Three days after the beginning of the Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a speech in the German parliament that described the Russian invasion of its neighbour as a historic turning point or Zeitenwende for European security, which necessitated a fundamental change in foreign, security, and defence policy in response.Footnote 1 Subsequently, the term Zeitenwende would enter the lexicon of German and international politics and media as shorthand for transformative change of national security and strategic culture, or at least the aspiration for such change. To analyse its effects, scholars have investigated the Zeitenwende from multiple perspectives and theoretical framings, in particular focused on the linkage between external threat perception and security policy change.Footnote 2 This article contributes to this evolving research agenda by putting its analytical focus on Zeitenwende’s effects on Germany’s ontological security – its ability to maintain a coherent and continuous self-perception amid the uncertainties unleashed by the Russo-Ukrainian war. At the core of this analysis lies the recognition that states, like individuals, rely on narrative and biographical continuity to make sense of who they are and where they are going.Footnote 3
The politics of temporality is therefore a vital resource in considering a state’s ontological security and how narratives of continuity and change are embedded within a national framework of reference, its strategic culture, and its collective memory.Footnote 4 However, a majority of the research on temporality and ontological security is focused on the continuity of biographical narratives and how temporal security is maintained in the collective memory of the nation against its own historical Other.Footnote 5 In case of the Federal Republic of Germany, this historical Other has been defined by the militarism, territorial expansionism, and genocidal racism of the ‘Third Reich’, which legitimated a strategic culture of military reticence and civilian power while embedding Germany in a system of collective security and institutionalised multilateralism.Footnote 6 This structural continuity in the post-war and post–Cold War era anchored German ontological security temporally, constituting a historically stable sense of the national Self in collective memory. The analytical focus of this paper, however, lies on how the perception of external shocks and geopolitical ruptures results in a narrative retiming of ontological security, embedding its examination of Germany’s Zeitenwende within the wider context of the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations (IR).Footnote 7 In this we follow Hom’s observation that by ‘exploring how identity emerges “in time”, to be secured “over” or “through” it, we can explore how identity itself constitutes a timing project, an effort to synthesize oneself out of or with a variety of experiences, environmental changes, and other timing agents’.Footnote 8 Hence, rather than viewing identity as merely unfolding in time, we can understand it as a timing project – an ongoing effort to ‘(re)produce not only a coherent sense of self but also a stable sense of time, allowing individuals to feel that the dynamic world is unfolding in a manageable way’.Footnote 9 Framed in this way, the temporal challenges posed by events such as Germany’s Zeitenwende become central not simply as historical disruptions, but as moments that demand a retiming of self and world. As such, we place emphasis on temporal ruptures as opposed to historical continuity.
And here, the Russo-Ukrainian War provides fertile ground for analysis as Russia’s invasion and occupation of its neighbour fundamentally disrupted a sense of historical progress and chronological continuity in European security, characterised by an end of geopolitical division, a ‘peace dividend’ of substantial defence cuts and reduction of force sizes, and the strategic assumption that interstate war and territorial conquest were relics of the past. The Russo-Ukrainian war disrupted German ontological security in particular, unsettling a stable post-war and post–Cold war national sense of Self that had defined the Federal Republic primarily as an economic and civilian, but not a military, power.Footnote 10 This rupture of German ontological security and the displacement of a prevailing sense of German foreign policy continuity and stability would manifest in the Zeitenwende narrative of a temporal reordering of German national security, calling for the revitalisation of German military power in defence of European security, freedom, and democratic values. This narrative retiming of national security also redefined the identity of key actors – casting Russia no longer as a ‘partner’ but as a strategic threat – and shifted the broader setting in which Germany perceived itself, from a geoeconomic power existing within a benign European security order marked by stability and continuity towards a geopolitical actor facing a new era of strategic uncertainty.
Our argument unfolds in three steps. First, we engage with the growing efforts to conceptually bridge the ‘temporal turn’ in IR with scholarship in Ontological Security Studies, centring our approach on the narrative construction of ontological security and the impact of historical ruptures that result in the ‘retiming’ of hegemonic concepts of national identity and international politics. We evidence the importance of these dimensions by showing how the Russo-Ukrainian war has forced a temporal disruption of German identity on the ontological level, which necessitated a narrative reordering that challenged long-held beliefs and common-sense assumptions about national identity, military power, and international order.
Second, we examine Germany’s historical approach to national security and defence policy, in particular the pairing of a post–Cold war ‘peace dividend’ with an established strategic culture of military reticence and restraint, its disruption by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the practical policy implications initiated by the narrative reordering of German temporal security as part of the Zeitenwende turnaround. Third, we analyse the back-and-forth between strategic paradigm shifts, initial policy adjustments, and counter-narratives that challenge the Zeitenwende narrative and the temporal reordering of onthological security. Here, we zoom in on contemporary political and societal debates over Germany’s ‘war readiness’ and issues of military history and identity that have emerged as discursive focal points within the Zeitenwende context, where competing temporal security narratives clash over the meaning of the past and the demands of the present.
Our findings make three principal contributions. First, they expand the concept of temporal security narratives beyond constituting national collective memories and biographical continuity by showing how security narratives can be disrupted by geopolitical events and external threats in the present, and crucially the anticipation of further hostility in the future resulting in turn in the temporal reordering of national security. Second, this article contributes to the growing research literature on German national security, foreign, and defence policy and the implications of the Zeitenwende paradigm shift by adding an ontological security perspective to these conversations that demonstrates how the Zeitenwende’s temporal reordering of national security goes beyond policy adjustments and issues of defence spending, military recruitment, or national security strategy, and also addresses questions of national identity, collective memory, and historical change and continuity. Third, our investigation furthers the developing research agenda in IR on the role of ontological security and temporality in international politics, in particular the role of temporal security narratives for the legitimation of national security planning and defence policymaking.Footnote 11
We conclude that German ontological security was fundamentally destabilised by the resurgence of direct threats to European security, because its own militarist and genocidal past reemerged as a contemporary and existential threat to European security and the liberal international order at large in the form of Russian neo-imperialism and territorial expansionism. Temporally, a response to this threat could no longer be reconciled with an established post–Cold War strategic culture and associated narratives such as strategic energy partnership with Russia (Ostpolitik), economic engagement with authoritarian powers (Wandel durch Handel), and military reticence. In its place, the Zeitenwende narrative emerged, advocating for a revitalised German military and a leadership role in European security. Yet this narrative of a temporal reordering of national security also remains constrained by an incremental policy implementation and historical associations with Germany’s own militaristic past, creating enduring political and societal tensions and ontological insecurities about Germany’s role in European security and the remaking of military identity.
