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Facebook Menu Privacy · Terms · Advertising · Ad Choices · Cookies · Home Create a post Stories Feed posts Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook · Marta Havryshko A casual question from a FaZ journalist · "Can you tell us Europeans what can we concretely do to help you to kill more Russians, more Russian soldiers, of course?" Michael Martens, a journalist from the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, asked Zelensky in Belgrade. The fact that this question came from a German journalist whose grandfather served in the military apparatus of Nazi Germany is deeply revealing. It points to what may be one of the darker impulses shaping Germany’s attitude toward the war in Ukraine: a lingering resentment over the humiliating defeat of the Second World War at the hands of those once contemptuously portrayed as “Asiatic hordes.” Now, it seems, history has offered a chance for a kind of rematch. Seen from this perspective, what drives this impulse is not so much love or compassion for Ukrainians as hostility toward Russians. And that is precisely what makes Michael Martens’s question so disturbing. It was not a question about how to end the war. It was not about how to protect human life, stop the killing, or bring peace closer. It was a question framed around death: how to help kill more Russians. Words matter, particularly when they come from a country carrying the historical burden that Germany does. Germany spent decades presenting itself as a nation that had confronted its past and learned from the catastrophe of Nazism. Yet rhetoric like this raises an uncomfortable question: has Germany truly exorcised those ghosts, or have some of them merely changed their vocabulary? Perhaps the specter of that past has not disappeared after all. Perhaps it still wanders, in altered form, through the corridors of power.