BEFORE LEAVING Germany, I met with Michael Brenner, a Jewish-history professor at the University of Munich. He grew up in a small town in Bavaria before making his career in academia (which included a several-year stint at Brandeis University in Waltham). Brenner cautioned against making too much of the Möllemann affair. It’s too easy, he said, to come to Germany, see a political spat about anti-Semitism, and conclude that the country is anti-Semitic. I agreed with him, but pointed out that I hadn’t simply conjured the headlines in the German press about anti-Semitism. That said, Brenner’s point is well-taken. And the picture I saw of Germany during my relatively short visit wasn’t only one of bubbling anti-Semitism.

There were the reactions of Germans like Höges, for instance, to the Möllemann/Friedman affair. Germans who care deeply about the prospect of resurgent anti-Semitism in their country. Some of this involves maintaining moral responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past. But to an even greater extent, their concern centers on the nature of Germany itself, on a fear that if left to its own devices, the country might somehow slide back into its frightening, hate-filled, and tyrannical past. This anxiety seemed to drive the comments of the Green Party’s Roth, who granted me — the only American reporter in the room covering the historic meeting between the Greens and the Central Council of the Jews — a brief interview after the meeting. "This is a discussion of German democracy after 1945," she told me. "Never again should a problem be solved on the backs of minorities. And it’s not just a question of anti-Semitism. It’s for gays, lesbians, and women. What does it mean in a country to truly have equal rights?"

I found Roth’s sentiments reflected in several of my private discussions with German citizens as well, discussions that I never wanted to have. Call it paranoia, but I had devised a simple survival plan for my trip to Germany: I would volunteer as little personal information as possible. I would remove the American-flag pin I habitually wear in Boston. I would say little or nothing about being Jewish. I would avoid discussions about the Middle East. And I would ask no questions about how people felt about Germany’s monstrous past. These unpleasant topics would be saved for my arranged interviews with politicians, professors, and policymakers. I wanted to spare myself the emotional cost of daily debate on the nature of Germany and get a fair look at the modern nation, aside from these questions. And, although I saw that Germany has left standing the Dachau concentration camp — which served as the "dress rehearsal for Auschwitz" — so that its citizens won’t ever forget what happened there (on a memorial near the front are the words never again in several languages), it’s hard to gauge the memorial’s impact on the daily lives of Germans.

My Germany-survival plan lasted just two hours into my first day, when I toured Berlin with Philipp Felsch, a graduate student in history hired by Germany’s Goethe-Institut to be my guide. Being paired with Felsch turned out to be a stroke of good luck. He was only a few years younger than I, shared my deep interest in history, and was eager to engage me in personal discussion. Soon after I expressed an interest in visiting Berlin’s Jewish Quarter, we got into a lengthy colloquy about the Holocaust, our first of several discussions on the subject — all refreshingly open and amicable. This all took place as we passed several Jewish restaurants in Berlin and the New Synagogue, guarded by a phalanx of police officers. The police presence reinforced a point I heard from many of Felsch’s compatriots about the current issues surrounding the country’s nascent anti-Semitism: Germany could not afford to see any violence at all targeted against its Jews. (The New Synagogue has been barricaded for some time, but security has been stepped up around all Jewish locations in Germany after two American Jews were beaten in early April.)

Aware of European-wide anti-Israel sentiment, I also originally planned to avoid much talk in unofficial conversations about the situation in the Middle East. Soon that resolution also fell by the wayside, and I found at least a modicum of goodwill toward Israel among some of those I talked with. The attitudes I saw sweeping Europe as a whole — rather than anything I witnessed in Germany itself — had led me to expect across-the-board anti-Israel sentiment. Instead, I found a nuanced spectrum of opinions, ranging from outright support of Israel to extreme discomfort with the idea that Germany might do anything to overtly harm the Jewish state. When, for example, I asked Felsch about the prospect of Germany sending troops as part of an "international force" to the West Bank to protect the Palestinians, he appeared physically queasy. "With our history, I can’t imagine Germany ever doing that," he said — a notion echoed by sources I spoke with in the country’s foreign ministry.

Throughout Germany, I found evidence of a determined effort to rectify relations with Jews. In Berlin, the most impressive example of this was the newly opened Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, a current Berlin resident who was born in Poland in 1946 and later emigrated to the United States (of which he’s still a citizen). The massive structure contains three elements intended to convey the broad strokes of Germany’s relationship with the Jews: the Axis of Continuity, which marks the continued Jewish presence in Germany; the Axis of Exile, which traces the flight of Jews from Germany to parts elsewhere, including Israel; and the Axis of Holocaust. Pointedly, the Axis of Exile ends in a garden, which contains earth from Israel, a symbolic acknowledgement of the link between Germany’s actions toward Jews and the existence of the Jewish state itself. The Axis of Holocaust concludes with a doorway, which visitors can walk through into an empty tower. (A museum security guard slams the door shut, leaving visitors in darkness; this suggested to me how it may have felt to be locked into a gas chamber at one of the SS-run death camps.) The museum also boasts exhibits devoted to Germany’s leading Jews — not just well-known individuals such as Albert Einstein, but also lesser-known, albeit important, people, such as Scientific Humanitarian Committee founder Magnus Hirschfeld, who was the first major gay-rights advocate in Germany, and the composer Otto Klemperer.

There are less-public manifestations of the same conciliatory impulse. During my exploration of Munich, my guide, a law student, took me through her university, where students were celebrating elections in the main hallway. We walked down a flight of stairs to a small exhibit marking the Weisse Rose ("White Rose") movement. This group, led by college students at the university, had been one of the few to explicitly challenge Hitler and to expose the Holocaust in pamphlets it created and distributed. After distributing their leaflets, members of the group were caught in this very foyer, where I spotted students drinking wine and where I had enjoyed a salami sandwich. They had been turned in by the university’s headmaster — not because he was a Nazi, but because he was a stickler: the students had violated longstanding school rules regarding appropriate conduct in the hallways. At the exhibit, I found a small group of Munich residents diligently preparing an expanded project on the history of Jews in their city. Both White Rose project director Michael Kaufmann and his colleague, Veronica Krapft, were appalled that a politician like Möllemann would attempt to exploit anti-Semitism in the current election.