Zeitenwende, ontological security, and temporality
Existing research on the Zeitenwende paradigm shift has concentrated in particular on its policy impact,Footnote 12 the publication of Germany’s first-ever National Security Strategy,Footnote 13 Germany’s relationships with key allies and adversaries,Footnote 14 and debates as to whether the Zeitenwende prompted a re-evaluation of Germany’s approach to nuclear deterrence.Footnote 15 Researchers have questioned whether the proclaimed transformation has fully materialised, pointing to delays in policy implementation, domestic political constraints, and external geopolitical challenges, and have asked whether Zeitenwende represents a structural shift in German foreign and defence policy or whether it is solely a discursive tool for justifying policy adaptations within existing frameworks.Footnote 16 Most recently, scholars have turned to questions of identity and culture, analysing whether Zeitenwende has reshaped German foreign policy identity.Footnote 17 Some argue that the policy shift signals a break from Germany’s post–Cold War reluctance to engage in military affairs, while others suggest that deep-seated cultural and historical factors continue to constrain meaningful change in Germany’s strategic orientation.Footnote 18 Frank Stengel, for example, points out that Germany’s ‘out of area’ operations in the 1990s and 2000s already represented a break with prior notions of military restraint and Germany as a civilian power.Footnote 19 What has received limited attention so far, however, are Zeitenwende’s effects on Germany’s ontological security and self-identity.Footnote 20 This is surprising because, as Tobias Bunde writes, ‘Germany’s particular response to the war is hard to grasp without paying attention to identities and ideas on the domestic level’.Footnote 21 As this paper argues, investigations of the content and impact of Germany’s Zeitenwende need to consider how states construct and maintain a stable sense of self, making it an ideal case for analysis through the lens of Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with its focus on how actors seek a continuous identity in the face of existential uncertainty. Since its introduction into IR, OSS has grown into a vibrant and diverse field. Scholars have explored the links between identity and foreign and security policy,Footnote 22 how disruptions to narrative continuity create ontological insecurity,Footnote 23 and how crises prompt narrative adjustments.Footnote 24 OSS has also been expanded beyond the state to consider non-state actors and institutions as subjects of ontological security,Footnote 25 opening space for analysing NGOs, and international organisations as identity-seeking actors in their own right. This broadening of the field has been accompanied by theoretical refinement, such as calls for greater conceptual clarity and methodological rigour,Footnote 26 further engagement with core concepts such as anxiety and sovereignty,Footnote 27 and connecting OSS conceptually to other ‘turns’, specifically the historical turn in IR.Footnote 28 The rise of populism, nationalism, and ideological contestationFootnote 29 has further sharpened OSS’s analytical edge, as seen in Steele and Homolar’s work connecting ontological (in)security to populist narratives.Footnote 30
At the heart of this literature is the recognition that narratives are the primary vehicle through which ontological security is constructed. These narratives position the state within a broader historical trajectory, delineate the boundary between Self and Other, and offer a sense of purpose and coherence. Importantly, they do not just describe reality but constitute it, shaping what is perceived as possible, necessary, or legitimate. However, a significant theoretical blind spot persists in this growing body of work: the temporal dimension of narrative identity. While OSS acknowledges the importance of continuity over time, it often treats temporality as a background assumption rather than a site of political contestation. This is where Bachleitner’s engagement with ‘temporal security’ begins to fill a critical gap as it aims to connect OSS to the temporal turn in IR.Footnote 31 Bachleitner shows that ontological security is grounded not just in spatial relationships (i.e. with significant Others) but also in temporal relations, particularly in relation to a state’s past. Temporal security places an analytical emphasis on the national historical context of collective memory that guides state behaviour in international politics by seeking to maintain integrity of the national story against its own historical Other.Footnote 32 In aiming to maintain temporal security, political decision-making in international relations is thus primarily motivated by the traumas of the past and the desire not to repeat the historical mistakes of the nation, such as past military aggression and defeat in war. This work, however, focuses primarily on one layer of identity construction – historic continuity and ontological security’s relationship with collective memory, i.e. maintaining the integrity of biographical narratives and state identity.Footnote 33 As Steele points out, divergence between a state’s biographical narrative and its actions can produce anxiety and as such result in ontological insecurity.Footnote 34 In the words of Mälksoo, ‘memory thus emerges as a vital self-identity need as it is invoked to constitute the central narrative of a state about its past in order to form a core part of its consistent sense of the self in the present’.Footnote 35 However, this focus on historical continuity leaves other intersubjective and international dimensions of temporal security underexplored, in particular, how ontological security can be maintained when biographical narratives are disrupted, forcing an adjustment of the nation’s story of itself and its mnemonical security. Where biographical narrative highlights the role of coherent storytelling in maintaining identity, it does not fully capture the ways in which disruptions in the perceived flow of time – such as sudden shifts in historical self-perception or ruptures in the geopolitical ‘flow’ of time – can both generate ontological insecurity and also redefine established security narratives. Similarly, mnemonical security, while focusing on collective memory struggles and the securitisation of historical narratives, does not necessarily engage with how temporal restructuring itself can be a source of ontological (in)security. As we argue in this paper, ontological security can be retimed via the narrative reordering of identities – Self, Other, and international order – shifting the analytical focus of temporal security away from a prevalent concern with biographical continuity and mnemonical security towards the significance of narrative ruptures and discontinuities.
