Zeitenwende

Three days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz famously spoke of a “Zeitenwende” or “turning of the times” in German defence and security policy. Yet as Dina Gusejnova explains, the word has a more complicated history that can help capture the public mood swings which lie behind the rise of the AfD. If you’ve followed European politics since February 2022, you’ve probably run into the word Zeitenwende more times than you can count. Each time it seems to label something slightly different. First Olaf Scholz used it in his now-famous speech to the Bundestag on 27 February 2022, three days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Then it began to be applied to a new paradigm for German leadership on the global stage. Then it bounced back to Germany to describe the rise of the far right. In the course of all this, it got translated, mistranslated, discarded and rediscovered by think tanks, journalists and commentators, some building entire research programmes around it. What is it about the term that seems to capture so much of each current crisis? To recover this, it is important to look at the term’s earlier, twentieth-century history. Scholz not only didn’t invent the word. It has a much older, and rather specific backstory – one that looks back on a 1911 colonial standoff over a Moroccan port, a controversial provincial German school teacher turned bestselling author, with a surprising cast of later admirers that includes Martin Heidegger, Henry Kissinger, Soviet-era Russian émigrés and many others. Understanding that backstory tells you something uncomfortable about why the word keeps drifting toward describing many crises in politics. It is not only attractive to those who pick it up. For a while they appear to be drifting behind the word. A German moment The pitch of Scholz’s 2022 speech was to mark in simple terms what many experienced as a dramatic shift in global politics: Putin’s invasion had ripped up the rulebook of German and European foreign policy. There was no going back to business as usual. Germany, Scholz argued, had to choose sides between democratic and authoritarian values, and to back that choice with hard commitments: most famously, a new willingness to shape its own defence architecture. The word travelled fast. The Financial Times ran an end-of-year column treating Zeitenwende as a delightful new addition to the English speaker’s vocabulary of untranslatable German compound nouns, in the same category as Ostpolitik and Schadenfreude. The Munich Security Conference built a whole touring event series around it between 2024 and 2025. Germany’s own word-of-the-year committee crowned it in 2022. But four years on, the mood soured and the word’s usage spiralled more out of control, or at least out of the control of the centrist parties. Scholz’s coalition collapsed at the ballot box, a rightward-shifted CDU and a surging AfD took its place, and the diplomatic order that the speech assumed, including Germany’s transatlantic commitments with specific support for Ukraine, began to seem weakened in the face of the Oval Office confrontation between Zelensky, JD Vance and Donald Trump. Meanwhile the AfD’s own leadership had already started borrowing the word by early 2025, demanding a “Zeitenwende in migration policy” and thereby turning a language of democratic resolve into a vehicle for exactly the nativist politics it was meant to resist. Even the German Council on Foreign Relations, one of Berlin’s most influential foreign-policy think tanks, toyed with the idea of quietly shutting down its own “Action Group Zeitenwende” after two years, publishing a piece bluntly titled “The End of the Zeitenwende.” Agadir, 1911 – where the word was born So what happened? Was the word wrong from the start? To answer that, you have to go back more than a century, to a crisis most people have never heard of: the Second Moroccan Crisis, also known as the Agadir Crisis. In July 1911, Germany sent a gunboat, the Panther, to the Moroccan port of Agadir, ostensibly to protect German business interests (including those of the Mannesmann brothers, industrialists with mining ambitions in the region) against a French move to consolidate control over Morocco. It was less a military operation than a media stunt: Kaiser Wilhelm II and his foreign office, led by Alfred Kiderlen-Wächter, wanted to flex German muscle against the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. It didn’t work. France came out on top diplomatically, just as it had after the First Moroccan Crisis and the 1906 Algeciras Conference. Germany’s colonial leverage evaporated and German investors ended up protecting their Moroccan mining interests through a French-brokered trust rather than through Berlin. The crisis also triggered a wave of domestic backlash, being perceived as an unnecessary escalation which risked war. German Social Democrats organised major antiwar demonstrations, most notably a rally at Berlin’s Treptower Park on 3 September 1911, led by the young Karl Liebknecht, who had already served time in prison for his antimilitarist writing. It was this specific, oddly minor colonial episode that Oswald Spengler, a schoolteacher who became a public thinker, later credited with switching on his life’s project. In a 1921 essay, he wrote that it was “under the impression of Agadir” that he suddenly discovered his philosophy – the one that would become The Decline of the West. The book, published in 1918, contains the line that gave us the word: “In every political Zeitenwende, words can become fates, public opinions can become passions.” Not the description of an event, but a claim about popular sentiment Crucially, in using the term Zeitenwende, Spengler was not describing an actual shift in the balance of power. In fact, Germany’s real interest in Morocco was trivial. For context, the actual volume of trade with Morocco amounted to less than 0.1 percent of German foreign trade. But what the events in Morocco really signified and what Spengler was describing was a shift in mass perception of politics in Germany: the moment when a crowd stops being a collection of individuals and becomes, in his words, a single