On a beautiful morning last May, Diana Feldmann sat in her apartment in a suburb of Mainz, a prosperous city in western Germany, waiting for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Susanna, to return from a sleepover. When her phone finally lit up with a WhatsApp message, her heart leaped. “I’m in Frankfurt, taking a walk with my boyfriend Armando,” it said. “I’ll be back sometime later.”

Feldmann immediately grew suspicious. The message did not match her daughter’s usual writing style. Susanna had never mentioned somebody by the name of Armando. Nor, it soon became clear, had any of her friends heard of him. All of Feldmann’s attempts to reach her daughter were unsuccessful. That night, Susanna did not return.

More than twenty-four hours after her daughter had disappeared, Feldmann finally received a longer message. “Mom, I’m not coming home,” it said, in ungrammatical German. “I’m with my boyfriend in Paris. I’ll be back in two or three weeks, or never. Don’t look for me.”

Feldmann reported her daughter missing. But, since Susanna had skipped school a few times, the police suggested that she had probably just run away from home, and would soon return. In the following days, Feldmann kept pressing the police to do more. She asked Susanna’s friends when they had last seen her, and tried to get a television station to report on the case. Eventually, she wrote a desperate plea on Facebook, addressed to Germany’s Chancellor: “Dear Mrs. Merkel, this letter is a CRY FOR HELP!!! I feel abandoned by the German state and our friend and helper (the police) . . . . Not to know where your child is, and whether she is OK, is the worst feeling a mother can have.”

Three days after this post, her daughter’s body was found in Wiesbaden, less than ten miles from her home, hidden in bushes along some train tracks. She had been raped and strangled. A police investigation quickly identified a suspect: Ali Bashar, a twenty-one-year-old resident of a nearby shelter for refugees. The more details emerged about him, the more it looked as though the authorities had committed a remarkable string of blunders. Bashar’s application for asylum had been rejected more than a year earlier. In the months leading up to Susanna’s death, he had allegedly pushed and spat at a policewoman, robbed a man at gunpoint, and repeatedly raped an eleven-year-old girl. Even after he was identified as a suspect in the country’s highest-profile murder case, Bashar, along with his parents and five of his siblings, managed to procure papers, board a flight to Istanbul, and return to the family’s home, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Hundreds of people are murdered in Germany every year. But the troubling circumstances surrounding Der Fall Susanna, the case of Susanna, helped create a cause célèbre, generating intense media coverage—and activating the major fault lines now running through the country. Far-right parties hailed her as a martyr. Horst Seehofer, the country’s interior minister, who has repeatedly clashed with Angela Merkel over the government’s policy on immigrants and refugees, invoked the case when he threatened to resign last summer, sparking one of the most dramatic political crises in the country’s postwar history. And conditions were already fraught. Germany’s once placid political system had, over the past five years, been thrown into chaos by the rise of a new populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Support for Merkel had rapidly weakened, and, in October, in part to avert rebellion within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, she resigned as its chair and promised to step down as Chancellor by the next general election.

Since that announcement, a vast debate about Merkel’s legacy has come to inflect discussion of virtually every event of the past decade. Was her decision, in the summer of 2015, to open the border to a million refugees the noble embodiment of a liberal and self-confident Germany, or did it sow the seeds of communal strife and precipitate the rise of the far right? Is her cautious, reasoned style of politics what Germany needs in order to weather the growing tumult, or has it papered over problems that its citizens must urgently confront? Susanna Feldmann has, in her death, been swept up in a grand argument about the lingering effects of the refugee crisis and the future of the country.

Rising tensions over immigration have fuelled clashes all over Germany, none more prominent than the ones that erupted late last summer in Chemnitz, a proudly proletarian city in the country’s east. On the morning of August 26th, a drunken altercation over cigarettes reportedly pitted a small group of refugees against a handful of locals at the sidelines of the city’s fair. One of the refugees pulled out a knife and stabbed a carpenter named Daniel Hillig five times. Later that day, as news of Hillig’s death spread, far-right groups assembled for a spontaneous show of strength. In a video that galvanized the nation, neo-Nazi agitators appear to chase passersby whom they deem to look foreign. The woman who took the video tells her companion, “Honey bunny, you’d better stay here,” as a group of his friends pursue two men across a busy roadway.

When I arrived in the city, six days later, it was as though some demon had, at least for a few days, turned the most pessimistic predictions for the country’s future into grim reality. Eight thousand far-right protesters were marching through the city center, filling its thoroughfares with a steady stream of anger. A few hundred yards away, at a park ringed by socialist-style housing projects, a much smaller group of counter-protesters was assembled for a concert celebrating diversity. Between the two, scores of policemen, on foot, in vans, and on horseback, formed a buffer that seemed perilously fragile.

Walking through the streets of Chemnitz, I saw few signs of ordinary life. Tram and bus service had been suspended. Shops were closed. Large areas were deserted. In contrast to the earlier protests, the political theatre I witnessed felt carefully choreographed. The police were on a mission to show they were in control. The right sought to match its own dominance of public space with a demonstration of discipline. The counter-protesters were desperate to prove that the town wasn’t defined by the ugly scenes that had been watched around the world.

Chemnitz had suffered from a serious image problem even before the most recent bout of negative headlines. After the Second World War, the Communist regime renamed the city “Karl-Marx-Stadt” and turned it into an industrial powerhouse. But after reunification most of Chemnitz’s factories proved to be outmoded. Unemployment skyrocketed. As dislocation bred dysfunction, gangs of neo-Nazis roamed the city.

It was during this last period that Benjamin Jahn Zschocke first got drawn into activism. In the nineteen-nineties, when he was a teen-ager in Chemnitz, he briefly joined an anti-fascist group. “That’s the kind of person I am,” he told me in the dining room of the Chemnitzer Hof, a fading grand hotel located along the Avenue of the Nations. Now thirty-two, he’s still boyish, with short, pale-blond hair and an ostentatiously polite bearing. “When someone gets beaten up, I come to his defense.”