Temporal security narratives and the retiming of ontological security
The ‘temporal turn’ in IR seeks to examine and challenge the hegemonic foundations of the discipline and notions of the ‘timelessness’ of theoretical foundations and axiomatic assumptions as well as the linearity of historical processes.Footnote 36 Political constructs of time are inherently contested and, as such, can be subjected to revisionist challenges, while the timing of events and the imposing of chronological order in international relations, such as the ‘unipolar moment’, the ‘end of history’, the ‘peace of Westphalia’, or the ‘rise of China’, are in themselves a political act.Footnote 37 As Hom and Campbell note, the ‘language and logic of time’ are a key resource in the ideational repertoire of political elites in legitimating war and sustaining the use of force.’Footnote 38 The event of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, for example, would be translated by the George W. Bush administration into the intergenerational continuum of the ‘War on Terror’ and provide legitimation of its underlying strategic assumptions, ideological dispositions, and national security agenda – a temporal security narrative whose open-endedness would ultimately be reframed as an unwinnable ‘forever war’ and outright strategic failure.Footnote 39
Security narratives are normative constructions that establish a cultural framework of interpretation, which creates audience expectations for political behaviour and communication, thus both enabling and constraining policy choices.Footnote 40 As Ronald Krebs put it, ‘policies at odds with underlying narratives strike audiences as illegitimate: they have few public advocates, and their few advocates are ignored or treated as beyond the pale’.Footnote 41 Temporally then, security narratives perform the function of creating and sustaining the meanings of national security and identity by linking the past, present, and future, thus imposing a structured order of events and providing a sense of logical coherence and ontological security in the story of the Self.Footnote 42 As humans are fundamentally ‘storytelling animals’, we strive to impose a logical interpretation of our external environment to make sense of our surroundings and our very own sense of self through the narrative construction of social reality.Footnote 43 Routinised everyday practices and trusted social interactions – such as those with recognised authorities, institutions, and experts – along with commonly shared intersubjective meanings and stable identities that define the Self and Other collectively construct a sense of the ‘real’ and ‘natural’ world. This fosters continuity in biographical narratives and establishes a sense of personal agency, making individuals feel ontologically secure within their social environment.Footnote 44 As a result, individuals are able to ‘continually integrate events from the external world and weave them into the ongoing “story” of the self’.Footnote 45 As ideational categories, concepts of individual and group identity, common-sense status, and the ‘natural’ order of things are socially constructed – stories that we tell ourselves and infuse with meaning – and are thus not permanently fixed and unassailable. They can be subject to potential challenges and revisions: ‘What makes a given response “appropriate” or “acceptable” necessitates a shared – but unproven and unproveable – framework of reality.’Footnote 46 In international politics, ontological security is analogously constituted and maintained through widely shared and deep-seated narratives that position the nation state vis-à-vis its external spatial and temporal Other, providing a sense of ordered reality and chronological continuity as a result.Footnote 47 This narrative ordering of reality constitutes a sense of national belonging and historical groundedness as ontological security. As Annick Wibben has pointed out in her work on feminist security narratives: ‘Narratives are inherently political; they always mark/mask a political moment, and they simultaneously invest and invent an order.’Footnote 48
These are not just abstract stories but structured frameworks that provide order, continuity, and meaning. These identity narratives are composed of key elements: plots, which provide temporal and causal sequencing; actors, who serve as protagonists and antagonists; and settings, which anchor the narrative within a specific spatial and normative environment.Footnote 49
Narrative constructs of temporality and the timing of events in international politics reproduced in political rhetoric, media representations, and expert discourse constitute a ‘regime of truth’, in the Foucauldian sense, that seeks to legitimate political outcomes and establish dominant interpretive frameworks of meaning.Footnote 50 Narrative continuity is the ontological foundation of temporal security, which, however, can be disrupted, forcing an adjustment of the prevailing sense of the national Self. In IR, research on ontological security has explored how states maintain a stable identity and are motivated to act based on their self-perception, affecting their political decision-making.Footnote 51 As with individuals, crisis moments and critical situations can render a state ontologically insecure, forcing a revision of self-identity. This occurs ‘when a state realizes that its narratived actions no longer reflect or are reflected by how it sees itself’.Footnote 52 As Hom notes, one of the most significant aspects of the temporality of international politics is the notion of ruptures, ‘shocking and unprecedented moments of radical discontinuity’, which unsettle the status quo and present possibilities for political and social transformation by resetting an established timeline.Footnote 53 A general sense of historical disruption and chronological discontinuity can unsettle ontological security by challenging the hegemonic narratives that underpin it and thus affecting the nation’s collective memory, the ‘biographical self-narrative of a state’.Footnote 54 We argue, however, that temporal security narratives can be successful in retiming ontological security, when the narrative shock and disruption caused by a change in perception of the national Self, hostile Others, and the international system ultimately maintain integrity with the temporal Other in the nation’s collective memory. In the case of Germany’s Zeitenwende, the narrative displacement of post–Cold War security narratives such as Ostpolitik, Wandel durch Handel, and ‘peace dividend’ could still be framed and legitimated via a temporal security framework that represented Germany’s revitalised military power role and commitment to European security as antithetical to military aggression and expansionism. At the same time, as Germany shows, different temporalities can be experienced simultaneously, resulting, in the German case, in a fracturing of security narratives between supporters and opponents of the retiming of national security and structural policy adjustments.
