European wars since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which was a consequence of numerous religious wars.

Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

The Thirty Years' War (1618 to 1648) followed the Peace of Augsburg, followed by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714), the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763) and the Crimean War (1853 to 1856).

Then the distances got shorter.

After the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) came the First World War (1914 to 1918).

Just 21 years passed from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Second World War.

There is not one big explanation for this sequence.

But an important reason is that first the children of war participants or victims and then even more so their grandchildren repress the atrocities and finally forget them.

The previous war loses its terrors, which paves the way for the next.

For years, people have been warned time and again not to forget the lessons of the Second World War.

The fewer contemporary witnesses are still alive, the more difficult it becomes.

No automatism for eternal peace

Was Merkel's memory of this sequence in 2018 based on the idea that a few years later it would be that time again on European soil?

Putin's conquest of Crimea could, should have, served as a beacon.

But war in Europe was not a big issue in Germany in 2018 and in the years that followed.

However, some far-sighted politicians reminded that there is no automatism for everlasting peace.

The reason for concern in Germany was not so much the Russian president's aggression as the threatened collapse of Western security systems.

The main events were Britain's decision to leave the European Union (recalling the militancy in Northern Ireland) and the election of Donald Trump.

This fueled doubts about America's role as security guarantor in NATO.

The certainty of the cohesion of the western states began to crack.

The generation of political decision-makers such as Schröder, Merkel, Steinmeier and Scholz was shaped above all by the lessons learned from the Second World War.

As in World War I, the heart of the conflict was that Germany had attacked France.

According to the German interpretation, this must be prevented at all costs.

After 1945, peace should therefore be guaranteed by the close economic ties between Germany and France.

The Montanunion became the core of the European unification process.

After the Iron Curtain fell in the heart of Europe, West German society focused on Western Europe in an effort to achieve perpetual peace.

The German left in particular had a transfigured view of the Soviet Union and its front-line German state, the GDR.

Honesty, however, includes saying that there were notable exceptions.