In September 2016 Merkel did concede that her phrase from the year before, ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘We can do it’), was ‘a simple slogan, almost an empty formula’, and one that had significantly underestimated the scale of the challenge. But this was also wordplay, as one of her own MP colleagues in the CDU admitted to the press. This MP insisted that ‘The government has been on the right track with its policies for some time now. But our communication must be better. The Chancellor seems now to have accepted this.’ The ‘mea culpa’ claim was merely electorally useful for the CDU. But there was no serious remorse for what had been imposed on the country. For what Merkel also said at the same press conference and which was less widely quoted, was that it had been ‘absolutely right’ to take in the more than one million migrants of the year before. Nevertheless, ‘We have learnt from history. Nobody, including me, wants a repeat of this situation.’3

Yet it seemed as though the only lessons Germany had learned from history were the usual ones, and those from eight decades earlier. On the eve of the AfD’s success in the Berlin elections the mayor of Berlin Michael Müller, from the left-wing SDP, warned that a double-digit result for the AfD would ‘be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the right wing and the Nazis in Germany’. Everywhere else in Europe the same warning kept being issued from every direction after every event.

In the same month as the regional elections in Germany, one year after Germany had opened its doors, the British government announced that it was going to have to build a further security wall in Calais near to the large migrant camp there. The one-kilometre wall was designed to further protect the entry point to Britain, and specifically to prevent migrants from trying to climb onto passing lorries on their way to the United Kingdom. Responding to this proposal the French senator and vice-chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Nathalie Goulet, said, ‘It reminds me of the wall they built around the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two.’ And behind the perennial slur that borders were associated with the Nazis came the familiar presumption that borders were also part of history. ‘Putting up walls has happened throughout history,’ explained Ms Goulet. ‘But eventually people find a way around them or they fail. Look at the Great Wall of China – now tourists walk on it and take pictures.’4