A baffling clip celebrating a new tank brigade stationed in Lithuania shows the depth of Berlin’s military delusions
A dark clearing in a forest at dusk, flaming torches, a blazing brazier with an almost runic-looking sword shape cut into its cast-iron shell, a machine gun pointing into a foreboding sky in a steep Leni Riefenstahl angle, the oddly grating voice of the leader holding forth about ‘Kameraden’, ‘kriegstüchtig’, and ‘siegen’ in German, and a lot of men in uniform enthusiastically hollering in response.
All set against a score that seems to have been composed by Richard Wagner on acid to accompany a horde of burned-out German tanks riding off into Valhalla, circa 1943.
Sounds a little too retro for you?
You are not alone. Many Germans as well have reacted with bewilderment and alarm to a recent video clip officially posted by the ‘Heer’ – the land-army core of the German military, the Bundeswehr – on its Instagram account. It depicts a recent meeting between the new head of the Heer, Major-General Christian Freuding and his officers and soldiers of the German army’s 45th Tank Brigade, aka the ‘Lithuania’ brigade.
The head of Germany’s BSW party – currently not in parliament only because of an extremely suspect “miscount” – Sahra Wagenknecht and the party’s spokeswoman on foreign policy Sevim Dagdelen have criticized the torch-guns-and-brazier fest as a “disturbing propaganda video” reminiscent of “the most sinister times” (Wagenknecht) and a sinister mummery leaning into Nazi aesthetics (Dagdelen).
And not only prominent politicians are aghast. On the German Army’s own Instagram account, users have commented that, clearly, someone has badly failed to learn from past catastrophes.
The dark score, to get that out of the way, is not really by Wagner. Instead it’s composer Howard Shore’s clearly Wagner-inspired ‘March of the Nazgul’. The Nazgul are powerful and virtually immortal arch demons serving supreme evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Their rousing march stems from director Peter Jackson’s films. It’s German militarist aesthetics: from ancient tales about Siegfried, dragons, and the end of the world to a newer iteration that deals in Hobbits, dragons, and the almost-end of Middle Earth.
For the high priests of Germany’s ‘Long Way to the West’ cult in the country’s mainstream media and academia, it’s probably a good sign that registers have shifted from that older Ring of the Nibelungen to a tale thought up by an Oxford don whose son Michael fought for the Western Allies.
But then again, the Nazgul? Really? If anyone qualifies as the Waffen-SS of Tolkien’s Uber-villain Sauron, it’s them – his black-clad, faceless, entirely humorless, and, last but not least, eternally cursed top retainers.
Even Berlin’s otherwise reliably Russophobic and NATO-Green taz newspaper has struggled to explain that choice: Is the German army trying to tell us it’s ready to march for evil incarnate (again) or that its soldiers are Hobbits, most of whom are notoriously small, big-footed, and un-warlike? Weird choice there, Bundeswehr, but you do you.
In short, Freuding’s strange appearance at Germany’s brigade in Lithuania is ridiculous and indefensible. That is probably also why most in the German mainstream media are simply keeping mum about it. In a way, though, to be fair, Freuding doing clumsy stuff is not really news. While a favorite of Germany’s bellicose and inexplicably popular defense minister, Boris Pistorius, the current head of the German military’s most important branch has a record of being, let’s say, unusual.
Boyishly excited – and totally misguided – commentary on Ukraine’s Kursk kamikaze offensive and blatant regurgitation of fake news from Kiev after the latter’s Operation Spiderwebwere peak, but by no means exceptional, performances in Freuding’s career as Germany’s “YouTube general.” Demonstratively hanging out with Oleg Romanov, a commander in Ukraine’s notoriously far-right/fascist Azov forces – now flimsily disguised as the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade – was also typical. Romanov’s soldiers occasionally have fun visiting Auschwitz in T-shirts displaying Hitler quotes.
Meeting Romanov marked Freuding’s unprofessional and apparently obsessive need to provoke Russia because he couldn’t find a better date for hanging out with the Ukrainian commander than Russia’s 80th Victory Day. And it also indicated how exactly Freuding has gone from bad to worse. Always a career climber, a long stint as the German military’s Ukraine supremo has clearly radicalized and unhinged the German general.
But say what you will about Freuding’s scary eccentricities, he is, in his way, the man of the hour and emblematic of so much else that is wrong now with Germany’s self-destructive “elites.” There is his obvious delight in anticipating “going toe to toe with the Russkies” – as Dr. Strangelove’s densely insane Major Kong would have said (yes, that’s the one jubilantly riding a nuclear bomb to his and everyone else’s demise at the end of the film).
Then, Freuding’s teenager-ish romanticizing of Ukraine, where he believes he has learned what fighting for freedom means, is resolutely immune to the reality of a brutal Western proxy war calculus, in which Ukrainians are being used up systematically to pursue the futile aim of defeating Russia.
Last but not least, like all too many other German leaders, opinion shapers, and “experts” of the Carlo “I can tell Girkin from Strelkov” Masala type, Freuding seems oblivious to history’s lessons. Instead of seeking national security in a rational combination of deterrent defense capacity, diplomacy, and mutually beneficial interaction with Russia, Freuding projects a senseless and groundless fatalism in which the next war is already certain and all that remains to be done is to propagandize Germans into believing in that delusion.
Finally, there’s the 45th Tank Brigade, where Freuding has staged this latest whopper. Badly misplaced in Lithuania and facing both Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, this is an unfinished unit that, in effect, serves as a through-and-through political pet project in particular of Pistorius. It is a classic case of over-extension, a military move made for reasons of badly conceived PR instead of the cautious and realistic logic of national defense. Draining other units back in Germany, it exposes some of its best troops to unnecessary and unrewarding risks.
Yet that, too, is, alas, typical now: If there is one common denominator of Berlin’s current security policy – from debt-driven, ruinous over-armament to cognitive warfare on the often unwilling home population – it is putting the interests of NATO, that is, the US, and of East European hardliners over those of Germany itself.
There is nothing wrong at all with being ready to defend Germany. But everything is wrong about entangling Germany’s security with the interests of reckless Polish and Baltic politicians when some of them dream of dismantling Russia and others do not dream but act by helping blow up Germany’s pipelines. For German generals, giving loud, provocative torch-lit speeches in Lithuania is not patriotism but simply very silly, at best.
