It’s terribly dark in Berlin at night. On large boulevards such as Unter den Linden, it is now night without the lights of trees, shops and monuments. The outlines of the Brandenburg Gate are barely visible, as is the place where a manual (?) driver recently fell and was roughly patched up. In public buildings, workers move around in hoods, the thermostat is mandatory set to 19. Newspapers publish articles entitled “Can I stop working if I catch a cold?”. Energy saving measures expire on the last day of February. Until then, Germany lives with a daily existential anxiety: will there be enough reserves to keep industry going, to keep daily life going, and to justify the government’s energy policy? While the country got its way, catastrophic scenarios were not confirmed, helped by a mild winter, but German society and politics did not calm down.

In this context, this week the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, visited Berlin, where she met with her German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Chancellor Olaf Solz and Parliament Speaker Berbel Bass, officials of the Greek community, the German Metropolitan Mr. Augustinos. The picture of these contacts is such that the normalization of bilateral relations has been restored. Greece is now treated as a normal country, and not as an exception or anomaly in the eurozone, as it was ten years ago and for a long time. Bild rarely deals with our country, domestic issues are much more attractive for bold headlines: Solz’s difficulties with the obligation to transfer Leopard to Ukraine and the affairs of retired Defense Secretary Christine Lambrecht have dominated its front pages in recent days. The President of the Republic arrived at Bellevue Palace a few hours after the swearing in of Lambrecht’s successor, Boris Pistorius. The next day, shortly before the decisive meeting in Ramstein, which would be used to judge the supply of new heavy weapons to Kyiv, Olaf Soltz welcomed the Greek president to the office. He also asked to meet her during his visit to Athens, but she did not come. Contacts are intensifying, which is a good sign, political observers say, noting that just a few years ago, such meetings would have caused Germany more headache than relief.

Yesterday’s Soltz-Sakellaropoulou talks in Berlin took place in the shadow of pressure on Soltz on the Ukrainian issue, with a split in German public opinion, but taking into account Berlin’s allergy to other countries’ accusations against Alleingang (a lonely march). The country may indeed prioritize its national interests (as all countries do), but in terms of European solidarity and assistance to Ukraine, it has come a long way since the days when it struggled to send several thousand hard hats into the war zone.

“Why do the Greeks see us like this?” has been a constant question of German leaders from Angela Merkel to current President Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the debt crisis. The country’s image has improved, but according to a new survey by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Kapa Research, 57% of Greeks still have a negative view of the country (against 82% in the middle of the previous decade). “No news, good news,” say German officials and journalists today, who have endured the continuous rollercoaster of the debt crisis, immigration, the Prespa Agreement and the Greek-Turkish crisis in 2020. At the same time, Russian revisionism and the invasion of Ukraine are changing Berlin’s attitude towards Turkish politics, as it becomes clear what chronic appeasement of authoritarian leaders can lead to. Thus, in Greek-Turkish Berlin, a complex balance and low tones follow, given that both countries are in the pre-election period, but without “giving in” to Ankara.

And if Schäuble and Merkel once shared the roles of good and bad police in relation to Greece, then at the present stage, the role of bad police in relation to Turkey has been taken over by Foreign Minister Analena Burbock. The country’s most popular politician and spokesman for the Greens recently warned the Turkish embassy in Berlin of the consequences if Turkish politicians violate German law or undermine social cohesion in their German election campaign. The reason was the appearance of a deputy of the ruling AKP in the mosque of the “Grey Wolves”, where he spoke about the extermination of Kurds and Gulenists. “Hatred and hate speech has no place in Germany,” Burbock tweeted. Germany is concerned that Tayyip Erdogan could once again divide the Turkish community by turning the country into an electoral battlefield to attract the votes of the 1.4 million people who live in Germany and are eligible to vote in Turkey. Turkish reports show that the Turkish president himself is ready to move to Germany at the end of January, reminding that the AKP and Erdogan have significant bases among the Turkish minority, two-thirds of whom vote for him. In conversations with Ms. Sakellaropoulou, Frank-Walter Steinmeier confirmed Berlin’s fears that the pre-election polarization would shift from Turkey to Germany, and called a trip to Germany by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlet Cavusoglu a possibility. However, he insisted that there was no official information about the visit of the Turkish president to the country yet, refuting reports in the Turkish press about Erdogan’s meetings with the German president and Olaf Scholz.

