BERLIN — As the results of Germany’s election last Sunday flashed on her television screen in the western city of Cologne, Kirsten Schindler, watched with a mixture of confusion and dismay.

For the first time in decades, a far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, had broken into the Parliament, winning nearly 13 percent of the vote. Celebrating, its leading candidate, Alexander Gauland, pledged to “take back our country and our people.”

Ms. Schindler, a professor of linguistics at the University of Cologne, felt that all the postwar lessons of tolerance and acceptance of her western German upbringing were now suddenly at risk.

“I kept thinking the whole time, who are ‘our people?’” she said. “He doesn’t mean me.”

The outcome of the election has given her country equal pause. The result has ushered in a moment of national soul-searching over what post-World War II Germany is today, and whether its sense of a unique historical burden for Nazism and the Holocaust is felt as deeply as it once was.