The nuclear apocalypse is suddenly within reach in the Karlsruhe shopping center.
On the Kriegsstrasse, of all places, on a Friday in May, two man-high dolls with protective suits and ABC masks in front of their faces stand between the glass fronts of hip clothing stores, a gift shop and a store for muscle nutrition.
Bundeswehr soldiers have set up their advertising stand behind the dolls.
Flecktarn pens lie next to laminated QR codes on the bar tables, fighter planes are chasing across the sky on large flat screens and recruits are struggling over an obstacle course.
Being a soldier feels like a mixture of "Top Gun" and "Full Metal Jacket" in the films.
Lorenz Hemicker
Editor in Politics
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Above all, however, a wheel of fortune turns between the two dolls, the clicking of which can still be heard on the higher floors.
The soldiers want to win people interested in the notoriously understaffed Bundeswehr - and the Ukraine war should actually be a good opportunity to do so.
On this morning, however, most passers-by carelessly stroll past, gossiping, typing or dragging, the soldiers usually turn the wheel of fortune themselves. Only occasionally does a little boy pull his mother to the wheel or a father his daughters to a bar table to talk to a soldier about his own time to speak at the Bundeswehr.
There are no queues of worried young people in Karlsruhe who are now afraid for their country because of the war and want to join the Bundeswehr.
On February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine, an illusion was shattered.
Namely, that after decades of peace, alliance defense is only an anachronistic relic of the Cold War.
The West saw itself protected by a nuclear shield that made any conventional war on its own eastern flank unlikely.
Reports about too few soldiers and broken tanks, about a lack of money and armaments projects gone awry - until Putin's war, this worried only experts.
When the first rockets hit Kyiv, Russian columns advanced into Ukraine and the Kremlin rattled its nuclear saber, that all changed abruptly.
The Bundeswehr felt this too.
Access to their websites increased significantly in the first weeks of the war;
in the career centers, the advisers of the troupe suddenly registered more interested parties, as in several Eastern European countries.
Before that, the Bundeswehr recorded an average of 1,900 initial consultations per week, in March it was 2,900. The turning point proclaimed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz seemed to have fundamentally changed the relationship between Germans and their army.
First of all.
But by April there was not much evidence of that.
"For a short time we had a sharp increase in the number of applicants," says Andreas Westenfelder, a tanned sergeant in his mid-fifties, who still gets into conversation with most people at the advertising stand in Karlsruhe.
Maybe it's because he comes across as more civil than his comrades.
For the longest part of his military career he played the trombone in the Bundeswehr music corps.
While his comrades stand around in military fatigues, Westenfelder wears a short-sleeved service shirt that makes him look a bit like the head of a travel agency.
However, Westenfelder also rarely distributes tickets for consultations that morning.
That doesn't surprise the sergeant.
The hype, he says, is already over.
Even before the war, the Bundeswehr could literally use every woman and every man.
By 2027, the size of the armed forces is expected to grow from just over 183,000 at present to 203,000 soldiers.
More are currently not planned, despite the war, as a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense told the FAZ.
But it is already unclear how this number is to be achieved despite the Bundeswehr's massive advertising efforts.
During the long period of the "peace dividend" the Germans lost consciousness of the army - conscription, once a guarantor for the recruitment of young people, has been suspended for eleven years.
Demographics are also causing problems for the army because the younger generation is shrinking.