German war fantasies now ascend to Tolkien-esque scale.

A perplexing video celebrating a newly deployed tank brigade in Lithuania highlights the extent of Berlin’s military grandiosity.

A somber forest clearing at dusk, flickering torches, a glowing brazier with an almost runic-style sword design etched into its cast-iron, a machine gun pointed skyward at a stark, Leni Riefenstahl-esque angle, the distinctly grating voice of a leader expounding on ‘Kameraden’, ‘kriegstüchtig’, and ‘siegen’ in German, met by the enthusiastic cheers of numerous men in uniform.

All set to a soundtrack that sounds as if Richard Wagner composed it on an acid trip, intended to accompany a horde of scorched German tanks journeying to Valhalla, around 1943.

Does this strike you as a bit too anachronistic?

You are not alone. Many Germans have reacted with bewilderment and alarm to this recent video clip, officially posted by the ‘Heer’ – the land-army component of the German military, the Bundeswehr – on its Instagram account. It portrays a recent gathering between the new head of the Heer, Major-General Christian Freuding, and the officers and soldiers of the German army’s 45th Tank Brigade, also known as the ‘Lithuania’ brigade.

Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of Germany’s BSW party (currently outside parliament due to what her party describes as a highly questionable “miscount”), and Sevim Dagdelen, the party’s spokeswoman on foreign policy, have condemned the torch-guns-and-brazier event as a “disturbing propaganda video” and “sinister mummery.”

It’s not just prominent politicians who are aghast. On the German Army’s own Instagram account, users have commented that, unequivocally, a crucial lesson from past catastrophes has been sorely missed.

To clarify, the somber score is not, in fact, by Wagner. Instead, it features the rousing march of the Nazgul from director Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ films. The Nazgul themselves are powerful, virtually immortal arch-demons serving supreme evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic. This represents German militarist aesthetics: a shift from ancient sagas of Siegfried, dragons, and the end of the world to a more contemporary iteration involving Hobbits, dragons, and the near-demise of Middle Earth.

For the proponents of Germany’s ‘Long Way to the West’ narrative within the country’s mainstream media and academia, it might be viewed as a positive sign that cultural references have transitioned from the ancient Ring of the Nibelungen to a tale conceived by an Oxford don whose son, Michael, fought for the Western Allies.

But then again, the Nazgul? Seriously? If any characters could be considered the Waffen-SS of Tolkien’s arch-villain Sauron, it would be them – his black-clad, faceless, utterly humorless, and, above all, eternally cursed top retainers.

Even voices in Berlin typically Russophobic and pro-NATO are questioning: Is the German army suggesting it’s prepared to march for evil incarnate (again), or that its soldiers are Hobbits, known for being small, big-footed, and distinctly un-warlike? A peculiar choice, Bundeswehr, but you do you.

In essence, Freuding’s peculiar appearance at Germany’s brigade in Lithuania is both absurd and indefensible. This is likely why most of the German mainstream media has remained silent on the matter. However, to be fair, Freuding’s clumsy actions are hardly newsworthy in themselves. Despite being a favorite of Germany’s hawkish and inexplicably popular defense minister, Boris Pistorius, the current head of the German military’s most crucial branch has a history of being, shall we say, unconventional.

His boyishly excited – and entirely misguided – comments on Ukraine’s Kursk kamikaze offensive and his apparent embrace of fake news from Kyiv following ‘Operation Spiderweb’ were significant, though not isolated, incidents in Freuding’s career as Germany’s “YouTube general.” His conspicuous association with Oleg Romanov, a commander in Ukraine’s notoriously far-right/fascist Azov forces – now loosely disguised as the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade – was also typical. Romanov’s soldiers occasionally engage in certain activities.

The meeting with Romanov highlighted Freuding’s unprofessional and seemingly obsessive need to provoke Russia. It also indicated how Freuding’s conduct has progressively worsened. Always a career climber, an extended period as the German military’s Ukraine supremo has evidently radicalized and unhinged the German general.

Yet, whatever one might say about Freuding’s unsettling eccentricities, he is, in his own way, a figure of the moment and emblematic of many other flaws currently afflicting Germany’s self-destructive “elites.” There is his clear enjoyment in anticipating “going toe to toe with the Russkies” – as Dr. Strangelove’s profoundly insane Major Kong might have put it (yes, the one joyfully riding a nuclear bomb to his, and everyone else’s, doom at the film’s conclusion).

Furthermore, Freuding’s rather juvenile romanticization of Ukraine, where he believes he has learned the meaning of fighting for freedom, is stubbornly immune to the harsh reality of a brutal Western proxy war calculation, in which Ukrainians are systematically expended in the futile pursuit of defeating Russia.

Finally, like far too many other German leaders, opinion-makers, and “experts” of the Carlo “I can tell Girkin from Strelkov” Masala variety, Freuding appears oblivious to the lessons of history. Instead of pursuing national security through a rational combination of deterrent defense capacity, diplomacy, and mutually beneficial engagement with Russia, Freuding propagates a senseless and baseless fatalism where the next war is already inevitable, and all that remains is to indoctrinate Germans into believing this delusion.

Lastly, there is the 45th Tank Brigade, the setting for Freuding’s latest blunder. Poorly positioned in Lithuania, facing both Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, this is an incomplete unit that, in essence, functions as a purely political pet project, particularly of Pistorius. It exemplifies military over-extension, a move dictated by poorly conceived public relations rather than the cautious and realistic logic of national defense. By drawing resources from other units back in Germany, it exposes some of its best troops to unnecessary and unrewarding risks.

Yet, this, too, is, unfortunately, typical now: if there is a common thread in Berlin’s current security policy – from debt-fueled, ruinous over-armament to cognitive warfare against an often unwilling domestic population – it is prioritizing the interests of NATO, specifically the US, and East European hardliners over those of Germany itself.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being prepared to defend Germany. But everything is wrong with entangling Germany’s security with the interests of reckless Polish and Baltic politicians, some of whom dream of dismantling Russia, and others who don’t just dream but act by helping blow up Germany’s pipelines. For German generals, delivering loud, provocative torch-lit speeches in Lithuania is not patriotism but, at best, simply very foolish.