Unsatisfied with his casuistry, I pushed my MP. He must know, and his colleagues must know, that the reason why the flow had diminished was because of these two factors. If Germany really did care as much as it claimed about all the oppressed, beleaguered and war-torn of the world, then there were obvious solutions to their plight. Germany did not need to keep making Greece pay the price. Why did Germany not lay on a fleet of airplanes to bring migrants from the Greek islands and fly them straight up into Berlin? If the dominant country in Europe really did abhor the re-erection of borders – as it officially claimed to do – then it should not permit those borders to be a hindrance to their humanitarian activism. Massive numbers of chartered flights from the extremities of Europe to its heart were clearly the answer.

My interlocutor would not grant this, and that is where the realisation struck that even these people – even the most pro-Merkel, pro-migrant, MPs – have their snapping point. And here we were right at the edge of it. He was willing to plead the plight of all migrants, also condemn all the borders, and simultaneously be willing to pretend that the flow had slowed of its own volition. This was the way in which his conscience and his survival instinct had found room for an agreement. By pretending that the migrants simply weren’t coming whilst supporting a policy that had stopped them from coming, it was possible to remain a humanitarian and remain in power. He had made a pact with himself that many other Germans were also beginning to make.

News from Germany strangely no longer travels very far. The cost of foreign-reporting, even of having a single correspondent full-time in another European city, is one explanation. As is an apparently diminishing public appetite for news rather than gossip and entertainment. Elections are still covered, of course, as are unavoidably huge events. But in a continent that likes to pretend it is wholly interconnected, the real news of what is going on rarely travels from one country to another. Yet as anybody who knows Germany will know, any normal day’s news, that rarely travels further than the German-language press, reveals a country teetering ever nearer to disaster.