After spending ten months promoting her memoir without saying anything seriously newsworthy, it was in the end a Hungarian-language YouTube channel that tripped Angela Merkel up.
The former German chancellor retold a story about how, in the summer of 2021, she became concerned that President Putin was refusing to meet her in person, and Poland and the Baltic states blocked her efforts to set up a summit with him through the European Union.
A few seconds later, she continued with the sonic equivalent of a shrug: “Then I left office, and then Putin’s aggression began.”
Whether Merkel genuinely meant to imply that her eastern neighbours bore a share of the blame for the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that began a few months later is debatable: one of her old friends suggests her words were wilfully twisted by her critics.
Their effect, however, has been explosive. Andrzej Nowak, an eminent historian and adviser to President Nawrocki of Poland, said Merkel’s remarks harked back to an “imperialistic” German tradition of divvying up central and eastern Europe with the Russians.
“It is in exactly the same line, seeing only the German chancellor and Russia as the two important centres of power … and disregarding voices from the countries that actually neighbour Russia as an obstacle to this wise, far-reaching concept of peace in east-central Europe, a concept that should be dealt with between Berlin and Moscow,” Nowak said, with bitter irony.
Andrzej Nowak announcing Karol Nawrocki as the Law and Justice party’s candidate for the 2025 presidential election
ARTUR WIDAK/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
Nawrocki with his wife, Marta, after winning the presidential race in June
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He added: “This type of reasoning seems dangerous to me, because it keeps recurring in the German elite’s position.”
Mateusz Morawiecki, who repeatedly crossed swords with Merkel as Poland’s right-wing prime minister from 2017 to 2023, was even blunter in his verdict: “With this thoughtless interview, Angela Merkel proved that she is among the German politicians who have done the most damage to Europe over the past century.”
Mateusz Morawiecki and Merkel during a press conference in Berlin in 2021
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The commotion comes at a bad time for German-Polish amity. After years of animosity and mutual mistrust, the centre-right Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, had presided over a tentative thaw.
With Russia threatening to blow up the foundations of European security in Ukraine, the reasoning on both sides went, the two countries shared a problem so big that it dwarfed their previous disputes.
Yet negotiations over a German atonement package for the genocide of about two million ethnic Polish civilians during the Second World War ran into a brick wall last year.
Relations deteriorated further over the summer after Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, ordered border guards to turn back asylum seekers at the frontier.
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German officials are also exasperated by what they regard as Poland’s recklessly bellicose response to a mass incursion of Russian drones into its airspace last month.
That exasperation is reciprocated with interest by Warsaw. On Tuesday, a day after Merkel’s faux pas was picked up by the Polish media, Tusk said that it was not in his country’s interests to hand over a Ukrainian national whom the Germans want to charge with involvement in bombing the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines.
It was not quite a threat to block the extradition — Tusk said that was a decision for Polish judges — but the message was unmistakable: that the true injustice had been Berlin’s choice to build the pipelines and double down on its addiction to Russian fossil fuels despite the vociferous warnings from its neighbours.
Donald Tusk
WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/ GETTY IMAGES
Morawiecki concurred, despite his long-running political rivalry with Tusk. “The real sabotage was [Germany] trusting Moscow more than their own allies,” he said. “It was against European unity, against European security, and against European trust.
“Responsibility begins with those who made the choices — and ignored the warnings. By the way, the same people who built the pipeline now want to judge the sabotage? That’s irony, not justice.”
A further shock to the system came on Wednesday, when Nowak, the historical adviser to the Polish president, made a speech in the Bundestag at the invitation of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Centrists in both countries were flabbergasted by the sight of a prominent Polish conservative fraternising with German nationalists who maintain that the culture of guilt for the crimes of Nazism has been overdone.
Tusk’s spokesman said it was “indefensible”. Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, described it as “exceptionally shortsighted”, adding: “Fear a nationalist Germany more than a pro-European Germany.”
However, Nowak, who is a professor of history at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, said he had not consulted Nawrocki about the trip and he had strong reservations about the AfD’s entanglement with the Putin regime and its assertions that German guilt culture in respect to commemorating Nazi atrocities was overdone.
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He said he had taken up the offer in a personal capacity because it was important to talk about Berlin’s plans to establish a “German-Polish House” as a memorial to Poland’s suffering at the hands of Nazi Germany. Nowak is concerned that the project risks downplaying Adolf Hitler’s systematic campaign to destroy the Polish nation.
Nowak also suggested there was scope for Germany and Poland finally to strike a deal over compensation for the Second World War, an issue that has bedevilled the relationship since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Officially, Warsaw is sticking to its demand for €1.3 trillion in reparations, which the German government regards as wholly unrealistic. However, Sikorski, Nawrocki and German diplomats have all signalled that they are willing to contemplate an agreement that would revolve around Berlin not only recompensing the victims but also making a large financial contribution to the Polish armed forces.
“I think it’s evident that the danger of ongoing Russian imperial aggression is something that can make Polish-German relations based on our mutual interest in a defence strategy that we should share,” said Nowak.