Hours after the World Trade Centre towers collapsed in fire last September, a stony-faced Gerhard Schröder appeared on television to make a solemn promise of "unlimited solidarity" with the US, writes Derek Scally
He later added a proviso: Germany was willing to participate in a military strike against Afghanistan but was not willing to take part in what he called "military misadventures".
Nearly a year on, Mr Schröder has resurrected the term "military misadventures" to justify his government's decision to keep German soldiers out of Iraq. He was back in his home town of Hanover on Monday to launch the Social Democrat election campaign with a fiery polemic against US war-mongering.
Germany will not participate in a strike on Iraq even if the action has a UN mandate, he said. Neither was Germany interested in war games for their own sake, particularly in the absence of any plan for Iraq if Saddam Hussein was toppled.
As the Schröder government's term runs out, Mr Schröder's decision not to send German troops to Iraq has thrown into focus how far Germany has come in the last four years. It also raises questions about whether Germany is showing a new mature attitude to military intervention or retreating into its "culture of restraint", coloured by the burden of history.
Germany has come a long way since the Gulf War when the Kohl administration provided political support and €8 billion in funding, but was restrained by its constitution from providing military assistance. Three years later the country's highest court ruled that the government was within its constitutional rights to deploy soldiers on UN or NATO missions.
The SPD-led government sent peacekeepers to Kosovo in 1999, after much soul-searching in Germany and the near-collapse of the government following a revolt by the pacifist members of the junior coalition partners, the Greens. Mr Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister, saved the day with an eloquent speech about Germany's modern role as a defender of human rights but the Green Party pacifists have revolted against every military intervention since.
Last August the government struggled to find the majority it needed to send troops to Macedonia, and in November Mr Fischer threatened to resign unless his Green Party colleagues backed the deployment of 4,000 German soldiers to Afghanistan. Chancellor Schröder tied the vote to a vote of confidence in the government, a calculated gamble on his government's future to give the US the "unlimited solidarity" he promised.
That makes this week's about-face all the more striking. On Monday, despite cranking up the volume and the rhetoric as he went, Mr Schröder's speech only met with polite applause. But when he declared that the "days of the US as a role model are over" the crowd started to cheer and banners began to flutter when he shouted that Germany was not interested in playing war games.
Within minutes his promise from last year of "unlimited solidarity" was drowned out by an anti-US rant and the cheers it elicited from the crowd.
Opinion polls show that Germans are suspicious of the Bush administration's hawkishness and are overwhelmingly opposed to action against Iraq. By siding with public opinion the government stands to gain support to help close the gap with the opposition in the six weeks to elections.
Mr Schröder is also playing a strategic game with voters, by asking them to decide who they would rather have leading them in times of looming military crises.
Would they rather the conservative challenger Mr Edmund Stoiber, who as prime minister of Bavaria has little experience in world affairs and is determined to increase German military spending? Or Mr Schröder, who oversaw succesful peacekeeping deployments and delivered "unlimited solidarity" when needed, but who can also be a critical ally? So far the opposition has played right into Mr Schröder's hands, calling the decision not to intervene in Iraq an "election campaign trick".
Mr Schröder was easily able to dismiss the charge by saying the decision was dictated by the timetable of world events and not German domestic politics. In Hanover he promised to pursue a "German way" in world affairs, independent of UN and NATO obligations or expectations. But NATO leaders gathering for the Prague summit hours after the German polls close, will be anxious to hear about this new "German way".
German officials will have to make clear that Berlin is still a serious military partner and will reinforce Mr Joschka Fischer's belief that it would be better to concentrate NATO's energies on the fight against global terrorism than to get dragged into a war in Iraq.
Regardless of next month's election, Berlin must use the Prague summit to prove it is exercising a critical maturity in its relations with the US, rather than having a fit of anti-Americanism or, worse, a relapse into its "culture of restraint".
Derek Scally is the Berlin correspondent of The Irish Times