Timing German ontological security: From ‘Stunde Null’ through Wendezeit to Zeitenwende
Germany’s post-war identity has long been shaped by the foundational narrative of Zivilmacht or ‘civilian power’, grounded in a normative commitment to multilateralism, anti-militarism, and the promotion of democracy and human rights. These principles, as Eberle and Handl observe, were ‘articulated much more vocally toward the Kremlin’, particularly as tensions with Russia increased.Footnote 55 This identity narrative, however, cannot be understood in isolation from its temporal dimension. As Forsberg points out, the evolution of Germany’s foreign policy has always been embedded in a specific historical consciousness – one that seeks stability through continuity, moral redemption, and a firm anchoring in the liberal international order.Footnote 56 As with any identity narrative, Germany’s self-conception as a civilian power is deeply intertwined with the politics of time. Temporal narratives serve not only to situate the state within a broader historical arc but also to secure ontological stability by providing coherence and purpose in relation to its past. The roots of Germany’s contemporary temporal identity can be traced back to the immediate aftermath of the surrender of the German Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945 and the complete political, military, economic, and moral collapse of Germany in the Second World War. This event, referred to in German as ‘Stunde Null’ or ‘Zero Hour’, indicates a temporal disruption of German identity on the ontological level that was so fundamental as to literally reset the clock of the nation’s historical narrative of itself. The Federal Republic of Germany, which assumed the historical continuity of the German Empire (1871–1945), would subsequently institutionalise a temporal narrative of a rebirth of Germany as a liberal and democratic entity anchored in the West. For the Federal Republic, the ‘Third Reich’ therefore represented the ‘significant historical other’ against which its own identity and sense of ontological security was constructed and maintained in the post-war era.Footnote 57 German ‘mnemonical security’ had established a stable and secure self-identity by demilitarising the historical narrative of the Federal Republic as an antithesis to Nazi Germany, resulting in a dominant strategic culture of military reticence and restraint.Footnote 58 This temporal narrative of democratic, liberal, and anti-militarist rehabilitation of West Germany within the community of nations would ultimately be transferred into the collective memory of the German nation as a whole following reunification in 1990, which not only absorbed the territory of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic but also established the chronological continuity of the historical narrative of West Germany and its institutions as enduring hegemonic knowledge and the dominant timeline, subsuming the history of East Germany as secondary and finite – a temporal aberration in the collective memory of the German nation. The Wendezeit, or time of change, of 1989/1990 therefore did not constitute an ontological shock to (West) German temporal security and identity; quite to the contrary, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the negotiated settlement that ended the Cold War, which culminated in the 2 + 4 Treaty and the reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990, provided a powerful confirmation of Germany’s post-war identity as a peaceful and democratic status quo power, structurally embedded in the institutional architecture of the liberal international order.Footnote 59 German temporal security, i.e. the ontological integrity of the collective memory vis-à-vis its historic Other, Nazi Germany, had been maintained. In foreign policy and national security terms, Germany saw itself ‘encircled by friends’ within a Europe ‘whole and free’ after the end of the Cold War, with Berlin articulating a strategic vision that saw Germany assume a role as a primarily civilian and geo-economic power in European and international affairs.Footnote 60 German ontological security manifested in a broad political and societal consensus from 1990 onwards that emphasised strategic continuity, including reliance on the United States of America for defence and security via NATO, paired with a ‘peace dividend’ of significantly reduced defence budgets and continued cuts to the combat strength and troop numbers of the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces), strategic economic engagement with Russia, primarily in the energy sector – a continuation of the Ostpolitik rapprochement of the 1970s and 1980s – as well as a Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) paradigm of geo-economic engagement and commercial interdependence with non-Western emerging powers, especially China.Footnote 61 This sense of German post-war and post–Cold War ontological security would be disrupted by the Russo-Ukrainian War, as it challenged German strategic assumptions about the nature of international politics in the 21st century, such as the primacy of geo-economics over geopolitics, the negligent significance of military power, and the effectiveness of multilateral diplomacy and the unchallenged status of European security.
Zeitenwende as narrative disruption and the retiming of national security
In the Zeitenwende speech of 27 February 2022, Chancellor Scholz used the temporal security narrative of a historic rupture in Europe’s post-Cold War trajectory to legitimate a strategic reorientation of German national security and the outlook of foreign and defence policy. As Hom notes, the timing of events in periods of upheaval ‘may involve re-timing, or re-establishing useful relationships and processes; or more laborious attempts to time anew, to create novel timing modes in the face of unsettling events’.Footnote 62 For Germany, re-timing meant a narrative reordering of national security, questioning long-held beliefs and common-sense assumptions about national identity, military power, and international politics with significant practical policy implications. The Zeitenwende narrative disrupted German ontological security by reorienting it temporally from a post–Cold War strategic culture of military reticence towards contemporary leadership responsibilities for the strategic deterrence of Russia via NATO and the continued military support of Ukraine.Footnote 63 Germany’s ontological security was challenged because the necessity of supplying Ukraine with weapons in defence of its national sovereignty and territorial integrity and strategically reorienting NATO towards conventional deterrence of Russia could no longer be reconciled with temporal security narratives of post-war Ostpolitik and a post–Cold War ‘peace dividend’ that had guided German national security and foreign policy thinking until this point.Footnote 64 In his speech, Scholz emphasised the urgent need for a substantial modernisation and rearmament of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, in all areas, including its continued capability to deploy US tactical nuclear weapons under NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement.Footnote 65 Among the most significant announcements in the Zeitenwende speech were the creation of a 100 billion EUR special fund for an immediate increase in defence spending, as well as the promise to invest ‘from now on – year by year – more than two percent of gross domestic product in our defence’, thereby indicating that Germany would not only be meeting, but regularly exceeding, NATO’s 2 per cent target for defence expenditure by 2024. In an extraordinarily martial rhetoric for a German head of government, Scholz warned the Russian president not to underestimate German resolve ‘together with our allies, to defend every square meter of alliance territory’.Footnote 66 With the announcement