Germany

Young people gathered in Berlin’s central Potsdamer Square on Thursday and marched through the German capital to protest against the government’s plans to reintroduce military service. While the police counted around 3,000 participants, organizers claimed there were 6,000 demonstrators in Berlin and 50,000 in more than 130 towns and cities across Germany.

“I don’t think I’ll be dying for my friends, relatives or acquaintances, in the worst-case scenario,” 17-year-old Shmuel Schatz, spokesperson for the School Strike Committee, told DW’s Gasia Ohanes. “Rather, in the end, only for those who are put into the trenches for the interests of large corporations like Rheinmetall, ThyssenKrupp, and others, so they can line their pockets at the expense of war.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France has persistently called for Europe to act decisively to defend itself and its own interests in a world where Russia is on the march, China is economically aggressive and the United States is turning away.

Mr. Macron first talked of the need for European strategic “autonomy” in 2017. In the last year, with trans-Atlantic relations spinning downward, Europeans seem to have heard the message: They need to do more and spend more in their own defense.

But there is a built-in political problem. Germany is already spending much more money than its European partners, according to military spending trackers, like that of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research organization. After years of aversion to war because of its history and a hope that the collapse of the Soviet Union would bring about a more peaceful world, the German military had shrunk badly.

A month after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the East German rock star Petra Zieger and her band winched their instruments up to the top of the Brandenburg Gate, looming 85ft over the government district.

For a little over a decade she and her husband, the band’s drummer Peter Taudte, had been testing the boundaries of what artists could get away with under the stifling censorship of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Her hit single Das Eis taut (“The Ice is Thawing”), thought to be the only piece of music ever performed atop the landmark, captured the zeitgeist: a volatile mixture of optimism, wariness, uncertainty and excitement.