A refugee carries a picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as he arrives in Munich in 2015. Credit:AP In November, conservative newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported the German Interior ministry was considering an Australian-style immigration solution, turning boatloads of refugees in the Mediterranean back to where they came from. "Instead of accepting them in Australia they send them back," National Democratic Party Commissioner Jens Baur, a neo-Nazi, said earlier this year. "This is the one real solution." Discussions had previously been held between Australian diplomats and German authorities, confirmed Australia's Ambassador to Germany, Lynette Wood. "There are some good lessons learnt about Australia's border security," she told Fairfax Media in an exclusive interview in Berlin. "We are lucky because we are an island, we also have a very modern, sophisticated system." "Germany [did not have] a structure that was used to dealing with [immigration] on that scale. So there has been a lot of exchange with authorities."

Protestors on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen It might be effective, but it has also been widely criticised. A United Nations report last year found Australia was systematically violating the international convention against torture for holding asylum seekers in dangerous and violent conditions on Manus Island. The hard-line approach to refugees came under the spotlight once again this week after protesters glued their hands to a railing while drowning out question time in federal Parliament. On Thursday, they unfurled a "close the bloody camps now" sign on the front of Parliament House and dyed the parliament's pond a blood red. Australia's offshore immigration detention centre on Manus Island. Credit:Andrew Meares Just days before, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton had admitted that not all 1600 refugees still in detention on Manus Island and Nauru would be re-settled through the deal inked with the United States in November.

While some of those detained on Manus and Nauru continue to wait in limbo, more than 16,000 kilometres away, many of their compatriots in Europe are watching nervously. Australia's Ambassador to Germany, Lynette Wood. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw Constantin Schreiber, a German broadcaster and Middle East expert, says any German shift towards an Australian system is more than just getting tough on borders – even the open discussion of such an idea by mainstream political parties signals a shift in the society's perspective on refugees. "Most Germans would associate Australia with koala bears and kangaroos, but in the last few years we have also seen these horrifying pictures of people on remote torture islands," he says outside the German parliament, the Bundestag. Refugees Basel Mutlark, 31, from Syria and Faraidoon Wasal from Aghanistan a former NATO interpreter, both are training to be wind farm technicians in Germany Credit:Eryk Bagshaw

The message has gotten through to the tightly connected networks of the international refugee community in Germany. "All the people that try to go to Australia have to be on small islands," says Basel Mutlark, a 31-year-old father of two from the flattened Syrian city of Homs, who recently lost his mother to a bomb blast. "Unhuman things happen to these people." A demonstration against immigration, organised by the Alternative for Germany party in Erfurt. Credit:AP So successful has the marketing of Australia's immigration policy become that none of those preparing to shiver through a sub-zero German winter in valleys filled with ship containers would countenance a move towards the Torres Strait, nor their friends or families still left at home. They are terrified that an Australian-style immigration solution will permanently separate them from their loved ones planning to come to Germany, particularly those still trapped by war in Syria and Iraq.

Yazidi refugee Renda Barakat, 11, with Majid Dhalriaiyam, 17, from Afghanistan outside a snow-covered refugee shelter in Germany. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw Meanwhile, the changing perception of asylum seekers in Germany is taking its toll. "In Syria I had the perfect life, I have my work, I have my wife, nobody looked at me like I am low level," Mutlark says. He remembers the abuse he received after what many have labelled the turning point in Germany's attitude to refugees, the New Year's eve Cologne attacks, where dozens of women were repeatedly groped by migrants. Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, the disused airport of Nazi Germany, where more than 1000 refugees are being housed. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw "Now they look at you," he tears up. "I run away from terrorism, not to be a terrorist here," he says.

