IF ALL of the roughly 567,000 Syrian refugees currently in Germany were like Firas Alshater (pictured), there would be no integration problem. Mr Alshater is living proof that alienation and trauma can be overcome with a good attitude. In Syria, he was tortured in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons for nine months. “You sit there, hear the torment of others, and you don’t know when it’s your turn,” he recalls. In 2013 he escaped to Germany. “I had heard that the Germans are closed,” he says. “No, they’re not!” Now 25, he rarely looks back.

But Mr Alshater fled to Europe at a time when the flow of migrants was still manageable. That changed a year ago, during the night of September 4th-5th. Masses of refugees who had trudged through the Balkans were stranded in a train station in Budapest. Fearing a humanitarian disaster, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, allowed the whole lot into Germany. What was meant as a one-off exception was interpreted in the Middle East and Europe as a new open-borders policy, attracting even more refugees. Germany’s initially euphoric “welcome culture” soon soured, especially after New Year’s Eve, when crowds of mainly Arab men, including refugees, robbed and sexually assaulted women during festivities in Cologne and other cities. Now, as Germans mark the first anniversary of their experiment, many worry that integrating refugees will prove harder than they ever imagined.

Mr Alshater burst into the public eye shortly after the Cologne assaults, like an angel of cross-cultural mingling. Speaking fluent German by now, he put his Syrian theatre-studies degree to good use with a self-produced YouTube clip. “Who are these Germans?”, he promised to explain, sitting on a couch with a scraggly beard and body piercings. As with all his succeeding clips—called Zukar Stückchen, mixing the Arabic for “sugar” with the German for “cubes”—the video has negligible intellectual content but oozes comedy and goodwill. In one stunt, Mr Alshater stands blindfolded in a Berlin square until people spontaneously begin hugging him.

The clips went viral, helping Mr Alshater to launch a promising career in German media. With a partner, he is producing more Zukar Stückchen and will air his first television film this month. All this makes integration look easy. Is he a role model? “I don’t even know what ‘integration’ is,” he shrugs. “I accept them, they accept me, and I don’t bother anybody.”

Others are less sanguine, among them Germany’s best-known Syrian immigrant of an earlier generation, Bassam Tibi. The 72-year-old Mr Tibi was born into an aristocratic family in Damascus. He learned to recite the Koran as a child, and grew up imbibing the anti-Semitism that pervaded his environment. But in 1962 he came to Germany, studied with renowned German-Jewish philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and embraced the West’s tolerant and open society. As a professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen for four decades, he popularised the term “Euro-Islam”, arguing that Muslims can and should integrate by blending their traditional and adopted cultures into a secularised and modern faith.

But of late Mr Tibi has turned pessimistic. Mrs Merkel’s welcome last year, he thinks, could even turn Germany into a “failed state”. Recently, he spoke with ten young Syrians. “Two of them spoke German, were doing well, and reminded me of myself back then,” he says. “The other eight were telling me that ‘Allah gave us Germany as a refuge, not the Germans’.” Most Syrians and other Muslims, he now thinks, will never integrate, instead retreating into misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic worldviews and segregating themselves in radicalised enclaves.

Many Germans share his worries. Anxiety has risen since July, when a Syrian refugee blew himself up outside a concert in Bavaria, injuring 15 people, and an Afghan refugee hacked several passengers on a train with an axe. Both claimed to be acting on behalf of Islamic State. The government knows of 340 cases in which Islamic extremists have infiltrated refugee camps in search of recruits.

Hard information on the progress of integrating refugees is elusive. Crime statistics suggest that “refugees, on average, are as likely or unlikely to become delinquent as the local population”, according to the interior ministry. Indeed, relative to their numbers, Syrians are under-represented among criminal suspects. (Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians are over-represented, but rarely qualify as refugees.) Other objective measures of integration—such as the speed with which the newcomers learn German, acquire vocational skills and find jobs—will take years to assess. As of July, the backlog of unprocessed asylum applications was still more than half a million cases. With so much unknown, anxiety only increases.

Mr Alshater is always cheerful in his videos, but in person can appear tired and sad at times. He tries bravely to remain optimistic. Integration just takes a lot of time, he says. “When I came, just that fucking paperwork took a year,” he says, displaying an idiomatic command of German expletives. “But those now crammed in the camps with hundreds of other refugees— how are they supposed to integrate? Speaking to a wall? To an oak tree?”

Mr Tibi, convinced that integration will fail, blames not only the refugees. The German government thinks the challenge of integration boils down to teaching refugees German and getting them jobs. But it is really about identity, he says, and this is where German society fails. During his own stints at American universities, he was always impressed by how quickly he felt a sense of belonging. In Germany, even after writing 30 books in German and marrying a German wife, people still make him feel foreign. “I suffer from an identity crisis, but I go to a psychoanalyst and lie on the couch,” Mr Tibi says. “These 16-year-olds go to Islamic State.”