BERLIN — If there are two qualities prized by modern Germans, they surely are Ruhe (peace and quiet) and Ordnung (order).

So the past few months have been profoundly unsettling. First, the United States — the very power that helped Germany to its feet after 1945 and instilled democracy in the ruins of Hitler’s Reich — was found to be a less than transparent ally. The National Security Agency, riding roughshod over concepts of privacy and individual freedom treasured by Germans, had collected huge amounts of electronic data from ordinary citizens and had even spied on the chancellor, Angela Merkel.

That shocking news — “snooping among friends, that just doesn’t work,” as Ms. Merkel put it — is still reverberating through the political elite and most recently spurred Parliament to appoint a committee to look into the case.

Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor lionized by many here for having exposed the extent of American intelligence operations, may even testify by video link from his temporary exile in Moscow.

Even as anti-Americanism surged, however, the Germans faced a second, more profound shock: The crisis over Ukraine proved that Russia, the giant to the east that Germans know so well from centuries of doing business and waging war, was no longer playing by what Berlin considered the established rules of the 21st century.

By replacing the currency of modern diplomacy — global cooperation, a wariness about using force, a shared trust and belief in agreements — with the swift, forced annexation of Crimea, Russia threatened the very foundation of Germany’s modern power.

As mighty as its economy — the largest in Europe — may be, Germany does not, unlike the United States, Britain and France (or Russia, for that matter), have the military clout of a conventional power.

“If push comes to shove,” Ulrich Speck wrote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Britain and France “could defend themselves. Germany could not.”

“Germany needs a world order in which basic principles are respected by all key players,” he added. “The attack on Ukraine is an attack on the very order that underpins Germany’s freedom, security and prosperity.”

Mr. Speck argued in a separate paper for Carnegie Europe, where he is a visiting scholar, that Russia wants to replace the concept of nation-states, having clearly defined borders and interests, with a notion of empires, which “consist of centers and peripheries without such clear delineations.”

In a four-hour televised question-and-answer session on Thursday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seemed to confirm that thought. Mr. Putin, for the first time, repeatedly invoked “New Russia,” a historical term whose vaguely defined territory includes much of eastern and southern Ukraine, spilling even into neighboring Moldova.

At the same time, hours of more conventional diplomacy in Geneva produced the first agreement between Russia and Ukraine since protesters drove Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, from power in February.

Germans’ relief was audible. Finally, said Sabine Rau, a prominent commentator on the country’s most watched state television channel, Mr. Putin was being rational and was ready to talk.

The foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has traveled and talked ceaselessly since the Ukraine crisis erupted, weighed in from an Easter vacation in northern Italy to caution that the Geneva talks were just “a first step, and many others must now follow.”

But, he emphasized, diplomacy at last had a chance. Germany was back on familiar terrain — represented in Geneva, notably, not by its own diplomat but by Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief of the 28-nation European Union, a partnership so often gently mocked in Washington, but hallowed in Berlin as the real, if cumbersome, governing body of Europe.

As Mr. Steinmeier acknowledged, if violence in Ukraine did not subside, the pressure on the West to impose much tougher sanctions on Russia would rise.

But behind the scenes, diplomats say, there is a wariness to act, perhaps because of strong German business ties to Russia — but also because of popular ambivalence.

While Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer in Dresden, is unpopular here — 65 percent of Germans view him as dangerous, according to a survey conducted this week by the Allensbach Institute — 68 percent view Russia as a world power, up from 38 percent when Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008.

Detailed questioning of 1,006 people polled by telephone on March 31 and April 1 showed that those from the former East Germany — but also young, educated Germans in the west — supported negotiation over sanctions, and were inclined to think Germany should steer clear of the whole imbroglio in Ukraine.

As Jan Fleischhauer noted in a column for Spiegel Online, Germans view Mr. Putin as they might the brash Russians strolling along the glamorous Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. “We laugh at the cult of masculinity and the bling-bling,” he wrote, “but in the contempt there is also a grudging admiration for a way of life that we no longer have the confidence to strut.”

Nonetheless, the twin shocks from Washington and Moscow to the German political elite are tangible, and will leave a trace.

Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, argued in The Financial Times last month that the only people who seemed not to realize that Germany was at the center of the Ukraine crisis were “the Germans themselves.”

Subsequent reaction suggested that ruhe and ordnung were perhaps too firmly embedded in German political culture. People want to live, he said, in “a giant Switzerland.”