On Saturday evening, a day before the Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored its first passport to power, I went to the cinema to clear my head – and failed spectacularly.

Lying around in the foyer were flyers from a special screening for the actors and creative team of the final series of Babylon Berlin, a popular television show about the end of German democracy and the rise of fascism.

Inside the cinema, one of the trailers was for Heimsuchung (Visitation), the new film by celebrated German film director Volker Schlöndorff. It uses lakeside summer cottage – and its changing owners over the decades – to retell Germany’s dramatic 20th century. (And will be shown next week at Leitrim’s Adaptation film festival).

Finally came the main feature: Vaterland (Fatherland), a monochrome masterpiece about the 1949 return visit of exiled writer Thomas Mann to the ruins of his now divided homeland. As the opening credits began to roll, I wondered: “Without its past, would Germany even have a film industry?”

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A day later, the past came crashing into the present when nearly 600,000 voters, in a state two hours southwest of Berlin, backed the AfD.

The party is many things to many people, morphing from a single-issue anti-bailout party on its foundation in 2013 to a strident anti-Islam migration voice in the subsequent refugee crisis. In its current........

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