BERLIN — The past lurks here like a tripwire.

While Europe’s leaders wrestle with the challenges of a tortured present — the rise of the Islamic State, the euro, the maneuvers of the Kremlin — Germany also seems hauled back to its history, as if condemned never to overcome it.

In recent days, there has been news of the heirs of Jewish art dealers suing in the United States for the return of a trove of church treasures in gold and silver — the Welfenschatz, or Guelph Treasure — claiming that their forebears were forced to sell to the Prussian state under Nazi pressure in the 1930s.

Then there was a reminder that “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s manifesto, which has been suppressed since Germany’s defeat in World War II, will finally be republished in Germany in 2016, albeit with critical annotations, when the existing copyright held by the state of Bavaria expires at the end of this year.

But perhaps the most chilling throwback across the decades came when Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said Jews should consider removing their traditional skullcaps in some “problematic neighborhoods” of Berlin to avoid hostility.