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the firm’s boss, told analysts that its lignite business is likely to be hived off as a non-profit foundation as soon as the current energy crisis ends and German politicians have the time to give regulatory approval.

ConEd’s 3GW renewable business will make rwe America’s fourth-largest provider of green energy, but also comes with a pipeline of wind and solar projects of over 7gw

Enel, an Italian firm, and Iberdrola, a Spanish one, want to reach 129gw and 95gw, respectively, in green power-generation capacity by 2030.

. The Qatar Investment Authority (qia), the country’s sovereign-wealth fund, contributed €2.4bn of cash for the deal and will henceforth own 9% of rwe. But it only paid about half the multiple for its stake in rwe that rwe shelled out for ConEd’s renewable business.

When Chancellor Olaf Scholz toured the Middle East in September, Qatar was one of the stops. Germany’s government hopes that the resource-rich Gulf state will one day provide exports of liquefied natural gas to replace imports from Russia. With qia now becoming rwe’s largest shareholder, the gas is more likely to start flowing

the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.

Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.

As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.

While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”

“Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.

They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon

Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.

Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”

Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.

There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.

The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.

. In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods

As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?

While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea

the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.

Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.

Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.

It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented

Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.

His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation

Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.

For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite

Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.

According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”

. The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.

For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.

“If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”

For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious

The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves

More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte

“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

“As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”

The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.

Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.

He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.

Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards

Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.

Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”

Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea

That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.

Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.

If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.

Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.

Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.

Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.

A big portion. There now are 29 special funds, with the largest among them allowed to borrow and spend over multiyear periods up to €869 billion, all of it backstopped by taxpayers but none of it folded into the general budget, where it would be subject to the debt brake

Before the court ruling, special-fund net borrowing in 2023 was expected to reach €147 billion, compared with on-balance-sheet borrowing of €45.6 billion. The constitutional court finally has caught on.

At a stroke, €60 billion has vanished from the budget. And that might not be the only disappearing cash. Finance Minister Christian Lindner—never enthusiastic about any of this spending anyway—believes a separate pot of money slated for energy-price subsidies also may run afoul of the newly articulated constitutional requirement. The size of that fund: €200 billion

Industry is fleeing Germany. The new green jobs the net-zero left promised require enormous subsidies. And Berlin must offer generous handouts, probably permanent, to individual households to shield them from the crippling energy-price consequences of decades of accumulated policy errors.

Ameliorating all of this was meant to be paid for on the sly via borrowing concealed in various Sondervermögen. No longer

Germany long ago perfected the art of green virtue signaling. Now it will have to conduct a substantive debate about whether the negligible global benefits of Germany’s slashing carbon emissions are worth the costs, especially if money must be diverted from other policy priorities such as social welfare.

Critics on the left will argue this all could be solved easily if only those hidebound Teutons weren’t so neurotic about budget balance. This crowd will note that Berlin could simply borrow more on the general budget, which it still can do relatively cheaply, and use the proceeds to sustain the net-zero transition and much other spending. Politico was quick off the mark, calling this a “make-believe debt crisis.”

Mr. Scholz is in political trouble because it was never clear how his center-left Social Democrats could govern in a coalition with Mr. Lindner’s free-market Free Democratic Party and the eco-leftist Greens. The special-budget trick was politically essential because it allowed all three parties to skirt the budget bargaining that would expose their deep ideological differences.

Those splits are out in the open now. Berlin is going to have to cut spending (on what?) or raise revenue (from where?) or borrow (how much?) to fill the net-zero funding gap—or, not impossible, conclude Germans don’t care that much about net zero after all

The key point is that Berlin’s budget process is no more dysfunctional than any other Western government’s. It’s merely more honest, at least now that the court has stepped in.

Yet the most striking illustration of this convergence is the harmonious relationship between the European center right and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who became prime minister of Italy last year. As soon as she indicated that she would not disrupt the bloc’s economic policy and would be supportive of Ukraine, the European People’s Party was willing to work with her — and its leader, Manfred Weber, even sought to form an alliance with her. The center right, it turns out, doesn’t have a problem with the far right. It just has a problem with those who defy E.U. institutions and positions.

Such thinking is behind the hardening of migration policy. But it is also influencing Europe in a deeper way: The union has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization, particularly in its foreign policy. During the past decade, as the bloc has seen itself as surrounded by threats, not least from Russia, there have been endless debates about “strategic autonomy,” “European sovereignty” and a “geopolitical Europe.”

figures like President Emmanuel Macron of France have also begun to frame international politics as a clash of civilizations, in which a strong, united Europe must defend itself.

Supporters of the bloc tend to see European unity as an end in itself — or to assume that a more powerful European Union, long idealized as a civilizing force in international politics, would automatically benefit the whole world

as the union unites around defending a threatened European civilization and rejecting nonwhite immigration, we need to think again about whether it truly is a force for good.

Sources say US and European officials have been in intense discussions over the several past hours over how to proceed with additional sanctions against Russia.

