Germany at a turning point as spectres of war and far right loom

HISTORY is omnipresent in the old East Germany. On Dresden’s Angelikastrasse, a pastel yellow villa that once served as the local KGB HQ – Vladimir Putin worked here during the final years of the Soviet Union – now hosts a Rudolf Steiner school.

A few hundred metres south of Angelikastrasse lies the Bautzner Street Memorial, a one-time Soviet and Stasi prison that was converted, after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), into a museum of Stalinist tyranny.

For a small €8 fee, you can tour the prison’s abandoned cells and interrogation rooms; an empty labyrinth of cracked plaster, chipped paint, and exposed piping.

Modern Germany tries to make sense of its 20th-century experiences, its ruinous encounters with communism, fascism, and war.

But 36 years on from the fall of