The 31-year-old engineer, like thousands of other refugees, is re-training as a wind-farm technician at Hamburg's Acacia Campus, a cold, damp job on the North Sea that will power Germany's insatiable demand for renewable energy. Mhadeya is establishing a start-up in Hamburg to encourage older Germans to rent out their empty properties to refugees. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw It's one of the many integration efforts the private sector is willing along, keen to get its hands on young, enthusiastic talent in a country that is looking to support the future of an ageing population. Start-ups such as Hamburg-based Leethub are working with refugees to help them try to innovate their ways out of shelters. Mother-of-five Mhadeya, who asked not to use her surname, has been living in a shelter for the past year. The PhD student is running a program to encourage refugees to renovate thousands of Hamburg's empty homes so they can be used for refugee rental accommodation instead of sitting as empty private investments. Isobel Hardtie runs refugee programs with Syrian refugee Hamdi Al Kassar, a TV presenter who fled Syria last year. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw

"You need a future too," she says. "It's not only clothes, food, you need to be able to look ahead." In Berlin, former Syrian TV presenter Hamdi Al Kassar runs tours for locals and tourists to see Berlin through a refugee's eyes, featuring the local sim-card shop. "The one thing we all need is data to talk to our family at home," he says as he flicks through his smartphone a year after fleeing a war-torn Damascus. "Don't ever ask a refugee for their phone number, because the cheaper sim cards give us lots and lots of data, but no calls." Frank Kuhne, editor at Germany's largest children's book publishers Carlsen. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw Despite the prodigious efforts of many, such as architecture writer Andreas Tolke who transformed his 120-square-metre apartment and Armani couch into a makeshift bed to host and educate hundreds of refugees over the past year, Mutlark, Mhadeya and Al Kassar are the exception on the streets of Berlin and Hamburg, where many have struggled to adapt and crucially, learn German. "In the beginning it was 'everyone is a doctor'," says Dr Birgit zur Nieden, a refugee researcher from Humboldt University. "But as the right took hold, the threat to lower-skilled jobs changed this sentiment."

The language barrier has meant the optimism of Merkel's initial pitch to the nation - of thousands of older professionals flooding into Germany - is battling against a tide of pessimism and segregation. "They are giving up," says Gul Matic, the social co-ordinator at Die Johannieter Camp in Hamburg. "What was meant to be six weeks in the shelters has become one year and two months, how do you explain this to people?" "All the energy they had in the beginning. I want to learn German, I want to do this and this – and now its like, for what?" Even the most left-wing of politicians say the fate of Germany's great show of generosity now lies in the youngest of its new migrants. "If integration is going to be successful, it needs to start at the bottom, where up to 60 per cent of kindergarten children have a migrant background, 85 per cent in the city," says Michael Gwozd the Deputy leader of the Greens in Hamburg.

The refugees now filing into schools around the country have made this language barrier, which already existed with the large Turkish and Eastern European communities, all the more present. One of the largest book publishers in Germany, Carlsen, knew this when it distributed 200,000You are Welcome, picture books in Farsi, Kurdish and Arabic for free to every camp in Germany. "You have to learn how to live, but we need to know how you live," says editor Frank Kuhne. Now Carlsen is forging ahead with plans to use the technology savvy refugee community to help jump the language hurdle, distributing books about German and refugee cultures. Smartphones will be able to scan the books to be read aloud in 26 different languages. Even with the efforts of the likes of Carlsen, observers remain sceptical that Germany will be able to hold out against anti-immigration sentiment. Elections, due before October next year, loom as the great temperature gauge. In September, Merkel's Christian Democrats were beaten by the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany in local elections in her home state.

German author Hatice Akyun is concerned the refugee debate will become the dominant theme of a divisive campaign. "In this whole discussion about refugees, facts don't matter," she says. "Everyone operates on a 'until you can prove it's wrong, it's right' model". "Even if you prove they can be responsible for economic success, that is very hard to explain to the working class." For the sake of children like Renda, she hopes that can change. Tapping her feet nervously on the snow outside the shelter in Hamburg, Renda's thoughts drift to the bike she used to ride through the vibrant community that once existed near Mosul, where Yazidis, Christians and Muslims worked side by side. There, now only ruin, isolation and suspicion remain in a vacuum of terror left by Islamic State.

Loading I ask her what she misses the most. '"Everything," she says. Eryk Bagshaw travelled to Germany as the 2016 recipient of the German Grant for Journalism.