to procure armaments for Heron TP drones from Israel and US-American F-35 fighter jets as successor to the ageing fleet of Tornado fighter bombers in the nuclear sharing role, contentious defence policy issues that had been discussed fruitlessly for years were summarily concluded. Germany would also abandon its previous military restraint and approve substantial arms deliveries to Ukraine, a policy shift that would ultimately result in Germany emerging as the second-largest provider of military aid to Ukraine behind the United States (with 64.6 billion EUR), committing arms, ammunition, and other military supplies worth 12.6 billion EUR up to the end of February 2025.Footnote 67 The sustained supply of the Ukrainian armed forces with artillery, ammunition, air defence systems, infantry fighting vehicles, and modern main battle tanks from German manufacturers had overturned a hitherto-existing taboo of German foreign policy not to send war materials into an active conflict zone.Footnote 68 On the material level, the Bundeswehr had to recapitalise after more than 20 years of structural underfunding, which some studies suggested had cut as much as 500 billion EUR from subsequent defence budgets as a result of the ‘peace dividend’ after 1990.Footnote 69 All NATO countries had cut back the size of their armed forces after the end of the Cold War, but the reduction in combat strength of the Bundeswehr had been the most dramatic among them, with some categories, such as artillery, being reduced by 96 per cent compared to Cold War levels, and other capabilities, such as short-range air defence systems (SHORAD), for example, having been eliminated completely.Footnote 70 Only two days after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the chief of the German army, General Alfons Mais, had garnered widespread media attention with an embittered public acknowledgement that the troops under his command were more or less ‘bare’ in terms of their ability to provide for the conventional deterrence of a peer rival such as Russia.Footnote 71 The dramatic statement underscored how low military readiness in Germany had fallen as a result of the decades-long ‘peace dividend’. The Bundeswehr only had ammunition reserves for two or three days of high-intensity combat, while the number of available tanks, helicopters, submarines, and fighter jets had fallen so low that the government’s annual report on the readiness status of major weapons systems had been classified in 2019, apparently to save the defence minister in Berlin from public embarrassment.Footnote 72
Following German participation in NATO-led peacekeeping operations in the Balkans in the 1990s (IFOR, KFOR) and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the German armed forces had been recalibrated from a large, relatively static, and heavily armoured territorial defence force to providing medium-sized expeditionary contingents for international crisis management operations in the context of United Nations, NATO, and European Union missions. As Nabers and Stengel note, post–Cold War German security narratives had emphasised the emergence of ‘new threats’, a set of ‘loosely connected phenomena ranging from armed conflict within states and state failure to environmental destruction to mass migration to organized crime, piracy, and terrorism’ necessitating a ‘networked security’ approach combining civilian and military resources and state and non-state actors.Footnote 73 In line with this understanding of the post–Cold War security environment, the annexation of Crimea and occupation of territory by Russian forces and separatists in 2014 had initially been viewed as limited conflict that did not fundamentally alter strategic perceptions of the European security environment. Against this prevailing sense of strategic continuity, the Zeitenwende narrative reoriented the Bundeswehr’s operational focus from peacekeeping, counterterrorism, and counter-insurgency towards conventional deterrence of Russia with quickly deployable and sustainable land, air, and naval forces, using state-of-the-art equipment.Footnote 74
Temporally, security narratives that stressed the Bundeswehr’s war-fighting capabilities and military readiness against a peer adversary indicated a return of Germany’s Cold War role as the conventional backbone of NATO, albeit now territorially forwardly deployed on NATO’s eastern flank.Footnote 75 This strategic and geopolitical turnaround the Zeitenwende speech by Scholz had originated was reconfirmed by the publication of Germany’s first-ever National Security Strategy (NSS) in June 2023 and a new set of defence policy guidelines in November of that same year that both identified Russia as the biggest threat to Euro-Atlantic security ‘for the foreseeable future’ and the main operational focus of the Bundeswehr.Footnote 76 Both documents made specific references to the Zeitenwende narrative, with the NSS declaring that ‘Germany’s security environment is undergoing profound change and we are living through a watershed era’.Footnote 77 According to defence minister Boris Pistorius and chief of defence General Carsten Breuer, the military implications of this change was a collective rethinking of the role of the armed forces for national security, framed as deliberate temporal disruption of past security narratives and strategic assumptions:
As a nation and as a society, we have neglected the Bundeswehr for decades. For too long, we were unable to imagine the scenario of a war on European soil and a direct threat to our country. The Bundeswehr was geared towards international crisis management operations abroad. Common structures and capabilities necessary for national and collective defence were abandoned.Footnote 78
On the narrative level, the Zeitenwende represented the greatest strategic shift in German foreign, defence, and security policy since the end of the Cold War. Scholz himself would subsequently reaffirm the Zeitenwende narrative on multiple occasions, for example, in repeatedly vowing to transform the Bundeswehr into Europe’s most modern and most capable conventional armed forces, and in calling for an increase in defence industrial production in Germany of weapons and ammunitions both for the continued military support of Ukraine and the modernisation of the Bundeswehr.Footnote 79 Leading German media outlets, such as the Spiegel news magazine, would comment on how images of Scholz at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new Rheinmetall ammunitions factory in northern Germany or riding together with the Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda in a German Boxer armoured personnel carrier (APC) during an inspection of Bundeswehr troops stationed in Lithuania as part of NATO’s enhanced forward presence were quite literally ‘unthinkable’ only a few years before. Leading news media that frequently utilised and reproduced the Zeitenwende framing reinforced the sense of a marked temporal disruption of German national security, including its political prioritisation and public visibility in the everyday.Footnote 80 The material consequence of this narrative shift was maybe most obvious on the issue of NATO’s 2 per cent target of defence expenditures, which Germany had agreed to in principle at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales but never actually reached in practice, a persistent source of tensions and irritations in transatlantic relations under the Trump presidency in particular. Germany would reach the NATO quota for the first time in 2024 with reported defence expenditures of 71.8 billion EUR (76.8 billion US$), resulting from the combination of the regular defence budget (c. 52 billion EUR) and the special fund inaugurated by Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech (19.8 billion EUR), plus assorted defence-related expenditures from other ministries.Footnote 81 Given the size of the German economy, with