In public buildings, workers move around in hoods, the thermostat is set to 19, articles are published in newspapers entitled “Can I stop working if I’m cold?”

In discussions with politicians and journalists in Berlin, topics unpleasant for Athens resurface: immigration – both the inability to integrate immigrants, as a result of which they insist on wanting to move to Germany, and complaints about exclusion – the rule of law and freedom of the press. However, the reaction to the results of Greece in these sectors is rather restrained. The case of the dead Maria, presented by Spiegel, made the Germans themselves more worried about the future of journalism in the country. At the same time, xenophobia is growing in Germany due to the arrival of new immigrants from Ukraine, and the initial solidarity either gradually dries up or comes at the expense of the previous “generation” of refugees in 2015. Christian Democrats (CDU) and far right (AfD) clash in racist statements. CDU leader Friedrich Merz recently called young immigrants “little bastards,” implying that the German state spoils them with benefits and integration policies. “We were once told not to throw flares so as not to disturb those with psychological trauma from the war zones. Today, these hyper-sensitive immigrants are hurting police and firefighters,” complained a spokesman for Alternative for Germany, referring to incidents between youth and security forces on New Year’s Eve.

Finally, the issue of reparations is raised in all high-level bilateral contacts, although Germany insists on considering it expired and Greece open. Most historians believe that the only real requirement for our country is a mortgage. The most notable difference is Poland’s role in trying to create a common front on the reparations issue, an attempt that Athens flatly rejects, characterizing the two cases as completely different.

In conversations with Greek diplomats and journalists in Berlin, a dynamic diaspora is described, numbering almost 600,000 according to conservative estimates. Among them are 8,000 doctors who come to Germany having already received their specialty, because working conditions and salaries are much better. More than 100 university professors led by Katerina Harvati from the Department of Bioarcheology at the University of Tübingen, well-known lawyers such as Nikolaos Gatseas, who represented Alexei Navalny in Berlin, Kostas Casambalis, owner of a very successful restaurant of the same name in Berlin, as well as young journalists from the German media (such as ZEIT and Spiegel) are among the most prominent examples. However, even 400 Greeks were not registered on the emigrant voter rolls because they were not informed about the next steps or because they do not meet certain conditions: especially long-term immigrants in Germany who have not completed two years of uninterrupted residence in Greece in recent decades, and although they would like to participate, they are excluded from the process. In every conversation with Greeks living in Germany, there is again a complaint about the corresponding device. The children of the first generation of immigrants who gave their lives to rebuild the post-war devastated German economy asked Ms. Sakellaropoulou for a gesture from the state to acknowledge their parents’ help in supporting Greece through the money they sent back to their relatives in the 1960s and 1970s. 1990s, as well as in their struggle against the dictatorship.

After many years of odyssey, the building of the Greek Embassy in Berlin, at 11 Hiroshima Street, directly opposite the Japanese Embassy, ​​is operating as usual. “I sincerely believed that this would never work,” the German Metropolitan Mr. Augustinos monologues, explaining the history of the building, which has become synonymous with the Greek crisis. “Everything that could go wrong, went wrong,” says Ambassador Mara Marinaki for her part. Built in 1911, it was saved from bombing during World War II and declared a monument. Construction work began in the 90s, the first building permit was canceled due to the fact that the Greek authorities did not start implementing the plans, which changed several times along the way, and then the company that took on the project went bankrupt. After successive delays and a huge bill for the Greek state, estimated at 20 million euros, Arta’s modern bridge was delivered almost a year ago.

Although the goal was to rationalize the costs of maintaining the diplomatic mission through housing combined with the residence of the embassy, ​​Ms. Marinaki cannot stay there yet, because the heating does not work, the windows do not open, there are no wardrobes. That’s how he’s been renting a place on Airbnb for two years now. Recently, the automatic doors broke and had to be repaired with two brooms so that employees could get through the entrance. However, the vast complex is located next to other embassies (Diplomatenviertel), and this in itself testifies to the smooth reintegration of the country into the European and international community.