HILLARY CLINTON, among others, has reportedly compared Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, which Hitler justified on the basis of protecting ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and de facto leader of the European Union in dealing with Vladimir Putin, has also been looking to history for precedents. But she concentrates on the events leading up to the first world war, not the second. That choice of analogy says much about how Germany is handling the crisis.

As a former East German, Mrs Merkel has no illusions about Mr Putin, who learned fluent German as a KGB agent in her country during the 1980s. She sees his empire-building as an atavism that has no place in postmodern Europe—the sort of “conflict about spheres of influence and territorial claims that we know from the 19th and 20th centuries, conflicts that we thought we had transcended,” as she told her parliament on March 13th. Unless Mr Putin stops, she added, Germany and its allies will incrementally step up their resistance. She ruled out a shooting war, but not an economic one.

By the standards of German foreign policy in general, and specifically its relations with Russia, such a tough tone is new. Starting with Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) in the 1970s, Germany has preferred engagement to confrontation when it comes to Russia: Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) as the rhyming slogan has it. (Leave the bullying to the Americans with their cowboy diplomacy, went the subtext.)

Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, took this approach furthest, becoming pals with Mr Putin and, soon after leaving office, joining the board of a pipeline company carrying Russian gas to Germany. Even now, Mr Schröder preaches empathy for Mr Putin, arguing that his actions in the Crimea are no different to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in which Germany took part under Mr Schröder. That is a “shameful” comparison, Mrs Merkel told parliament: in Kosovo NATO was intervening to stop atrocities.

And yet Germany’s Russia policy under Mrs Merkel and her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will always be more nuanced than its more gung-ho allies would like. Mrs Merkel’s style of crisis management, as displayed during the euro crisis, is essentially incrementalist. Mr Steinmeier used to be Mr Schröder’s chief of staff and shared his approach. And both are fascinated, if not haunted, by history; having recently read the bestseller “The Sleepwalkers” by Christopher Clark, an Australian historian at Cambridge who speaks flawless German, they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1914.

Mr Clark’s protagonists are sleepwalkers because, in the weeks following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, they failed to communicate or change course, trapping themselves in seemingly inevitable cycles of escalation and mobilisation until disaster struck. On March 14th, in the Baroque atrium of Berlin’s German Historical Museum, Mr Steinmeier hosted a debate between Mr Clark and a German historian, Gerd Krumeich, about the lessons of 1914 for today. The most relevant one, said Mr Steinmeier, is what can happen when dialogue stops and diplomacy fails. It is crucial not to drive into “dead ends”, Mr Steinmeier went on, but to create “exits”.

Sanctions and other measures must come step by step, giving Mr Putin chance after chance to stop further escalation. Mrs Merkel and Mr Steinmeier have been speaking to Russia more than any other Western leaders, with nearly daily phone calls in recent weeks. No matter what happens, Germany will keep talking.

The first two sanctions—suspending talks about easing visa requirements and blacklisting officials deemed at fault during the crisis—have not, admittedly, impressed Mr Putin much. Subsequent steps, in the form of economic sanctions, could hurt a lot more.

The pain would be shared. Though Russia was only Germany’s 11th-largest trading partner in 2013, after Poland, some 300,000 German jobs depend on exports there. Russia in turn mainly supplies gas and oil, 36% and 35% of Germany’s imports respectively. Russia might react to economic sanctions by reducing those exports. A report by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a Brussels think-tank, argues that the EU has full reserves and could import more gas from Algeria, Norway and Nigeria, though at a price. Other experts, such as Alexander Rahr at the German-Russian Forum, an organisation for informal exchanges between the two countries, think that doing without Russian gas is at best years away.

There are many more measured steps to be taken before things escalate that far. If they did, Germany’s business elite and public might yet support such drastic measures; but only after they had seen Mrs Merkel exhaust every other option.