I know not much about the average German. I am German but I was born in Russia. My ancestors came from the Ukraine. Went there under Katharine the Great and stayed there until the Russian revolution. Quite a long story my family can tell.

We have been occupied and divided after wwII, and I heard that we are still under US occupation the first time just a couple of years ago. Never really understood it though.

I was in the States for the first time in the nineties and was quite shocked by the civilian population's lack of freedom there. It seemed much freer to me in Europe, but things were different then and I was very young and didn't know much about the world. Factually it may have been true at the time (although I don't know who would ever have called this a fact, for example on the evening news) that Germany was not sovereign, but habitually and to its own executive officials I have felt free most of my life. That stopped with 2020.

Russia I do not see as an enemy. We were officially released from Russian occupation in 1989. For me, it's history now. But what maybe would seem strange to outsiders is that despite we are Germans, but of course spoke fluently Russian within the family and relatives, I have a feeling of "home" for Russia. The songs, the old fashioned clothes from the small villages there, all these things wake up childhood memories to me. I wished, the German government would have not gone the way they did. I was taken aback by the propaganda against Russia. The day I heard that Russian armies went to Ukraine I thought: "how tragic that the Russian government now has let itself being provoked and started war..." (but I do not know enough about all these things).