Fear eats the soul. This is what the German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, had called his difficult and unsettling film about a sexually passionate but doubt-ridden relationship between a widowed, sixty-plus, white German cleaning lady and a handsome Muslim Gastarbeiter (guest-worker) from Morocco in his thirties. Fassbinder had included this man's name, Ali, in the film's English title. Its original German should have been translated as "fear eat soul up" - in imitation of the grammatically inaccurate and robustly unassimilated German spoken by Ali in the film, and left that way in the German title, Angst essen Seele auf.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was made in 1974. But, more than four decades later, the film feels startlingly contemporary in the light (or murk) of what has been unfolding in Germany and the rest of Europe since the first boatfuls started arriving, alive and dead, on the Lesbian shores. The rapidly spreading yet shadowy accounts of how 'gangs' of mostly Syrian and North African male migrants had robbed and groped European women during New Year festivities on the streets of Cologne, in a menacing travesty of cultural difference, have started a new wave of polarized imagery that goes back a long way in the history of interracial cohabitation. (Think of Othello.) The stink of fear is again in the air, 'fear' that cannot be distinguished now from 'terror'. But there seems to be a third element too, lurking dangerously between fear and terror, more difficult to pin down, though potentially quite as ungovernable and catastrophic - desire. And was it not another migrant male, the great Jewish analyst of the European soul, who taught the modern world that fear and desire might share a very porous, and therefore closely guarded, border in the individual as well as the collective psyche? Fassbinder was disturbingly open in his film about whether the Other's desire and desire for the Other might coexist, or be allowed to coexist, in public and private harmony. But chancellors cannot afford to be as doubting and ambiguous as film-makers. The humane and generous optimism of Angela Merkel's "We can do it!" is beginning to resonate less and less with her European and Scandinavian peers as public, and specifically rightwing, reactions start to veer towards the entire spectrum from scepticism to hostility and aggression.

Hostility and hospitality are kindred words. And it is not only philosophers, but also actual States, that have used the language of hospitality - of letting outsiders into one's home - to explore the conditions and limits that might bind foreigners to the country into which they desire entry. In Germany, the notions of the guest-worker and now of Willkommenskultur, the culture of welcoming the refugee, use the same metaphor to experiment with controlled openness - an openness that must also make room for the first German "critical" edition of Mein Kampf since the fall of the Third Reich. But what happens when the host turns hostile? Guest and host must look their fear, desire, and fear of desire, in the face before they can see how they might need each other.