Yeah, it is definitely not the most rational approach, but with respect to German experiences/approaches to Russia, it isnt based on any form of pure logic...there is also a huge, huge element of collective, national, mind-fucking trauma that occurred at the hands of the Russians, and that has stuck in the national attitude.
Your average German’s right eye will start twitching at even the mention of another war with Russia. The Red Army truly fucked up this country’s psyche something fierce and that has been passed down intensely, particularly in the German version of the Boomers and Gen X. The Germans fucked around and found out on the battlefield, and their old men who didn’t fight were beaten or killed and many of their mothers were raped by Russians, and that shit stuck. Big time. So, just as the trauma of the Eastern Front and subsequent Soviet occupation of those Central and Eastern European countries forms their justifiable geopolitical stances towards Russia, respectively, the ass-whipping annihilation that the Russians put on the Germans at every level of society forms much of the German position now with respect to fighting/engaging in “the East” now.
I see it all the time within my wife's family. Just two days ago we were at the local cemetery with my in-laws for the monthly tending to family graves, as is customary here. Walking through the cemetery, I can count at least two dozen “Missing in Stalingrad/Missing in Ostfront” gravestones, including one in my wife’s family (Stalingrad). Shit is everywhere, particularly in certain cemeteries in Munich proper. The death dates between 1943-1947 are insanely disproportionate.
Another example from my own experience… there are family photos taken in what looks to be about 1957-59, given my mother-in-law’s age in the photo. They are candid shots around a beer bench at my wife’s family land in Southern Bavaria, with a few from the house where my in-laws live now, and there is a man there dressed nicely but oddly positioned just far enough from the group to indicate he was somewhat involved in the goings on, but weirdly separate with a blank expression on his face. It is this way in every photo of this guy, on multiple different occasions over the years. Just this dude…nice-looking, well-dressed, physically removed from the group and blank-faced…1000 yard stare type shit. So after years of coming across this picture at various times, I finally asked my mother-in-law what the story was with this guy, and she just said, “Oh, he was my uncle that fled with my mother and aunts from the Sudetenland during the expulsion. He was the only of the brothers who survived and he never snapped out of it. He died in the early 70s, he lived with us until I was 22, but he was always somewhere between shellshocked and scared. I never really knew him because he was never really “there” upstairs." She "never really knew him", yet she saw him every day...ate dinner with him all the time...celebrated holidays, birthdays, and life events...but he was "never really there." So the impact of a Russian ass-whipping isn't abstract like it is to us.
So, the point is, reminders are everywhere…and not reminders in the form of memorials or public statements or vigils or lapel pins, but in the form of family members with 1000 yard stares at the dinner table, gravestones for missing uncles in family cemeteries, warnings from mothers to daughters to avoid Russian males on the street corners, stories from Opa about his cold feet wrapped in newspaper shoes, buried in the snows of the Great Steppe for what felt like an eternity. Yeah, that shit leaves an impact. In short, this was highly personal trauma that wasn’t able to be “dealt with” in a natural, collective way, IMO, and due to the collective guilt, was expected to be pushed down and managed privately. So they became experts at burying their heads in the sand. Drives me crazy, but God they have perfected it. I could write a book on how fucked up the situation with the post-war children was. They took the process of national atonement very, very seriously and they scrambled the fuck out of a generation of young minds in the process.
And by “dealt with” I mean in the way that the victims of German and Soviet aggression were able to. The Czechs or the Poles or the Balts, for example, were able to rely on each through their collective victimizations and re-build together, forging a new chapter of resilience in their long existing national identity, which, of course, contains an element of a collective national outlook on security matters/positioning. The post-war Germans didn’t do that. They worked through the post-war trauma in a highly individualized and repressed manner, primarily through shame in their parents, fear of it happening again and internal guilt (albeit self inflicted by the actions of their parents and grandparents, of course). They didn’t have a moment during their national reckoning where they collectively (through their leaders) defined a constructive, newfound role for Germany on the international stage independent of avoiding a repeat of their past sins and trauma…and, as such, their foreign policy ethos is comprised of guilt, trauma, and the fear of experiencing it again…but certainly not any element of leadership or assertiveness abroad. So it is basically a wealthy, wealthy country with little idea of how to finally act comfortably in a role of leadership when hard power is required.
And to be clear, in no way do I mean this as a justification for their feeble foreign policy positions, but I do think it comes down to much more than just a desire for cheap energy. But, to be sure, that plays a huge part as well.