Ever since Germany reformed its military after World War II, the primary role of the German defense minister has been to maintain an army large enough to protect the country, but constrained enough to prevent a return to German militarism.
The role of the incumbent, Boris Pistorius, is different.
As Russia warns that it is ready for war with Europe, Mr. Pistorius’s goal is to make Germany’s military capable of leading the continent’s defense in a major land conflict — and to prepare the country’s pacifist population for this new posture.
Opinion polls in Germany show a pervasive fear of sending another generation into war. Domestic politics play a role, too, with parties on the far right and left that are partial to Russia or that favor dialogue with it.
On Friday, German lawmakers approved the latest part of Mr. Pistorius’s plan: a law that aims to increase the number of German soldiers to 260,000 by 2035, a nearly 50 percent boost. To incentivize recruitment, soldiers will be paid more and receive more training that is useful for civilian careers.
The law is the latest in a sequence of moves that were unthinkable less than a decade ago but that Mr. Pistorius has promoted in order to bolster German defense. In March, he helped lead a successful effort to remove limits on military spending from Germany’s Constitution. That was a major shift for a debt-shy country, and it enabled Mr. Pistorius to spend billions more on arms, tanks, ships and aircraft that the country previously couldn’t buy.
For some, such moves provoke unease, summoning memories of German expansionism during the two world wars.
But Mr. Pistorius remains phlegmatic. Debate is healthy, he said, not least because it is slowly acclimatizing society to the need for action.
“The discussion alone,” he said, is “changing the way many people think about the times we live in, about the threats we face.”
In our interview, Mr. Pistorius acknowledged the weight of German history, but said it had given him and others “a sense of responsibility.”
“Namely, that we must do our part to ensure that we continue to live in peace in Europe,” he said, adding that the expanded German Army will still be much smaller than it was during the Cold War. Back then, Germany had as many as 500,000 soldiers but limited military ambitions, and it never sought to lead Europe’s defense in the way that he now seeks.
Despite pushing for contentious measures, Mr. Pistorius has remained Germany’s most popular politician for most of the past three years, according to monthly opinion polls.
He speaks with the rasp of a drill sergeant who has been yelling all day. His speech is unadorned, to the point, and sometimes self-deprecating. At one point in our interview he compared his work to that of a soccer coach.
I witnessed his brusque charisma on a visit in January to eastern Poland, where a group of German soldiers were helping to staff a missile air-defense system near the border with Ukraine.
Mr. Pistorius’s popularity has allowed him to survive the electoral fall of his center-left Social Democratic party, which led the previous governing coalition until it collapsed last year. Reappointed as part of a new coalition after the center-right won the last election, Mr. Pistorius is Germany’s first defense minister since World War II to serve chancellors from two different parties.
Early in his tenure as defense minister, Mr. Pistorius provoked a national furor by insisting that Germany become “Kriegstüchtig,” or “war-ready” — a provocative term for a country that, since 1945, had sought only to be “defense-ready.”