BERLIN — Germans have enjoyed a long holiday from history, but it looks like their vacation is over. That was the impression I got while traveling through Germany last month before the federal election. I was struck by how abnormally normal the country seemed: prosperous, democratic and tolerant. While other European societies are torn apart by anxiety and anger, in Germany a vast majority of citizens are satisfied with their economic situation. The government has more euros to spend than ever before, unemployment is almost nonexistent, and the tone of the electoral campaign differed from the last American election in the way a family drama differs from a horror movie.

But beneath this abnormal normality is something disturbing. While most Germans would agree that their country is enjoying a time of plenty, very few would claim that tomorrow will be better than, or even as good as, today. One senses, instead, an anxiety very close to the surface.

The German elections exemplified that of all the crises that have hit the European Union in the past decade — the eurozone, Brexit, the war in Ukraine — the refugee crisis will have the most profound impact on the European Union’s future. This time, it is not the economy, stupid. The influx of refugees and the cultural and demographic panic it has stirred, more than anything else, explains the disquiet of Europe’s political mainstream. That crisis has, in its way, become Europe’s Sept. 11 in that it has fundamentally altered how citizens look at the world.

The German elections also revealed that East-West divide is not simply between Germany and its post-Communist neighbors, but at times within the West itself. In Germany’s eastern states, those areas of the former Communist republic, where there are far fewer settled refugees than in other parts of the country, the far-right Alternative for Germany achieved its best results. And while on the surface the East-West divide may be about migration, in reality the refugee crisis has made visible the growing resentment among former East Germans over the legacy of the fall of Communism.