In the economically stagnant, mostly Eastern, towns where anti-immigrant feeling runs highest, hatred of the new arrivals has not prevented people from taking advantage of their presence. The government has invested millions of euros in housing for refugees, which local interests have welcomed as a rare form of economic stimulus. The Clausnitz attack was led by an AfD supporter named Frank Hetze, whose brother, another AfD member, turned out to be the director of the shelter. It later emerged that the Hetze family business, a metals factory, had sold shipping containers to a refugee center in Leipzig, which used them for temporary accommodations.

The day after the Clausnitz attack, Petry gave a press conference in which she blamed refugees on the bus for inciting the violence. “The incoming refugees were making unsightly gestures—possibly obscene gestures,” she said. When asked about the involvement of AfD members, she said that the matter would “need to be further researched.” Later, when I said that the AfD affiliation of the attackers was well established, she became flustered. “That’s not true!” she kept saying. “There were no AfD members connected with any of the attacks, or whatever you are calling them.”

When I asked if AfD rhetoric contributed to the violence, she said, “Typical German journalist question!” Her voice took on a steely hauteur. “The first question you have to ask is what is causing so many cases of breaking the law in Germany,” she said. “Of course masses will get out of control. Most of the Saxon protesters stay peaceful, but these are never talked about.” She began to speak faster and faster. “We have to distinguish between the causes and the symptoms,” she said. “In order to get rid of the symptom, you have to get rid of the problem.” After all, if there were no immigrants there would have been no protests.

Last winter, I took the first of a number of trips to Berlin’s main center for processing refugees, not far from where I live. It is in Moabit, a former working-class neighborhood that is now gentrified. The center—called LAgeso, an acronym, in German, for State Office for Health and Welfare—is in a bureaucratic slab of concrete occupying a city block across from a small park. Next to the main building, there is an empty lot with two large makeshift tents where people wait for their appointments. There are guards out in front, but no one ever tried to stop me from going in.

Each tent had a wood-plank floor and benches around the perimeter. Berlin winters are very cold and damp, and families clustered near large white ducts that piped in warm air. The men paced back and forth, nursing giant plastic cups of tea or bottles of mineral water that had been handed out. The tents filled up throughout the day, as buses arrived with exhausted-looking asylum applicants from camps outside Berlin. My eyes were drawn to people’s shoes. Some were nearly falling to pieces, from the journeys that had been taken to get this far. Others were new and shiny—recent purchases by those with connections in Berlin or access to a bank account.

“Cut a few thousand jobs here, a few thousand jobs there, boss, and they start to add up.” Facebook

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I met a gangly eighteen-year-old from Aleppo named Muhammed Fateh. He was leaning against one of the warm-air ducts, drinking tea. He had braces on his teeth that had worked themselves crooked, and wore track pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. He told me that he and his father had left Aleppo during the Russian bombing campaign in January. Initially, they took cover in a nearby village. When they returned to their house, they found that it had been destroyed. “It was unbelievable,” he said, sweeping his arm across the tent. “It was gone, gone, gone.” But his tone was nonchalant, as if he were referring to something much milder, like a car accident. He didn’t want to burden me with all the details.

Fateh spoke decent English, wincing when he thought he’d mispronounced something. He was impatient to begin learning German, and confident that he would find a place in a German school. Assimilation seemed to present few challenges for him. But his father appeared crushed. He lay on the floor, staring at the metal beams of the tent. A relative of theirs hovered nearby, looking warily around and examining the bottles of water to see if they had been tampered with. Fateh periodically glanced over at them with concern. When I asked him what their future in Germany might be, he shrugged.

I spoke to Cemile Giousouf, a politician who is a rising star of the C.D.U. and is well placed to understand the position of people like Fateh. Thirty-eight years old, she is of Turkish descent and the first Muslim member of the C.D.U. to enter the Bundestag. Looking around her office there—a shrine to multiculturalism, adorned with Islamic, Christian, and Jewish iconography—I wondered how she would defend her party’s burka ban, which had been proposed a few days earlier. Her answer showed how valuable she is to a party that has traditionally had little in the way of multicultural bona fides. “When my parents came to Germany, in the seventies, my father worked in a factory,” she said. “He never learned German. I still have to translate letters for him when I’m home. But German wasn’t as necessary for the work he was doing as it is for the work we need immigrants to do now. I’m talking about nurses, I.T. programmers, and so on. You need to know German to do these jobs, and so we need people to integrate more quickly. We can’t afford to wait a whole generation.”

The last time I met Petry was in August, back at the Saxony State Parliament. When I arrived, she was standing in a glass atrium, speaking sternly to a group of advisers—all men, all much taller than she was, and most at least a decade older. She looked like a young Renaissance prince consulting with his courtiers. She was complaining about the latest machinations of one of her AfD rivals, a favorite topic. We moved to a pressroom, where Petry addressed a handful of journalists about the AfD’s budget policy. Her speech was, as usual, boring, but its dullness muted the radicalism of her proposal—to defund asylum shelters and put the money into teachers’ salaries.

Afterward, in her office, we talked about the AfD’s connections to other populist movements. She has established close ties with Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, and has also met with Geert Wilders, the star of the Dutch far right. She told me that a colleague had recently met with Marine Le Pen, of France’s Front National, and that over the summer she had spoken to various American Republicans, including the Iowa congressman Steve King, who has compared immigrants to dogs and suggested building an electric fence on the U.S. border with Mexico. When I asked her what she thought of Donald Trump, she said, “My impression is that Trump may become the American President, because the alternative to him, Hillary Clinton, is just so unconvincing. She is almost like a copy of someone like Merkel—someone who just keeps on with the same policies that led to the trouble in the first place.” She admired the American willingness to take risks: “It might not be better under Trump, but at least with him there is the chance to change.”

She thought that German politics was more weighed down by liberal pieties. “It’s so moral to allow these attacks to happen,” she said sarcastically. “It’s so moral to promise to people around the world that they can come to Germany and find paradise.” She found this outlook anti-democratic, disdainful of the views of ordinary Germans. “I myself am not morally good,” she said. “I’m just a human being. I try to stick to the rules. And I think there is a majority of Germans who agree with me. So, reducing the entire Enlightenment and all of the successes of European history down to this need to be morally good: I find that extremely dangerous. There’s this saying of Nietzsche”—she took out her phone and pulled up the quote almost instantly. “Here it is, in ‘Zarathustra’: ‘The good have always been the beginning of the end.’ ” ♦