In the long arc of European history, few questions have proven more consequential than how a nation perceives the threat at its borders — and how it chooses to respond. This summer, Germany found itself confronting that question anew, as a series of attacks on airports, defense contractors, and power infrastructure coalesced into what its government has named hybrid warfare, attributed to Russia. A majority of Germans now share that alarm, yet the country remains divided along geographic and political lines that reveal not merely disagreement about security policy, but a deeper fracture over w