With Germany preparing to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Görlitz in many ways exemplifies the enduring east-west differences in Germany, not just politically but also socially and economically, that have helped the AfD succeed.

“We know how it is in Dresden. We know how it is in the western German cities,” Sebastian Wippel, the local AfD leader who narrowly lost a race to become Görlitz’s mayor this summer, told me, referring to places with larger immigrant populations. “I don’t need to have that here to know that I don’t want it. I don’t need to experience it here, and we don’t want to experience it here.” (Indeed, he has made his views on the city’s immigrant population clear: At an event celebrating the end of Ramadan in Wilhelmsplatz last year, Wippel handed out postcards that said “Syria Misses You.”)

Read: Germany’s future is being decided on the left, not the far right.

Is Wilhelmsplatz merely a municipal disagreement that’s taken on a life of its own, or does it showcase, as Wippel suggests, the unsettling, out-of-control effects of immigration? How Görlitzers answer this question is an immediate indication of their political persuasion, at a time when many here feel split into two camps that no longer understand or listen to each other.

The back-and-forth about Wilhelmsplatz “is very symptomatic for the lack of discourse in this society,” said Franziska Schubert, a local politician for the Greens who came in third in the June mayoral race, won by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Görlitz’s city center, Schubert said, is beautiful and calm, “like the backdrop for a movie,” but Görlitzers ultimately need to decide what kind of city they want to live in: “Do you want life, or do you want to be in a backdrop for a movie … where everything is dead and empty?”

Walking through Görlitz’s historic old town indeed feels, as Schubert says, like stumbling onto the movie set of a picture-perfect German city—which, as a popular filming location for Hollywood movies, it quite often is. The candy-colored, perfectly preserved buildings in the old town span centuries: Napoleon stayed in an orange-and-white baroque building on one side of the Upper Market square, along what used to be the path of one of Europe’s longest trading roads; down the street is the now-empty department store that served as the hotel lobby in Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Blocks away from the old town, crumbling, empty buildings in various states of disrepair tell a different story—and hint at the social and economic problems plaguing the city and others like it. After the Berlin Wall fell, many residents left to find better jobs and opportunities in the West; Görlitz’s population shrank significantly and still hasn’t recovered. While the state government focuses resources primarily on Saxony’s bigger cities, places like Görlitz suffer: It faces shortages of skilled workers, teachers, and caretakers for its elderly, and the local infrastructure is lacking.