How the war came to Germany — Justice, alienation and an attitude that endured, 1945–2026

Abstract

Since 1 January 2026, every man born in 2008 has been liable for military screening. For this cohort, the children’s law reform of 1998 has applied from the day they were born, with a right to both parents that no child can enforce on its own. In 2026 Germany is meeting an external threat with the repertoire it has kept in reserve since the last war: it places people at the state’s disposal and narrows the channels through which they might push back. War, in this essay, means the legal condition in which the state may conscript men, together with the mobilisation that condition sets in motion. The attitude behind it survived 1945 because silence took the place of a reckoning; it shifted from overt to covert power and was handed down from one generation to the next. The judiciary is throttled at a bottleneck that politicians control, works without witnesses and is largely shielded from liability. These mechanisms converge in the family court, which decides the fate of children whose right to both parents has no one to enforce it, and of fathers whom the state carries on its books as payers and as potential conscripts. The state guards the child’s data and leaves the child’s bond with both parents unguarded. A public whose attention is spoken for lives with this contradiction in a state of collective cognitive dissonance. The war never left; it carried on out of sight and in 2026 came back into view.