Clearly, Pegida has touched a nerve. In Germany, where the economy is still growing and more people have jobs than ever before, no equivalent has emerged to France’s Marine LePen and her populist National Front, and no leaders have ridden discontent to power like Prime Minister Victor Orban in Hungary.

The Islamization evoked by Pegida is hardly imminent, with only about 2 percent of the population in the Saxony region foreign, and only a fraction of those Muslim.

But right-wingers and soccer hooligans banded together in Cologne this fall and overran police officers in violent protests they said were aimed at Islamic extremism. Dresden is almost the anti-Cologne — determinedly antiviolent and careful in its fliers and patriotic placards to stay on the right side of laws banning hate speech — yet focused on many of the same targets.

In Pegida, “Obviously, we are dealing with a mixed group — known figures from the N.P.D., soccer hooligans, but also a sizable number of ordinary burghers,” said Frank Richter, director of Saxony’s state office for political education. He and other East Germans who marched against the Communist government in 1989 cringe at the new demonstrators’ appropriation of the old rallying call. “But they obviously feel they have not been understood.”

Some see Dresden’s xenophobia rooted in its Communist past. Before unification, the region was known as “the valley of the clueless,” because it was the only major urban area in East Germany which could not receive West German television.

And while the rest of Germany was absorbing Turks and other immigrants for decades, the East was largely isolated from foreigners.