I was in the German countryside when the results came in; staying on a glorious stretch of the river Rhine filled with craggy peaks, ruined castles and terraced vineyards aglow with the colours of autumn. A kindly German-Indian hotelier brought me a hearty breakfast of ham and rye bread and broke the bad news. “It’s 27 years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell down”, he said, “and now everyone is going to start building walls again”.

Travelling around Germany for the last couple of weeks, it’s been no surprise to find that most Germans are instinctively sceptical of Donald Trump. Germany may have a conservative government, but it’s also a country where the Green Party hold a tenth of all the seats in parliament, and policies like universal healthcare are widely accepted. According to one poll conducted in the summer, just six per cent of Germans felt positively about the prospect of a Trump presidency. Had German citizens been eligible to vote in swing states by post, Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide.

Another factor, of course, is the elephant in the room: Germany’s own experience of demagoguery. On Monday, one popular post on social media, purporting to be a message from “the people of Germany”, told American voters to “go ahead [and] vote for the guy with the loud voice who hates minorities…. What could possibly go wrong?” The post was accompanied by the hashtag #BeenThereDoneThat. Offline, most Germans are a bit warier of evoking comparisons between Trump Republicanism and the Third Reich. Hitler analogies aren’t taken lightly here, and one prominent academic warned journalists that there was “a crying-wolf danger of an inflationary use of Hitler comparisons”. However, Germans know all too well how easily populist rhetoric can turn poisonous.

Before the election, the German media were almost united in their opposition to Trump. One didn’t have to speak much German to understand front-page headlines like Bild’s “Ist Donald Trump ein Sex Monster?” or the Hamburg Morning Post’s “Bitte nicht den Horror-Clown!” Since the result, headlines have been similarly appalled; first prize goes to Die Zeit for its simple English-language summary: “OH MY GOD!” People I’ve spoken to have been just as shocked as many others around the world.  “It’s awful”, a law student in Karlsruhe told me. “Everywhere you look, the right wing is rising. It makes me very afraid for the future, in Germany and elsewhere”.

For the German government, Trump’s election also creates some tricky dilemmas. Like many others, the Germans will be forced to cooperate with Trump on many issues, but are likely to be appalled by his policies. The message of congratulations which Angela Merkel sent Trump yesterday provided a masterclass in political wordplay: she said she looked forward to “close cooperation” with the new administration, but also said that such cooperation must be based on “values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law, and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views”. The contrast with Theresa May’s vapid statement that she “looked forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump” on “trade, security and defence” was stark.

An optimist might argue that a Trump Presidency could end up being good for the Germans. With both the British and the Americans threatening to take a step backwards off the world stage, Germany is an obvious candidate to become a new leader of the free world. However, it’s hard to see a weakened, divided America as being helpful in the long term. German exports amount to more than forty per cent of GDP – far more than almost every other country – making Germany deeply vulnerable to any turbulence in world markets. Another big problem is security. For decades, the Germans have been given something of a free ride by NATO; able to under-invest in their own military thanks to the presence of thousands of American troops on German soil, and other powers’ promises to protect German territory against external aggression. If NATO now begins to fracture, the Germans will face difficult questions about whether they should engage more in places like Syria, and the extent to which they’re willing to stand up for neighbours like Poland in the face of a resurgent Russia. Coming a few months after the Brexit vote, Trump’s victory is deeply destabilising. For the Germans to lose one major ally to isolationism is bad news; to lose a second is a disaster.

Finally, Trump’s election also comes at a time when the German political outlook is very uncertain. In more than a decade as Chancellor, Angela Merkel done much to reinforce Germany’s status as a great power, and to build the moral authority of a country where the past casts a long shadow. “She’s really the only one who can run the country properly”, a middle-aged woman shopping for Christmas decorations in Mainz told me. “I can’t imagine anyone else could do it better”. However, the Chancellor’s popularity has been badly undermined by her decision to admit hundreds of thousands of refugees – a policy which Trump said proved Merkel was “ruining Germany” and meant she should be “ashamed of herself”. Elections are due to be held in Germany next year, and Merkel’s party is now polling nearly ten points behind the Social Democrats, with whom they currently share power. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded just a few years ago, has attracted many supporters with its anti-immigrant rhetoric, and already holds seats in more than half of the country’s state assemblies. As German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble warned this morning, “demagogic populism is not a problem only in America. Elsewhere in the West, too, the political debate is an alarming state”. Merkel – along with the likes of Hollande, Renzi and Rutte – will be hoping that Trump’s triumph isn’t easy to repeat on this side of the Atlantic. As American history becomes increasingly like the plot of a Philip Roth novel, the implications for Europe remain unclear.  “Was nun?” the Allgemeine Zeitung asked on its front page this morning; what now? So far, no-one knows.