Monday's sanctions were cautious in nature and Tuesday's sanctions are expected to go further but it will not be the full blow that the US has previewed, pending "further actions" by Russia.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize breakaway eastern Ukrainian territories, calling it “unacceptable," and saying it is contrary to the Minsk Agreements.

China's Foreign Ministry evaded more than a dozen questions on Ukraine in its daily briefing on Tuesday. In his responses, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin reiterated that any country’s “legitimate security concerns should be respected” and urged all parties to "exercise restraint.” Beijing is navigating a complex position as it attempts to balance deepening ties with Moscow with its practiced foreign policy of staunchly defending state sovereignty.

The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”

The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,

It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.

“China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.

Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.

“We believe they chose not to weigh in in advance.”

“It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”

China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,

a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.

Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.

China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.

Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.

Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.

China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.

Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.

“He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”

‘Britain’s young are giving up hope’, John Oxley described a ‘generation that has soured on ambition… the under forties [are] drifting towards professional apathy.’

tens of thousands of young people moved across the Channel, an exodus that caught the eye of the New York Times in 2014. One of the French people the paper interviewed explained that ‘in London, there’s this can-do attitude, and a sense that anything’s possible.’

French-bashing became de rigueur for British politicians and business leaders. Few were as withering as Andy Street, the managing director of John Lewis, who in October 2014 described France as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’, a country where ‘nothing works and, worse, nobody cares about it.’

Within months of taking office Macron slashed the wealth tax and corporate tax rates have steadily fallen from 33 to 25 per cent. Last week the French government passed a budget for 2023 that includes an €8 billion tax cut on businesses. 

In Britain, the corporation tax rate has moved in the other direction, and last month Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced it will rise in April from 19 to 25 per cent; the Daily Telegraph could barely bring itself to acknowledge that because of Hunt’s business tax raid, UK shareholders will now be ‘worse off than the French’. 

Tory Britain is no longer a friend of business and nor is it particularly pally with its young. More and more aspirational British twenty-somethings are doing what the ambitious young French did a decade ago and heading to countries where they feel they have more chance of fulfilling their potential.

The result is that less energy is being produced overall, and Germany is loath to buy it from France—where power is much cleaner, because it’s mostly nuclear.

So who absorbed the adjustment? Easy: industry, the old backbone of the German manufacturing state, which has been closing production facilities in significant numbers.

This does not, of course, reduce the overall atmospheric pollution generated in the world, as the old clients of German firms turn to alternatives in other locations that are, almost always, fueled with high carbon sources. The Indonesian, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese companies that will now manufacture the products that German workers used to make are largely run on fossil fuels.

Part of the problem is that there are inherent technical limitations to how high a country can drive wind and solar in its energy mix. State of the art lithium-ion batteries can only store energy in the range of megawatts, up to the low gigawatts. In order to store electricity to survive a German winter with next to no sunlight and long low-wind periods, the country would need to increase its storage capacity by orders of magnitude.

There are only three presently known energy sources that can be used at scale to balance a natural grid: hydroelectricity, nuclear and fossil fuels

hey decided to simply make do with less power: economic degrowth in action. Of course, people depended on those power sources for jobs: good, well-paid, stable union jobs that guys without university degrees could get. The government closed down the factories—can they really be surprised some of these people now want to vote for the far right?

Germany didn’t adopt degrowth by choice, but through a series of blunders. The comic edge of its misfortunes is that so many of them occurred because of miscalculation or just sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the Greens and Social Democrats. First, a few months before becoming a Russian energy lobbyist in 2005, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted on putting Russian natural gas at the core of Germany’s energy grid, continuing a Social Democratic tradition of entwining Germany’s future with Russia’s. Then, a Green Party with its roots in 1970s anti-nuclear weapons activism carried this atavistic policy into the 21st century when it entered government, insisting that Germany decommission the backbone of its zero-emission energy matrix. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and the pipelines were cut. Oooops. Guess who’s digging for coal now?

The alarm is growing louder, but the German public remains unconvinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.

Mr. Pistorius’s status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others — including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz — do not enjoy.

The prospect of a re-elected Mr. Trump has German officials and many of their fellow NATO counterparts informally discussing whether the nearly 75-year-old alliance structure they are planning to celebrate in Washington this year can survive without the United States at its center. Many German officials say that Mr. Putin’s best strategic hope is NATO’s fracture.

Only a year ago NATO was celebrating a new sense of purpose and a new unity, and many were confidently predicting Mr. Putin was on the run.

now, with an undependable America, an aggressive Russia and a striving China, as well as a seemingly stalemated war in Ukraine and a deeply unpopular conflict in Gaza, German officials are beginning to talk about the emergence of a new, complicated and troubling world, with severe consequences for European and trans-Atlantic security.

some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.

“If Ukraine were forced to surrender, that would not satisfy Russia’s hunger for power,” the chief of Germany’s intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, said last week. “If the West does not demonstrate a clear readiness to defend, Putin will have no reason not to attack NATO anymore.”

