Some countries are absorbing these conflicts better than others. And there is one place, in particular, that continues to flourish in the era of polarisation — the southern German state of Bavaria.

It is one of the richest and most economically dynamic corners of Europe but is also famous for its conservative politics and Catholic traditionalism and sense of place — even the co-leader of the Bavarian Greens, Katharina Schulze, wore a traditional dirndl dress when canvassing in last year’s state election.

The German lands of Europe have traditionally come under the sway of either Berlin or Vienna, and Bavaria is in some ways culturally closer to Vienna. Bavaria fought on the side of Napoleon in the early 19th century, was one of the least pro-Nazi states, and its exceptionalism is underlined by the fact that it never signed the German “basic law” constitution in 1949.

Historically it was a largely agricultural state with no significant natural resources; Germany’s pre-1945 industrial powerhouses were the Ruhr region in the west and Silesia in Prussia.

But after the Second World War this all changed dramatically and Bavaria was one of the principle beneficiaries. Following Germany’s defeat, Prussia, one of the most successful and significant states in modern European history, was wiped off the map and the Prussians were, in effect, ethnically cleansed. Many of them ended up in Bavaria.

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It is one of the best kept secrets of post-war German history that Bavaria’s economic take-off after 1945 was partly driven by emigrant Prussians and Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Millions found refuge in US-controlled Bavaria and some of the biggest names in German industry — such as Siemens, Allianz, Osram and Agfa — moved their headquarters from Berlin to Munich.

Bavaria has its own conservative party, the Christian Social Union, which is autonomous from, but in permanent alliance with, the main German centre-right party, the Christian Democrats. From 1961 to 1988 the CSU was led by the pugnacious but economically pragmatic Franz-Joseph Strauss who helped to establish Bavaria as the economic success story it is today in cars, defence and aerospace, electronics and most recently in the new digital industries.

The region has one of the best education and vocational training systems in Germany, not just for the cognitive elites but for competent middling performers too. It also boasts a network of top universities and research institutes, including the headquarters of the Max Planck institute which also moved to Munich after 1945 changing its name from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Former federal President Roman Herzog coined the phrase “laptops and lederhosen” to describe the state’s unusual blend of innovation and tradition.

The CSU has run Bavaria throughout the post-war period and although it has adapted with the times it remains considerably more conservative than the CDU. CSU leaders were vehemently opposed to Angela Merkel’s refugee policy and almost brought down Germany’s coalition government over it. Viktor Orban is a frequent visitor to Bavaria and his Hungarian Fidesz party was for many years protected by the CSU from being expelled from the main centre-right grouping of European political parties, the EPP. More recently CSU members outraged liberal opinion in Germany by opposing a leadership proposal for quotas for women in the party.

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The CSU is probably the last remaining true “Volkspartei” in Germany with a solid representation in all social classes, including the working class.

Bavaria also has a powerful left-liberal tradition in the big cities, which are mainly run by the Social Democrats and/or Greens. The Suddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, is Germany’s most influential liberal daily and has a lighter touch than its northern rivals. Munich is an open city with a distinctively southern variation on German-ness.

But a strong sense of belonging to Bavaria can accommodate both the traditionalist small farmer 100 miles outside Munich and a young, liberally-minded, digital entrepreneur in the state capital. The two-week Oktoberfest beer festival at the end of September every year is a celebration of Bavarian traditions that attracts around 6m foreign tourists and somehow manages to make historic peasant costumes seem cool.

Can this happy co-existence of Anywheres and Somewheres last? I was making the case for “model Bavaria” to a Social Democrat politician in Berlin a few months ago who, not surprisingly, did not like the idea. Moreover, he claimed that Bavaria is becoming a victim of its own success. By attracting so many people from all over Germany the distinctive Bavarian brand is being diluted. Soon, he said, it will be a German state like any other.

Other Germans, some of them migrants to Bavaria, say that is to miss the point — newcomers like, and want to preserve, Bavarian-ness. And, as its post-war history shows, this powerfully rooted place has been able to absorb millions from outside.

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This was true before the war too; Ludwig Erhard, one of the shapers of Germany’s post-war economic miracle, came from the Protestant community of the wine region of northern Bavaria which also once had a flourishing Jewish community, Henry Kissinger and my own distant relatives the Lehman banking family were products of it.

Although CSU politicians take a hard line in general against mass immigration, they took a disproportionate number of refugees after the 2015 surge. Bavaria is likely to make a greater success of the influx than most other states thanks to the most efficient administration in the whole of Germany and the most no-nonsense police force.

It is too early to say how the integration process is going but it is generally easier for outsiders to integrate into a place that has a strong sense of itself, as, in the UK context, Scotland has shown in recent decades. Bavaria has a strong but open indigenious culture, anyone can wear lederhosen, and perhaps illustrates how a clear Leitkultur (dominant culture) rather than something to be ashamed of can help to foster integration.

