After Angela Merkel rang Vladimir Putin to reprimand him for destabilising eastern Ukraine four years ago, she concluded that the Kremlin chief was living in “another world”. In fact, it is the German chancellor’s world that seems both to be shrinking and of a bygone age. When she opened Germany’s frontiers to an uncontrolled flow of migrants in 2015 she ushered in the creeping disintegration of the European Union. Belatedly she has grasped that her naive act of generosity has stirred up national and tribal animosities in a union that was supposed to tame them.

Take the city of Essen in the Ruhr. A food bank there now insists that everyone in the queue must present a German passport because, say the organisers, asylum seekers