As a person bitten by a 'collector' bug, I have yearned for unusual pieces of memorabilia that range from collecting George VI stamps to systematically accumulating all the yellow-jacketed Wisden year books since 1945 - I still have 13 or so volumes left to complete my collection. Then there are the quirky items, like the 19th-century ornate caviar bowl I picked up from the big bazaar in Tehran and the embossed padlock used to inaugurate a medical ward in Calcutta by a British governor of Bengal that I detected in an antiques market in London.

Among the items I particularly yearned for is a Pickelhaube which, for the uninitiated, is the spiked helmet worn by the Imperial German army (and even the police) until the Weimar Republic. Alas, the prices of these quaint pieces of headgear -there are grand photographs of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and many of his (largely Prussian) generals wearing a Pickelhaube - proved to be rather forbidding. Fortuitously, a friend noticed a bargain in an eBay auction and, in a spirit of mad generosity, gifted me one for my birthday. Today, it sits side by side with my equally bizarre collection of pith helmets ( sola topee), so favoured by functionaries of the British Empire in India and Africa.

When I was in Berlin earlier this year doing a frenzied round of the wonderful museums of the resurrected German capital, I was strongly tempted to do the rounds of the antique shops to locate an affordable Pickelhaube. Friends with a greater awareness of contemporary Germany told me to desist. Germany, they informed me, had developed such a profound distaste for its militarist past that this innocent and crazy search for a ceremonial helmet could well be horribly misconstrued. I heeded the advice and instead spent a good 15 minutes gazing appreciatively at an entire showcase of Pickelhaube at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

One of the exhibits that struck me particularly was a large bronze wreath commemorating Germany's fallen soldiers that was once installed in a prominent part of the area around the Brandenburg Gate. Apart from the fact that the wreath was associated with an age when Germany prided itself on its militarism, there was nothing to identify it with some of the more reprehensible facets of Germany's 20th-century past. And yet, it was deemed necessary to remove this simple but dignified memorial to all fallen soldiers from the public space and relocate it in a museum.

That Germany remains troubled and even ashamed of its Third Reich inheritance is undeniable. The disavowal of the past is both ostentatious and public. In Berlin, there is a Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate comprising 2,711 concrete slabs spread over 4.7 acres, a Topography of Terror museum at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters and adjoining a section of the preserved Berlin Wall, a museum of Jewish history and countless brass plaques embedded in pavements in front of buildings from where Jews were carted off to concentration camps. Indeed, not only for Germany but in the official mythology of the whole European Union, the Holocaust is presented as a defining point - the proverbial Year Zero marking the transition from 'evil' nationalism to the new post-national Enlightenment.

Germany has taken decisive and energetic steps to disavow its past and ensure that history doesn't repeat itself. It is illegal, for example, to flaunt symbols of the Nazi past, including the flag with the swastika and portraits of Hitler. Denial of the Holocaust can land a person a prison sentence. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important global event for the publishing industry, a British publisher was put in a spot because among the books he displayed was an innocuous quasi-academic study of Hitler's propaganda techniques. There were objections that the book cover had a photograph of Hitler - hardly surprising because the Führer's personality defined German National Socialism.

The question is: can the past be entirely disavowed? The question has come to the fore in the context of last week's elections to the German Bundestag where, for the first time since 1945, a party that is dubbed neo-Nazi has made impressive gains. The Alternative for Deutschland won around 13 per cent of the national vote - up from 4.7 per cent in 2013 - and now has 94 parliamentarians in a House of 709, making it the third largest party after the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. The gains were particularly striking in the erstwhile East Germany where it polled 25.4 per cent first preference votes in Saxony, 22.5 per cent in Thüringen, 18.2 per cent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and 19.2 per cent in Brandenburg.

The AfD's success in emerging as the third largest party in Germany has, predictably, been greeted with howls of liberal outrage. There have been suggestions that Germany is regressing and that this could be the signal for a revival of a virulent German nationalism that had been driven underground after the country's defeat and devastation in 1945. The fears are all the more since Germany is the main driving force behind the EU's post-national thrust. The hiccups in Germany's internal politics are naturally bound to have much more of a pan-European impact than the rise of nationalist feelings in, say, Hungary or Poland.

Undeniably, the small band of Holocaust-deniers and Nazi worshippers in Germany have probably found refuge in the AfD as either local activists or voters. There may be others in more prominent positions who have internalized the resentment of Germans expelled from the eastern territories after the 1945 defeat. However, while these may be powerful historical grievances - in Hungary the 'injustice' of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) that reduced it to a lesser European nation still rankles - they can't explain why, in 2017, German nationalism struck a responsive chord among a section of voters.

A chastened Angela Merkel probably got the larger picture when she blamed her party's unexpected setback to dissatisfaction with her over-generous decision to permit a million asylum seekers from West Asia to settle in Germany. Any mass migration of this colossal magnitude is bound to create resentment and this was reflected in the protest vote for the AfD, a party that was seen to be upholding the German identity. It, however, speaks volumes for the larger confidence in Merkel's leadership that the backlash was limited to just 13 per cent of the electorate.

Yet, for the upholders of the grand EU project, the election has thrown up more troubling issues. The geographical spread of the AfD vote suggests that it was the fear of Muslim immigrants rather than their immediate presence that drove voters in East Germany into the arms of the AfD - a phenomenon also noticeable in Hungary and Poland where nationalist parties are now governing. What this suggests is, first, that the cosmopolitan dream that is at the heart of the larger EU project is yet to become fully rooted; and, second, that the nation-state and national identity are still emotive concerns.

Germany has tried to build a wall between German culture and German history. The former is seen to be kosher and the latter a source of profound embarrassment. I believe that Germany has overdone the disavowal of its past and tried to reinvent the German imagination. Unfortunately, over-imposing the burden of guilt on a people doesn't always work. In Japan there is already a move away from the culture of unending apologies and a greater desire to assert national self-interest. I don't believe Germany will be able to remain permanently contrite for much longer. There is an important grey zone between triumphalism and capitulation it will have to occupy.