a GDP of 4.2 trillion EUR in 2023, future defence expenditures of 2 or 3+ per cent of GDP would result in Germany having the fourth-largest defence budget in the world (behind the United States, Russia, and China) and by far the largest in NATO Europe, ahead of the United Kingdom and France. Before the narrative intervention of the Zeitenwende, the various Merkel and Scholz coalition governments had rejected such defence expenditures as strategically unnecessary, fiscally impossible, and politically ill advised. A German military leadership role for European security that was associated with such a substantial budget increase had also been rejected by mobilising temporal security narratives of German military preponderance on the continent as potentially politically destabilising and ignoring the historical sensitives of Germany’s neighbours.Footnote 82 German defence expenditures had accordingly remained relatively constant throughout the 2000s, with only moderate budget increases following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, resulting in defence expenditures rising from 1.1% (2014) to 1.4% (2022) of GDP.Footnote 83 In the pre-Zeitenwende context, German temporal security narratives had still been constructed primarily against the historical Other of Germany’s own militarist and expansionist past and as continuation of the post–Cold War era ‘peace dividend’. Through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this emphasis on biographical continuity and temporal security would be displaced as a legitimation device for German structural inaction and passivity on security and defence matters. Rather than Germany’s historic responsibility for threatening European security in the past, its ability to defend it in the future became a primary concern, initially fuelling a new dynamic of policy activism in the present. Discursively, this reordering of German temporal security produced a profound change in the way issues of defence, military power, and armaments were approached politically and prioritised strategically, as well as how these issues were represented to the public. Both domestically and abroad, the Zeitenwende narrative of historic disruption and strategic reordering was subsequently perceived as a significant shift in German post-War and post–Cold War policy, a deliberate and conscious break with established paradigms of Germany’s world political role and self-identity.Footnote 84 Narratively, Scholz and high-ranking members of his cabinet, such as defence minister Pistorius, positioned the Zeitenwende deliberately against past strategic assumptions and associated temporal security constructs, including the post–Cold War era ‘peace dividend’ of structural underinvestment in the armed forces. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Scholz, for example, invoked the narrative of ‘an epochal tectonic shift’ to underline Germany’s willingness to become ‘the guarantor of European security’, drawing a clear historical distinction between the bygone post–Cold War era and a new, contemporary multipolar world.Footnote 85 According to Scholz:
The crucial role for Germany at this moment is to step up as one of the main providers of security in Europe by investing in our military, strengthening the European defense industry, being up our military presence on NATO’s eastern flank, and training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces.Footnote 86
Yet Scholz also insisted that this era should not result in a ‘new Cold War’ paradigm of competing spheres of influence and opposing blocs, instead stressing the value of alliances and partnerships in maintaining the established liberal international order and opposing Russian aggression and imperialism. Scholz thus reaffirmed the Zeitenwende as a temporal security narrative to reorient German foreign, security, defence, and energy policy for a new era, but, at the same time, he rejected the proposition that this era was to be defined by the geopolitical antagonism between democracies and autocratic powers, in particular the political, economic, and military competition between the United States and China, on which Germany remained economically dependent. As the next section will demonstrate, while the Zeitenwende rhetoric had indeed initiated a reordering of German temporal security narratives, challenging and partially displacing post–Cold War paradigms of Germany’s anti-militarist re-emergence as a primarily economic and civilian power, this process was both an ongoing and unfinished structural adjustment in policy terms. The strategic necessity established by the Zeitenwende narrative of responding to contemporary security challenges in Europe in the form of Russian aggression and imperialism with the growth of German military power continued to compete with temporal security narratives that identified a German leadership role in European security and defence as an ontological antithesis to Germany’s historic rehabilitation after the Holocaust and the Second World War. The latter was a rallying cry and voter mobilisation device of both left-wing and right-wing populist parties and politicians in particular. This oscillating quality to Germany’s Zeitenwende between strategic reorientation, unfinished policy adjustment, and narrative contestation was underscored by the fraught political and societal debate over Germany’s military identity and ‘war readiness’. These issues had emerged as discursive focal points within the Zeitenwende context, where competing temporal security narratives clashed over the meaning of the past and the demands of the present.
Temporal reordering and the contestation of the Zeitenwende narrative
The Russo-Ukrainian War constituted an ideational challenge to German ontological security because it posited the question to what extent a country alternatively categorised as either ‘pacificist’, ‘post-heroic’, or ‘anti-militarist’ had to be made ready for war again, not just materially, but intellectually and even culturally.Footnote 87 A historically constituted strategic culture of military reticence and the associated socio-political notions about the utility of the use of force in international politics in the post–Cold War era were directly contested by the Zeitenwende narrative of a transformed European security environment. The narrative reordering and retiming of national security therefore manifested primarily in the reframing of German military power on the ideational level. This conceptual reconfiguration was exemplified by the issue of ‘war readiness’. As a result of the Zeitenwende shift announced by Scholz in 2022, defence minister Pistorius had demanded repeatedly that the Bundeswehr under his command had to become ‘kriegstüchtig’, i.e. ready for war.Footnote 88 Subsequently, ‘war readiness’ was made the overarching goal of German defence policy under Pistorius, with German strategic assessments stating that a reconstituted Russia could launch a full-scale assault on a NATO member state by 2029, with Poland and the Baltic states seen as potential targets of Russian aggression.Footnote 89 Constitutionally, the Bundeswehr, established on 12 November 1955, the 200th birthday of the Prussian military reformer, General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, could only ever be used for defensive purposes and sent into combat alongside Germany’s allies as part of system of collective security, such as NATO or the European Union; by definition, any war Germany fought could only be one fought in response to an outside attack.Footnote 90 The differences between war readiness and more common expressions in German political discourse like Verteidigungsbereitschaft (readiness for defence) were thus semantic rather than systemic. However, their different framing and tonality directly touched on issues of Zeitenwende’s impact on political and societal attitudes towards the armed forces, in particular Clausewitzean