I arrived in Berlin in late 2014. It was Angela Merkel’s Germany I had come to, the Germany of health insurance, cheap rents, ebullient multiculturalism. And yet, in the summer of 2015, when Merkel said “We can manage this,” Berlin itself would manage nothing – the city’s bureaucracy never quite caught up with reunification – so my friends and I went directly to Berlin’s overwhelmed social services office, where refugees camped in courtyards waiting to be processed. We joined grassroots initiatives picking up the slack, and in the evenings shuffled our chairs over to make room for the newly processed: mostly young men, middle-class, fluent in English, drawn to our neighbourhood by its Arabic shop signs and buzzy, international air.
Later, my German friends would tell me that the Merkel era was the exception, not the rule – that the anti-migrant backlash it produced was simply a return to normal. They’d grown up around a racism so total that, to them, the “Welcome Culture” I’d been so moved by was not progress, but opportunism in the longstanding tradition of the “laundry certificate” that scrubbed accused Nazis clean after the war.