The Greens may make it a condition of any bargain with Scholz that American nuclear weapons will be removed from Germany. Up to twenty B61 bombs are estimated to be stationed at the Büchel Air Base in the south west of Germany. The Green’s co-leader and chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock ran on a ticket of anti-nuclear policy during the election. She is tipped to become foreign minister in the coalition government.

But Baerbock also said that Germany cannot “continue with a foreign policy which shies away when in doubt.” Her co-leader Robert Habeck expressed a wish to support Ukraine, even in the form of supplying weaponry to the country — a move for which he was reprimanded by his own party. Olaf Scholz last week called the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko a “very bad dictator” and showed support for Poland in view of escalating tensions at the EU’s eastern borders.

Will the Greens and Olaf Scholz back up these words with action are or follow their old pacifist instincts? Stoltenberg was worried enough to make a personal appearance in the German capital amidst what looks like the final phase of coalition talks. He reminded the country that, “nuclear sharing is important because it is an arrangement where NATO allies go together and provide nuclear deterrence.”

But nuclear sharing does not only require Germany to tolerate US bombs on its soil but take financial and political responsibility for them too. To act as a deterrence, enemies will need to be certain that there is political conviction behind Germany’s expressed willingness to resort to this if need be.

Germany does not fulfil its NATO obligation to spend 2 percent of GDP on defence. Merkel reassured various American presidents that her country was increasing the figure so as to shoulder its share of the financial burden of collective security. But so far, Germany has still only reached a figure of 1.4 per cent.

Stoltenberg pointed out that he cannot force a sovereign state to commit, but he made it clear that Berlin cannot expect to maintain its ‘seat at the table’ while it invests too little to warrant it. He also issued a veiled threat that there are alternatives for NATO’s security systems to be deployed: “we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the East of Germany.”

The end of Merkel’s tenure as chancellor is an apt time for Germany to readjust its role in the world. Younger politicians will need to jettison 20th century notions of Germany as a nation to be demilitarised in perpetuity for the crimes it committed over 75 years ago. The largest economy in Europe cannot expect the rest of the world to pick up its defence bills while retaining a self-image of a nation important enough to deserve a say in international decisions.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.

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