notions of war and the use of force as a political instrument in service of strategic objectives rather than merely an unwanted relic of the past and political taboo. The narrative reordering and structural transformation of national security thereby remained both politically and socially contentious. The German strategic community, for example, had welcomed Pistorius’ statement about a ‘war-ready’ Bundeswehr as a long overdue injection of realism and acknowledgement of strategic and geopolitical facts into the debate over German national security and defence policy. Political opposition against the reframing, however, had manifested also from within the SPD, the party of Scholz and Pistorius, with some members of parliament criticising the term as unhelpful as it was likely to produce a fear response in the German population, in particular by invoking collective historical memories of the devastation of the Second World War.Footnote 91 A similar dynamic of moderate policy adjustment rather than systemic change emerged on the issue of military conscription, which had been phased out in Germany in 2011 and whose return would be debated as a consequence of the Zeitenwende paradigm shift. The Bundeswehr, which was set to grow from around 180,000 soldiers to about 203,000 by 2032 according to official plans, had struggled for years to meet its recruitment targets given Germany’s changing demographics, with an ageing and shrinking native-born population and the need to compete for a limited pool of applicants with better paying and less demanding and dangerous career options offered by the private sector. In June 2024, a plan for a new selective military service module was introduced on the cabinet level (but not implemented), which consisted of a new mandatory questionnaire to be filled out by all 18-year-old German males about their interest in the Bundeswehr and their willingness to serve. Recruitment itself remained reliant on volunteers. The aim for the measure was to provide 200,000 new reservists within 10 years, which would enable Germany to expand its total troop strength to around 460,000 in the event of war, nearly twice the number of soldiers available in 2024. Critics, however, doubted the effectiveness of the measure. A return of mandatory conscription, however, which had underwritten an active troop strength of around 500,000 in the Cold War–era Bundeswehr, had been vehemently opposed by all three parties in the governing ‘traffic light’ coalition of SPD, Greens, and the FDP and was also not introduced as part of the CDU/CSU–SPD agreement concluded in April 2025 about forming a new government coalition.
Beyond political and societal debates over the appropriate adjustments of defence policy, however, the issue of military identity, history, and tradition also remained contested within the armed forces themselves. The political prioritisation of ‘combat readiness’ in the context of the Zeitenwende shift challenged established historical narratives about the Bundeswehr and an institutional sense of temporal security constituted primarily against its historic Other, the Wehrmacht.Footnote 92 In this context, a staff officer working in the German Ministry of Defence (BMvg) released a revised statement on the official guidelines on military tradition (Traditionserlass) in August 2024, highlighting the successful combat record of several Wehrmacht officers, who would later join the Bundeswehr, including Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann, the most successful fighter pilot of the Second World War.Footnote 93 The wartime achievements by members of the Bundeswehr’s founding generation, despite having fought for Nazi Germany, were presented as favourable historical examples of ‘combat readiness’ to be emulated by soldiers in today’s Bundeswehr without problematising or contextualising under which political and ideological conditions these military feats had been performed, i.e. Nazi Germany’s war of genocidal conquest. After critical media coverage, the defence ministry was forced to officially rescind the amendment, clarifying that the original Traditionserlass remained unchanged and that combat effectiveness alone was not a criterion that could justify military tradition, but that the values of liberal and democratic Germany had to be considered as well and be represented in the actions of military leaders.Footnote 94 While German temporal security narratives were increasingly defined by historic change and discontinuity with past strategic assumptions of the post–Cold War era, this episode illustrated how a profound ontological uncertainty remained in the armed forces about how exactly this strategic reorientation was to be reconciled against a German military identity whose collective memory remained dominated by the Wehrmacht and the Second World War. The uncertainty over the interpretation and utility of German military history for orienting German soldiers in a changed security environment demonstrated how the historic rupture of the Russian invasion of Ukraine had not fully displaced the ‘temporal Other’ of Germany’s own expansionist, militarist, and genocidal past but in fact recontextualised it.Footnote 95 As Karl Gustafsson has pointed out in his work on Japanese security policy, the temporal Other of a nation’s militarist and expansionist past can become desecuritised in official discourse in order to facilitate policy change.Footnote 96 In case of Germany, the temporal reordering of the Zeitenwende narrative did not displace the temporal Other of the ‘Third Reich’, but it linked German national security no longer to a historically constituted strategic culture of military reticence that had developed in response to the Nazi past. Instead of past military reticence, Germany’s new role was defined as providing security leadership in defence of European freedom and democratic values. Pistorius invoked precisely this temporal security narrative in his speech in the outgoing Bundestag on 18 March 2025 before the historic vote to amend the German Basic Law and exempt security related expenditures (above 1 per cent of GDP) from the constitutional debt break:
we face one of the greatest, if not the greatest, security policy challenges in the history of our country – a challenge that we cannot overcome alone. We need a strong Europe that is capable of defending our prosperity, our freedom, and our security: for ourselves, but above all for future generations.Footnote 97
According to General Breuer, the highest-ranking German soldier and principal military advisor of the federal government, the Zeitenwende was first and foremost a change of mindset, both in the armed forces and in German society at large: ‘The change of times is a change of thoughts.’Footnote 98 Beyond issues of personnel recruitment, organisational structure, and equipment needs of the armed forces, the temporal reordering and recontextualising of German security narratives problematised what mentality a new historical and geopolitical era required, both in terms of a combat mindset (or lack thereof) in Germany’s military and the resilience of German society as a whole, faced with the prospect of war and national defence against external threats, including the protection of physical and digital infrastructure from Russian sabotage and subversion. According to public opinion polls, a clear majority of Germans supported this change of mindset, including the continued military support of Ukraine and substantially increased defence expenditures, while identifying Russia as a direct threat to German national security.Footnote 99 The disruption and temporal reordering of national security the Zeitenwende narrative had initiated was shifting the boundaries of accepted political and societal discourse towards greater acceptance of military necessities and requirements and public awareness of the existence of geopolitical threats to national security.
