That was not Sarrazin's fate, to put it mildly. The initial reaction to his book must have exceeded his wildest expectations: it sold a million copies in a matter of weeks. Clearly his critique of multiculturalism and the long-term impact of Islam found its mark. But then the politicians got involved. In particular, Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear that Sarrazin's opinions were "unerwünscht": not merely mistaken but undesirable, even dangerous. The rest of the German establishment followed Frau Merkel's line. President Christian Wulff followed the procedures necessary to force Sarrazin to resign from his post on the board of the Bundesbank. Having sent out the signal that to criticise Islam would cost any public official his job, this same head of state attempted to draw a line under the affair when he declared: "Islam is part of Germany." Not only had Sarrazin lost his job, he had apparently lost the argument, too. In Standpoint, Karen Horn praised Sarrazin's courage in launching "a double debate which will benefit Western civilisation: one on the mishaps of integration, another on the road to serfdom down which our political class is leading us". 

Then, however, something unforeseen happened. Chancellor Merkel gave a speech to young Christian Democrats in which, to their astonishment, she admitted that "we lied to ourselves" about how successful the integration of the Turkish Muslims into German society had actually been. "The multicultural approach," she declared to enthusiastic applause, "has failed — utterly." This was pure Sarrazin. Suddenly, his "undesirable opinions" had been adopted by the German government — without acknowledgement, naturally. The echo his book had found in the electorate meant that his views could no longer be ignored and the petty spite of the political elite's punitive reaction had become indefensible. Public opinion had forced Frau Merkel to change course. This is how an open society is supposed to function. Germany has not abolished itself — yet.

How did Angela Merkel come to accept that she, her government and Germany had to change with the times? It is surely significant that she is an East German, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and a teacher of English and Latin, who lived at different times on either side of the Iron Curtain. The young Angela grew up with first-hand experience of the difference, not only between the prosperity of the capitalist West and the poverty of the communist East, but between what Orwell called "the freedom to say that two plus two equals four" and a diabolical world in which reason itself is denied.

Far better than most Western leaders, Frau Merkel grasps why the West is now faced with a real threat to its survival from the moral and cultural relativism that underlies the multicultural approach to Muslim immigration. Another — now deeply unfashionable — leader who gets it is George W. Bush. In a recent interview, the former President told The Times: "One of the controversial things I happen to believe is that freedom is universal. I happen to believe there is an Almighty, which might make this statement even doubly controversial, but the gift of that Almighty is freedom. And there is a tinge of moral relativism in the world expressed by those who say: he is imposing his values. Well, I rest my case. They are not my values. They are universal values."