BERLIN — Having grown up in West Berlin after World War II, Eike Schur’s fondest childhood memories are largely about America.
The American GIs who occupied his Kreuzberg neighborhood tossed him packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum and when he got older, he washed their cars and babysat their kids. He listened exclusively to the Armed Forces Network, the U.S. military radio station, fawning over Hank Williams and later Elvis Presley. He remembers trying on his first jeans and vividly recalls when an American major invited his family to the officers’ mess, where he ate strawberries with whipped cream for the first time.
In 1948, when he was 7, the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on West Berlin, preventing the Western allies from supplying the city. Food was scarce for Schur and his family — until the Americans rescued them with massive deliveries of food and fuel in the audacious Berlin Airlift. Schur felt “very close to America,” he said.
Now 84, Schur’s happy memories are overshadowed by thoughts of President Donald Trump’s threats toward Europe and Greenland and military action in Venezuela — all part of a deepening transatlantic rift that is hitting Germans especially hard.
“It’s truly horrific,” said Schur, who drives into the city center each day passing what used to be the officers’ mess. After a long pause, he added, “It affects me a lot.”
No breakup is easy, but the bitterness and disillusionment over Trump’s disdain for Europe is especially sharp in Germany, where Trump has familial roots. To many Germans, Americans were saviors, liberating them from the Nazis. For the older generations who came of age in the American sector of Berlin, the GIs were both protectors and role models, purveyors of security and of cool. For Germans who grew up in the Communist East, jeans and U.S. records were top-shelf contraband, smuggled across checkpoints to the lucky few.
The United Kingdom may have its “special relationship” with the United States, but the German one — forged in adversity, rescue and occupation — is in many ways deeper. Anti-Americanism has long been en vogue in France and elsewhere, but in Germany, even as people protested George W. Bush’s Iraq War and Trump’s “America First” mantra during his first term, the relationship fundamentally endured.
Now, the breakup feels irreversible, and so many lines have been crossed that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that happened. Was it when Vice President JD Vance declared at last year’s Munich Security Conference that the greatest threat to Europe was its own politics and culture? Or last month, when the new U.S. national security strategy warned of Europe’s “civilizational erasure?” Or maybe it didn’t truly come until this month, when Trump threatened to take over Greenland, a territory of NATO member Denmark, and impose tariffs on European allies that dared to stand in his way.
The United States and Europe appear to have stepped back from the brink of a major confrontation over Greenland, but the damage is done — with serious financial and emotional repercussions.
“The relationship between Germany and America is like a marriage where the spouses have grown estranged over the years,” said Holger Stark, author of “The Grown-Up Country: Germany Without America — A Historic Opportunity,” published this month. “The husband — and I would put America in the role of the husband, the strongman — is no longer really interested in his wife. He’s eyeing other lovers, having affairs, but no longer at home, and is actually more concerned with how to get the best possible terms with the divorce lawyer.”
For Stark, as for so many Germans, the breakup is personal. He grew up in West Berlin a generation later than Schur, listening to Grandmaster Flash, the Beastie Boys and Madonna on a different U.S. radio station, RIAS 2, “Radio in the American Sector.”
“America, in my family, always represented the idea of freedom and openness,” said Stark, who is deputy editor of the newspaper Die Zeit. “We would usually travel to East Berlin twice a year to visit my family’s old friends there. We’d smuggle in Mickey Mouse comics and Levi’s jeans. These were the symbols of the West, of capitalism and also of freedom.”
Trump, of course, has supporters in Germany, particularly in the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has shed its anti-American stance and worked hard to build ties with Trump and his movement. But AfD voters back the party largely because of domestic concerns, and polling shows that only about a third of them have a favorable view of Trump. In response to Trump’s saber rattling over Greenland, even the AfD’s two leaders criticized the president.
Now American companies are downplaying the “Made in the USA” origin of their products to appeal to Germans.
Already last year, with Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs on Europe doing no favors for his approval rating here, Coca-Cola ads popped up around the country with large photos of the German employees who bottled the locally sold soda. “Made by Heike. Made in Germany,” some proclaimed. McDonald’s highlighted its domestically sourced ingredients. Meanwhile, Tesla sales plummeted after CEO Elon Musk cast his lot with Trump.
A poll this month from public broadcaster ARD found that just 12 percent of Germans support Trump and that a record-low 15 percent call the United States a trustworthy partner. And that was before Trump’s escalating Greenland and tariff threats. (Polls suggest Americans don’t perceive the same rupture.)
Like any dependent partner, however, Germany, can’t make a clean break. It remains heavily reliant on the United States for defense. German political leaders continue to play nice with Trump, while ex-politicians, at liberty to speak more freely, say the goal is to keep Trump and the United States onside for the next five to 10 years, awkward as it may be, while Germany and Europe build up their own military capacity.
Heiko Maas, a former foreign minister under longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the U.S. has historically played the role of the parent and Germany the child. “The relationship should become more like siblings in the future,” Maas told Stark for his book. “And for that, we have to grow up.”
Schur now owns an apartment building in Kreuzberg near where he was raised. One of his tenants is Rieke Havertz, a colleague of Stark at Die Zeit, who just published her own book on the U.S.-German rift, titled “Goodbye, America?” (The split with the U.S. effectively has become a literary genre in Germany in recent months.)
Havertz also grew up in West Germany, admiring Hollywood and Levi’s and U.S. music — in her case, the 1992 Jon Bon Jovi album “Keep the Faith” was “just, like, insanely big.”
Now, Havertz talks to many Germans who say they’re rethinking plans to travel to or study in the United States. No new partner can replace the U.S. on a military level, Havertz said, but when it comes to tourism and education, Germans are eyeing a new romance — with Canada.
“They have an easy way of living, they have the big national parks, they have great tourist destinations,” Havertz said.
Trump won’t be president forever, but even if a new administration seeks to return to traditional alliances, many Germans say, trust in the United States as a dependable partner is probably broken.
For Germans who grew up in America’s thrall, that realization is heartrending. “For the boomer generation, it’s the end of an illusion, a very painful farewell to their own past,” Stark said, an “agonizing goodbye to something they thought would last forever.”
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