The strategic reorientation of Germany, including the rearmament of the Bundeswehr, the assumption of a military leadership role in European security, and the displacement of hitherto-dominant temporal security narratives with the Zeitenwende paradigm was, however, rejected in both its ideational and material dimension by a heterogeneous coalition of critics whose political stance combined anti-militarism, anti-NATO sentiment, anti-Americanism, populism, and pro-Russian attitudes to varying degrees. Following the outbreak of the war and the decision by Chancellor Scholz to supply weapons to Ukraine, a series of open letters written by an assortment of German artists, academics, and intellectuals had publicly opposed weapons deliveries to Ukraine as irresponsible escalation, demanding German efforts for ‘diplomatic solutions’ instead.Footnote 100 Others, like the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a stalwart of the intelligentsia of the old Federal Republic, had supported Scholz’s decision, but simultaneously criticised the ‘emotionalisation’ and ‘militarisation’ of public discourse in Germany as a result of the war and the Zeitenwende shift.Footnote 101 At the polar ends of this spectrum existed the nationalist populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the far-left Die Linke party, and the left-wing populist politician Sarah Wagenknecht, who would form a new party named after her, the BSW, in January 2024. The public mobilisation strategy of this anti-Zeitenwende coalition revolved around actively stoking fears in the population about military and nuclear escalation and the potential unleashing of a Third World War through the continued military support of Ukraine.Footnote 102 The mantra of ‘security with Russia, never security against Russia’ that was commonplace among the left-wing and right-wing populist parties that rejected the Zeitenwende paradigm had cultural roots both in the West German peace and nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s, and in enduring pro-Russian sentiment following German reunification, especially prevalent among voters in East Germany, where both the AfD and Die Linke/BSW had regional strongholds.Footnote 103 The rejection of weapons aid for Ukraine by these anti-Zeitenwende parties was justified primarily via a temporal security narrative that emphasised Germany’s historic guilt for the devastation and loss of life suffered by the Soviet Union in the Second World War, which according to them morally ruled out any German support for the use of force against today’s Russia. This anti-Zeitenwende narrative not only equated the Soviet Union with Russia, ignoring the Nazi occupation of Ukrainian territory in the Second World War – where Ukraine had suffered disproportionally greater losses of life and physical destruction than the Russian Soviet Republic – but it negated the national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political freedom of Ukraine as liberal and democratic values worth fighting for with military means in the present. As such, any systemic change to German foreign and security policy in response to the Russo-Ukrainian war was rejected as an unnecessary and dangerous aberration in German post-war history and identity, while projections of further Russian aggression and territorial expansionism were decried as unwarranted fearmongering. The ontological disruption of the Russo-Ukrainian War to German identity therefore also manifested in a fracturing of temporal security narratives among detractors and supporters of the Zeitenwende shift, where opposing timelines were competing for political and societal legitimacy about the ‘lessons of history’, future threats, and the validity of both for informing policy outcomes in the present.
Conclusion
The Russo-Ukrainian War constituted a profound rupture in German ontological security, undermining long-standing assumptions about the efficacy of multilateral diplomacy, the pacifying potential of economic interdependence, the limited relevance of military force, and the presumed structural stability of the European security order. Specifically, it marked a decisive break with hitherto-hegemonic temporal security narratives of the post-war and post–Cold War era – such as the ‘peace dividend’, Ostpolitik, and Wandel durch Handel – that had ontologically anchored Germany’s self-perception as a civilian power within a predictable and stable European order. In response to this ontological shock, the Zeitenwende narrative emerged as an attempt at reordering and retiming Germany’s national identity within a rapidly shifting geopolitical context. For Germany, this has meant a gradual but unresolved attempt to reconfigure national identity and military power in terms that move beyond the historical Other of Nazism, while confronting a contemporary Other in the form of Russian neo-imperialism. Zeitenwende thus represents an unfinished and contested temporal reordering – one that reveals how the politics of ontological security are fundamentally entangled with shifting and contested narratives of time.
As this article has demonstrated, ontological security is maintained not only through sustaining historical continuity and collective memory, but also through the capacity of states to retime national identity and security in response to external shocks and geopolitical transformations. When existing temporal security narratives become untenable, the result is a condition of ontological insecurity that necessitates narrative innovation and retiming. Yet, as the German case illustrates, these narrative projects are never uncontested. Competing actors mobilise alternate temporalities – whether nostalgic, revisionist, or populist – to challenge new security narratives and propose alternative futures and imaginary pasts. The fractures in German society over the ontological shock of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the narrative disruption of Zeitenwende are not merely about policy, but about time and identity itself: how history is remembered, how the present is framed, and which future actions are deemed legitimate and necessary.
Germany’s Zeitenwende thus reveals the temporal dynamics of narrative ruptures and adjustment at the intersection of collective memory, national security, and identity politics. Existing work on OSS tends to emphasise historical continuity and biographical integrity as key to maintaining state identity. Our intervention shows how discontinuities – in time, narrative, and memory – can also become productive sites of ontological realignment. When the coherence of the post–Cold War German self – as a civilian power – was rendered untenable, it was not simply abandoned but retimed, meaning the narrative link of ontological security and temporality was reinterpreted through a new narrative structure that positioned assertive security policy as consistent with, rather than a break from, the lessons of the past.
Malte Riemann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. His research interests lie at the intersection of historical international relations, defence policy, and Critical Security Studies. His work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals, including European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Global Security Studies, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Globalizations, and Critical Public Health. He is co-editor of the book series Routledge Private Security Studies (Routledge) and co-editor of Security Studies: An Applied Introduction (SAGE, 2024).
Georg Löfflmann is Lecturer in US Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Antagonism: Populist Security Narratives and the Remaking of Political Identity (Routledge, 2024) and American Grand Strategy under Obama: Competing Discourses (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). He is co-editor with Cora Lacatus and Gustav Meibauer of Political Communication and Performative Leadership: Populism in International Politics (Springer, 2023). His research has been published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Global Studies Quarterly, International Politics, Survival, European Journal of International Security, Geopolitics, and others.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors at EJIS and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
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