The evidence that migrants in Germany were failing to integrate, just as Sarrazin had argued, was all around them, but the political and media class fell on Sarrazin for his heresy in making these arguments. In the resulting fallout Sarrazin himself was forced to resign from his position at the Bundesbank. And despite himself coming from the political left in Germany, his own party (the Social Democratic Party) as well as Angela Merkel’s CDU distanced themselves from him. Various Muslim organisations in Germany attempted to take him to court and most damagingly (if also baselessly) he was accused of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless the book hit a public mood. A poll taken around the same time found that 47 per cent of Germans agreed with the statement that Islam doesn’t belong in Germany. Although German politicians had put a firm cordon sanitaire around the debate on immigration, integration and Islam, the two million copies sold of Sarrazin’s book, among other things, suggested that this was not restraining wider society from thinking things that their political representatives did not want them to.

With typical political skill Merkel chose to speak to this issue, trying to keep people with concerns within the camp of her party and also to correct where she believed Sarrazin and those who supported his views had gone wrong. In her speech in Potsdam she started by referring to the country’s Gastarbeiter programme and the mass movement of Turks and others to live and work in Germany from the early 1960s onwards. She conceded that the country had – like the post-war labour-market immigration in Britain and other European countries – ‘kidded ourselves for a while’. She continued, ‘We said “They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone”, but this isn’t reality.’ It failed to anticipate any of the consequences flowing from the policy. She went on to criticise more current mistakes in the German immigration and integration debate.

The speech was reported around the world. What made it so newsworthy was that it included the most damning summary by any mainstream politician to date of a European country’s integration failures. Some of it had previously been said on the political margins, but had never been so decidedly voiced in the mainstream. Discussing what had gone wrong between Germany and its immigrants, the Chancellor said, ‘Of course, the approach to build a multicultural society and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other has failed, utterly failed.’ That was why, she insisted, ‘integration is so important’. Those who wanted to participate in German society must follow the laws and constitution of Germany, she said, and must also learn to speak the German language.2