Opposite Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse train station there is a chemist, a shoe shop (summer fashions 50 per cent off), a Vietnamese restaurant – and a store promising a bright career in Germany’s Bundeswehr armed forces.
The store with military fatigues in the window opened its doors 11 years ago, three years after Germany set aside compulsory military service and moved to voluntary recruitment.
Ending military service was one of the most controversial decisions of the Merkel era, particularly for her centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In the years since, Bundeswehr bosses have tried – and failed – to attract enough new voluntary recruits to sustain the army, navy and air force.
By various calculations Germany’s armed forces are 60-80,000 bodies short of their ideal size of 250,000 serving men and women.
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Now, in a very different European security situation to 2011, Germany has admitted that voluntary military recruitment hasn’t worked.
On Wednesday, the cabinet of chancellor Friedrich Merz signed off a new national service Bill that, when it passes parliament, will require all German men who turn 18 each year – about 300,000 annually – to complete a survey about their general health and physical fitness. Young women are not obliged to answer, but can participate should they wish. Anyone who doesn’t respond will face fines.
[ Friedrich Merz’s first 100 days in office: Furious allies and disastrous pollsOpens in new window ]
The aim of the new survey is to recruit 10,000 annually to military service. With better pay and other sweeteners – discounted driving lessons, language lessons, drone tutorials – the hope is to find enough recruits voluntarily. And if not? That is the question nobody in Germany wants to answer.
On Tuesday afternoon, Berlin parents Luisa and Tom stopped by the Bundeswehr store with their two daughters, the eldest of whom is considering a medical career and wondering about work placements in the nearby Bundeswehr military hospital.
After a 20-minute consultation with two soldiers, they admit they are curious but unsure what that could mean for the future.
“I never would have thought we would be having this discussion again in Germany, about armies and war,” said Luisa (51). Looking to her 15 year-old daughter, she said: “It’s a bit early to be thinking about military service.”
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, a day’s train ride away from Berlin, the challenge facing the Merz administration is how to nudge on a war-and-peace discussion without triggering deep-seated German anxieties about militarisation.
Opinions differ in Berlin over whether Wednesday’s decision is an important milestone in rebuilding Germany’s military capacity, or more a political stopgap.
His junior coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), are unwilling to go back to obligatory military service, originally introduced in the two Germanies in the 1950s.
SPD defence minister Boris Pistorius says this opposition is down to practical concerns rather than a traditional wariness of anything to do with the military. Decades of post-unification neglect, he says, mean it will take years – and billions of euro – to have barracks and other facilities needed for any extra recruits.
Even without any obligatory service, Pistorius thinks the new military service Bill marks a gear shift that would boost Germany’s reservist capacity and revive a culture of military service.
“The registration and the survey will encourage young men to engage with the Bundeswehr, with the meaning of this task, and the possibility of an full-time application,” he said.
Leading figures in the centre-right CDU want less carrot and more stick. When the Bill reaches the Bundestag in the autumn, they will be demanding changes: clear annual recruitment targets and additional provisions allowing for an automatic shift to conscription if the targets are missed – or Germany’s security situation changes for the worse.
The debate in Germany reflects similar discussions around Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. While Nordic countries’ military recruitment campaigns are underpinned by a positive ideas around the state and national service, Germany’s fascist history and related war crimes make conscription an awkward debate in the country’s post-nationalist, individualist present.
“The government has jumped to step two,” said Felix Raabe, a Berlin architect who did his military service in 1989. “They say they want people to serve the country, without answering the ‘why’ questions around defending a nation and its values.”
A survey this month showed that just 16 per cent of Germans would be prepared to serve military to defend the country “in any case”, while a fifth said they would “probably” do so.
A majority of 59 per cent, however, were “probably” or “not at all” willing to defend Germany from attack, rising to 72 per cent among women.
For Hamburg lawyer Markus, with two sons of serving age, decision time will come in the case of an attack on a Nato member state, triggering a united response from the military alliance.
“We’re not staying here to defend Germany,” he said. “When [the] Nato announcement happens, I’ll grab the family and the dog and drive to our flat in Portugal.”
Back on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, outside the Bundeswehr recruitment store, father Tom wonders aloud whether a Bundeswehr medical placement for his daughter could morph into full military service.
“If everyone refuses to serve, or decides to leave,” he says, “what will become of us here?”