In the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, most Germans have grown accustomed to the notions that the country’s security would be assured if it worked with Russia, not against it, and that China is a necessary partner with a critical market for German automobiles and equipment.

Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat whose party traditionally sought decent ties with Moscow, seems reluctant to discuss the far more confrontational future with Russia or China that German defense and intelligence chiefs describe so vividly.

few politicians will take on the subject in public. Mr. Scholz is especially careful, tending to Germany’s relationship with the United States and wary of pushing Russia and its unpredictable president too hard.

Mr. Scholz has moved with great caution. He has opposed — along with Mr. Biden — setting a timetable for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance

The most vivid example of his caution is his continued refusal to provide Ukraine a long-range, air-launched cruise missile called the Taurus.

The Taurus has a range of more than 300 miles, meaning Ukraine could use it to strike deep into Russia. And Mr. Scholz is not willing to take that chance — nor is the country’s Bundestag, which voted against a resolution calling for the transfer. While the decision seems to fit German opinion, Mr. Scholz wants to avoid the subject.

Polls show that Germans want to see a more capable German military. But only 38 percent of those surveyed said they wanted their country to be more involved in international crises, the lowest figure since that question began to be asked in 2017, according to the Körber Foundation, which conducted the survey. Of that group, 76 percent said the engagement should be primarily diplomatic, and 71 percent were against a military leadership role for Germany in Europe.

German military officials recently set off a small outcry when they suggested that the country must be “kriegstüchtig,” which roughly translates to the ability to fight and win a war.

Norbert Röttgen, an opposition legislator and a foreign policy expert with the Christian Democrats, said the term was regarded as “rhetorical overreach” and quickly dropped.

“Scholz has always said that ‘Ukraine must not lose but Russia must not win,’ which indicated that he’s always thought of an impasse that would lead to a diplomatic process,” Mr. Röttgen said. “He thinks of Russia as more important than all the countries between us and them, and he lacks a European sense and of his possible role as a European leader.”

Mr. Scholz clearly feels most comfortable relying heavily on Washington, and senior German officials say he especially mistrusts Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who has argued for European “strategic autonomy.” Mr. Macron has found few followers on the continent.

Even Mr. Scholz’s main European defense initiative, a coordinated ground-based air defense against ballistic missiles known as Sky Shield, depends on a mix of American, American-Israeli and German missile systems.

Mr. Scholz’s ambitions are also hamstrung by his increasingly weak economy. It shrank 0.3 percent last year, and roughly the same is expected in 2024. The cost of the Ukraine war and China’s economic problems — which have hit the auto and manufacturing sectors hardest — have exacerbated the problem.

While Mr. Scholz acknowledges that the world has changed, “he is not saying that we must change with it,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst.

“He is saying that the world has changed and that we will protect you,”

Germans, and even the Social Democrats, “have come to the realization that Germany lives in the real world and that hard power matters,”

“At the same time,” he said, “there’s still this hope that this is all just a bad dream, and Germans will wake up and be back in the old world.”

In other words, the cultural crackup of the last few months only appears to be part of an international conflict. It is, in fact, resolutely German. What is really being fought over here is a hazy, transcendent national concept that, since Oct. 7, has overtaken more firmly constitutional principles of free expression and free association.

The tensions have been building since at least 2019, when the federal Parliament adopted a resolution designating the movement calling for a boycott of Israel as antisemitic, and urging local governments and “public stakeholders” not to fund organizations or individuals that support it. That makes a big difference here, since so many artists, writers and musicians receive generous government aid. The resolution, though nonbinding, led some cultural institutions to rescind invitations to critics of Israeli policy, and many more to take a hesitant approach.

“People in cultural institutions are risk-averse,” said Tobias Haberkorn, who edits the Berlin Review, a new literary publication. “So if they have to decide, ‘Am I going to invite this or that artist with a Middle Eastern background, or not?’ I can very well see them not inviting them. Just to avoid the potential hassle.”

Since Oct. 7, accusations of antisemitism have flown much more broadly. Some are merited. Many others are dubious. Quite a number of those accused of antisemitism have been Jewish, such as Gessen.

“There are many Jewish perspectives, and that is not being honored here in a country where the history cannot be excused,” said Peaches, who is also Jewish. “For any progressive Jewish person who is thinking about what is going on, and understanding the history of what is going on, to be called antisemitic — by Germans — is ridiculous. Never did I think in 2024 that I would be thinking about that.”

Yet it’s worth pointing out how few of these accusations revolve around cultural production. It is rare for Berlin’s theaters or festivals to cancel someone for what they actually sing or paint or film

What gets you now are statements, posts, likes, signatures: the imperatives of social media, which are swallowing culture wholesale. Once debates like this would have played out in Germany’s elite press, where intellectuals clashed over the country’s moral responsibility to the past. Today the national papers, and the institutions too, are playing catch-up to Ruhrbarone, a small website from the provincial city of Bochum that took down Anderson and many others.