feeling, thinking, momentarily alive “being.” He was alluding to the surge of interest in this global event which triggered, for instance, mass anti-war protests especially among Germany’s Social Democrat-inspired masses. The concept didn’t claim to describe reality; it claimed to describe how reality is felt and narrated by the public, which is exactly why it became such a useful tool for propagandists of every stripe for the next century. Politically, Spengler was dismissive of the Social Democrats’ vision of equality: he was merely fascinated by their ability to harness public sentiment. Spengler’s own version of Zeitenwende came bundled with darker political associations. In his 1933 sequel Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision), he described a coming age of “coloured world revolution”, by which he meant a global uprising of the world’s non-western peoples against a declining West – explicitly describing Bolshevik Russia as having thrown off a “white mask”. There was an eerie resonance with Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem “The Scythians”, which imagines Russia as Asia’s shield against Europe, now withdrawing that protection to watch the West destroy itself. This mix of cultural pessimism and world-historical prophecy made Spengler a touchstone for Germany’s interwar “Conservative Revolution” milieu, a loose network of right-wing intellectuals who mixed scepticism of liberal modernity with a taste for radical political renewal. This makes clear why Martin Heidegger engaged seriously with Spengler as early as 1919 and kept returning to him for decades, but Karl Jaspers with his interest in “psychopathology” also wrestled with the same problem of how to classify this new, half-prophetic, half-journalistic way of talking about history. Meanwhile, Zeitenwende as a term continued to have a life of its own. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the word even became interesting to the East German political leaders. The Socialist Unity Party’s 1946 manifesto to the German people spoke of a Zeitenwende moving Germany from a “bourgeois age” to an “age of the working people.” After 1945, Spengler’s fingerprints also show up in an unexpected place: postwar American realism. Hans Morgenthau’s foundational text of international relations realism and Henry Kissinger’s Harvard dissertation, titled The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, both grappled directly with his ideas. That’s part of why, when the word crossed the Atlantic in 2022, American commentators tended to read “Zeitenwende” less as a story about democratic values and more as a statement about Germany finally accepting a realist, militarised role in the world: a reading closer to Germany’s own Afghanistan-era debates about defending its security “at the Hindu Kush” than to Scholz’s talk of freedom and solidarity. A word as a tool to polarise Put all of this together and you get a pattern that should make anyone reaching for “Zeitenwende” today a little nervous. The term was never really a neutral description of a changed world. It was, from its very first use, a piece of political theatre, a way for Spengler to reframe an obscure and strategically minor colonial standoff as evidence that mass consciousness was on the rise and that conservative forces should grab it before the Social Democrats do. Ironically, about one hundred years later, this is exactly what seems to be happening with the AfD’s rise to power in German politics. Every subsequent revival has followed the same script, just with different actors. The Nazi-adjacent Conservative Revolution used it to dress up cultural pessimism as political destiny. The SED used it to narrate the end of the bourgeois order. Cold War American realists absorbed it into a Spenglerian theory of civilisational decline and great-power struggle. And when Scholz reached for it in 2022, hoping to signal a liberal, democratic recommitment to European solidarity, the word carried enough of its old conservative-revolutionary DNA that it took barely three years for Germany’s own far right to seize it back, demanding their own “Zeitenwende”, this time aimed at migrants rather than autocrats. There’s an additional aspect to this, too: Russian commentary on Scholz’s speech read the word not as a defensive pivot but as the opening shot of a hostile “anti-Russian vector” in German policy: a framing that, however self-serving, plugs neatly into the same early-twentieth-century Eurasianist tradition that once read Spengler’s own “coloured revolution” thesis as a validation of Russia’s civilisational mission against the West. So should we avoid using the term altogether? It is never quite wrong, but maybe one should have more awareness about what kind of baggage it carries in its trail. Above all, “Zeitenwende” isn’t an analytic term with a stable meaning. Consequently, it makes sense that different countries translate its connotations very differently, the way the Guardian’s slightly flat 2023 headline – “In Germany, the times are changing” – had implied. Being a loaded historical artifact, it keeps reactivating a century-old argument about who gets to define reality when a crisis hits: the liberal internationalists, or the conservative revolutionaries insisting liberalism was always a false promise. Four years after Scholz’s speech, with Germany’s progressive coalitions and traditional mass parties gone or weakened, and the AfD comfortably wearing the word as its own, it’s hard not to conclude that the term did what it has always done: it opened a door, and now we all have to accept which unintended guests can walk through it. The European Council on Foreign Relations recently warned that the previous government’s attempt to “adapt to the Zeitenwende without imposing any hardship on Germans” had simply failed, leaving a political vacuum that the AfD is poised to fill. The word that was supposed to announce Germany’s liberal reawakening now doubles as shorthand for the reform Berlin promised and never delivered. A longer version of this article is available in German. Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics. Image credit: Andrei Antipov provided by Shutterstock.