Bavarians also tend to have strong sub-Bavarian local and regional connections and a healthy relationship to the bigger national entity. They say: “Because I am Bavarian I am German.” By contrast, a Scot is more likely to say: “I’m a Scot, hence British but certainly not English.” And many Catalans would say: “I’m Catalan, hence not Spanish.”

Bavaria is not, of course, completely untouched by the winds of polarisation, and the hard-right AFD polled 10% in last year’s state election, reducing the CSU vote share to 37%, its lowest figure ever. But conservative Bavarian politics has now also thrown up a new big beast — Marcus Söder — who seems capable of pushing the CSU back up over 40% and is now being whispered about as a possible successor to Angela Merkel in Berlin.

If only some of that Bavarian magic could be sprinkled over the whole of Germany and, indeed, the rest of Europe.

Bayreuth, the small Franconian city I found myself in the week after the Bavarian vote, is a perfect place to contemplate this question. The adopted home of composer Richard Wagner, its annual ‘Bayreuth Wagner Festival’ attracts thousands of opera lovers every summer. But as any visitor knows or soon learns, Wagner’s landmark operas, Der Ring des Nieblungen or ‘The Ring Cycle’, were Adolf Hitler’s favourite music. Nationalism and its potential consequences lie heavily in the modern German’s soul.

The standard interpretation of the recent vote is that the entrance of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, into the Bavarian Landtag (legislature) is another example of Germany’s inability to deal with its nationalistic element. In fact, a closer look shows that the real issue is not how to deal with nationalism but how to define it. All sides in the election were propounding their own views about what German nationalism, and its peculiar Bavarian interpretation, is about.

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The Christian Social Union (CSU) has long had a stranglehold on this issue. Its pro-market, pro-welfare state worldview reflects the social market economy the Christian Democrats pioneered after World War II. The party proudly embraced Bavaria’s Catholicism, backing social subsidies for traditional families and supporting the use of religious imagery in classrooms and other public buildings.

In a state which had never been part of Prussia (indeed, Bavaria fought against Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866) and with its own monarchical past, dialect, and rustic traditions, the CSU sought to be the political expression of Bavarianism. And for nearly six decades it succeeded so well that it nearly always ruled without a coalition partner, a virtually unheard-of circumstance in German’s rigidly proportional election model.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the CSU’s main competitor during this period, but it never amounted to much. A secular industrial workers’ party in a religious rural state, the SPD rarely broke 35% in elections. But together, the two parties regularly combined for 80-90% of the vote.

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This duopoly began to break down in the last decade under challenges from the Left and Right. The Green Party began to compete with the SPD for the support of younger Left-leaning voters; it’s communitarian and environmentally-focused platform expressing more thoroughly the concerns of younger and more educated Leftists.

Eating into CSU support, Free Voters, Freie Wahler (FW) in German, began to pick up those, especially in the rural areas, who increasingly felt neglected by a CSU whose attention was focused on Munich.

Yet as recently as the 2013 elections, neither party seriously challenged the duopoly. If you were comfortable with traditional Bavarian nationalism, you voted CSU. If not, you voted SPD.

Merkel’s 2015 immigration policy blunder changed that. Many of the migrants passed through southern Bavaria on their way to seek asylum; culturally homogenous towns suddenly had an influx of Islamic, mostly male, migrants. For many voters in these areas – and for similar types of voters elsewhere in Bavaria – German and Bavarian nationalism was inconsistent with large numbers of Muslim migrants, even if they lived far away from their villages.

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Their sense of nation included acceptance of change and growth, but only against the backdrop of an ethnic German supermajority and a Christian-influenced public morality. Feeling betrayed by the CSU, nearly one in eight Bavarians supported the radically anti-Islamic AfD in last year’s federal vote, with proportions rising in the CSU’s rural, Catholic heartland.

The CSU had predictably moved to its Right following this shock to its dominance. The CSU’s state premier, Markus Soder, pushed through a controversial law that extended the display of crucifixes in schools to all state-operated public buildings. The CSU’s leader and federal immigration minister, Horst Seehofer, forced the Merkel government to the Right on asylum and immigration policy, much to her chagrin and that of her other coalition partner, the SPD. The message was: we, not the AfD, remain the representatives of respectable German and Bavarian nationalism.

This move, however, raised a different question for voters less attached to the old Bavaria. Former SPD voters had always excepted themselves from this view, but now the SPD was complicit in supporting the very values of closed, ethnically-based German identity that it had traditionally opposed.

Urban, educated, secular voters experienced a similar quandary. The CSU’s move to the Right exposed priorities that were not shared by these voters. Should they back the CSU, whose economic record was spotless, despite their misgivings? Or was there an honourable alternative, a party that could give expression to their view of a Germany open to all, a Germany that firmly rejected even the whiff of its past?

