With both Greece and Italy allowing recent arrivals to push on up into Europe, the next month the German Interior Ministry had already revised Germany’s expected arrivals for 2015 up to 800,000 – more than four times the total number of arrivals in 2014. A week later the Ministry along with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees pondered the question of what they would do with people coming up through Greece and Hungary and into Germany. Would they be sent back to Hungary as they ought to have been under the proper protocols? An agreement was reached that they would not be. On 25 August this fact was announced on Twitter by the Office for Migration, which said‚ ‘we are at present largely no longer enforcing Dublin procedures for Syrian citizens’. The message swiftly went around the world. Then on the last day of August the Chancellor made her most important statement. Before an audience of foreign journalists in Berlin she announced, ‘German thoroughness is super, but now German flexibility is needed.’ Europe as a whole ‘must move and its states must share the responsibility for refugees seeking asylum. Universal civil rights were so far tied together with Europe and its history. If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed. It won’t be the Europe we imagine.’2 The German Chancellor was opening the doors of Europe, and the words of encouragement she gave to her countrymen were motivational: ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘We can do this’). Germany, she insisted, was politically and economically strong enough to succeed in this task, just as it had succeeded with tasks in the past. Much of the media backed her up. ‘Merkel the bold’ was the headline in The Economist, with the accompanying article claiming: ‘On refugees Germany’s Chancellor is brave, decisive and right.’3