For nearly eighty years, Germany's postwar democracy rested on an unwritten covenant: that the far-right would be kept from the corridors of power by the collective will of mainstream parties. A decisive state election victory by the Alternative for Germany has strained that covenant to its breaking point, revealing not merely a shift in electoral arithmetic but a deeper fracture in the shared memory and shared values that once held the firewall in place. The question Germany now faces is one that democracies across history have struggled to answer — how a society protects itself from forces i