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Enter the Green Party, who skyrocketed in the polls to become the second largest party in Bavaria. They, not the AfD, were the election’s big winners, garnering 17.5% of the vote and more than doubling their vote share. Many of their voters were former SPD backers (that party shed more than half of its vote, falling to a mere 9.7% and finishing in fifth place), but many others had backed the CSU in prior elections, especially in large cities such as Munich or Bavaria.

The Greens polled 26% in Bavaria’s largest cities, just a whisker behind the CSU’s 27%, and it won six urban seats that directly elected its representative via a first-past-the-post system. The Greens were easily the largest party in Munich, besting the CSU by over 7%.

The CSU therefore staved off catastrophic defeat, but only at a great cost. The AfD share of the vote dropped compared with the 2017 Bundestag election in rural regions and small towns, and some of those voters returned to the CSU. The FW, however, also gained some of these voters as they were a safe protest party for those who wanted to send the CSU a message.

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In the cities, the CSU defined itself in a way that proved unacceptable to economically conservative but culturally liberal voters who want a Germany that is open to migrants and the world. The SPD’s collapse also showed that the old ways no longer hold; the two parties combined for less than a majority of the vote. The centre held, but just barely.

And there is little expectation that this position can continue,  in part because CSU support skews heavily to the elderly. The exit poll showed that CSU support drops among each age cohort, from 52% among those 70 and older, to 27% among voters 18 to 24 (just a shade more than the 23% who backed the Greens). Incredibly, nearly a quarter million CSU voters died between the last election in 2013 and today, more than passed away for all the other parties combined. Without a change in path, tomorrow does not belong to the CSU.

The role of Germany’s past and its culture is unmistakably behind these trends. The exit poll included a question that, roughly translated, asked whether the respondent was worried that Germany’s culture was gradually being lost. An astounding 100% of AfD voters agreed with this, but so did 68% of FW voters, along with 61% of CSU voters. However, only 20% of the Green voters and 37% of SPD voters concurred.

Germany is now experiencing the same splits between its cities and its territories, and between its educated and its less educated, as the rest of the world. According to the exit poll, the CSU support among the least educated dropped from 57% to 43%; and the AfD finished second among this group with 16%. Among the most educated, the Greens leapt up from 15% to win 28% of the vote. The educated and the urban want a global, less territorial society; the rural and smaller town areas do not.

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Identical trends are sweeping other German states too. Recent polls show the Greens are now the second largest party in Germany with around 20%, more than double their showing just one year ago. The CDU/CSU union is now polling below  30%, their worst showing ever, and its coalition partner, the SPD, have dropped to their worst showing as well, below 15%. The trend is so pronounced that at a recent post-election event in Washington sponsored by the CSU’s Hans Seidel Foundation, one speaker said that the Greens were likely to become the main party on the centre-Left for years to come.

Meanwhile, the AfD is now the largest party in the former communist East. Combined with the party descended from the former Communists, Die Linke, nearly half of East Germany’s voters support a party of either the far Left or far Right. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that East Germany’s politics have more in common with those of their former Warsaw Pact allies, where Right or Left-wing populism is also rising, than of the western part of the nation they now call home.

Which brings us back to the city of Bayreuth. The creation of Germany in the late 19^th Century required the manufacture of a German culture that brought together Lutherans and Catholics, westerners used to civic governance and easterners who had long lived in a harsh monarchy. Wagner’s music was part of that effort, which idealised a homogenous, Christian, small-town Germany with a courageous – and, dare I say, martial – past. This cultural ideal reached its apotheosis during the last days of Imperial Germany, and was the touchstone that the Nazis drew upon after the twin despairs of Versailles and the Great Depression.

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The devastation that the Third Reich brought upon the homeland in turn drove the founders of the Federal Republic to actively suppress the political expression of such sentiments. The new Germany would renounce its closed and martial past in favour of commitment to economic growth, democracy, and peace.

The CDU/SPD domination of post-war Germany reflected this yearning for a new beginning devoted to comfort and security over conquest and adventurism. Despite occasional rumblings from the small neo-Nazi Right, it appeared that this new Germany had rooted itself in the German soul by the dawn of the 21^st Century. Those roots are still there, as the strong showing of the Greens demonstrates. But they are now in tension with milder expressions of the old nationalism.

Germany is not close to experiencing its Gotterdammerung. Virulent German nationalism required the twin calamities of national humiliation and economic collapse to give it life; neither event is on the horizon today. But a nation need not undergo collapse in order to experience extreme instability. Torn between a Left that has little that is distinctly German and a Right that has little that is distinctly modern, the old parties of the old order are slowly withering. The failure to create a new German national identity like their Bismarckian forefathers could drag the new Germany down with them.