There is a question I have been asked privately, more times than I can count, usually with real fear in the eyes of the person asking. By professionals who built careers in European cities. By parents raising children in European schools. By community leaders watching decades of work come under pressure they did not expect.
How bad is it going to get?
The honest answer is neither reassuring nor catastrophic. It is a calibration.
The best-documented case of a democratic, cultured, prosperous European society moving from marginalising a minority to destroying it is Weimar Germany. The comparison is not made to say that the Holocaust is about to be repeated. It is made because that case gives us the most detailed map of the stages a society passes through on the way.
Classification: the minority is marked as different, and the difference is made to mean danger. Legal differentiation: laws that apply to them and not to others. Social marginalisation: exclusion from work, housing and ordinary contact, until people are visible only as a category. Cultural dehumanisation: the slow erosion of the majority's empathy, headline by headline. Political disenfranchisement: rights that still exist on paper but no longer protect.
Then the last stage. Organised violence, conducted, sanctioned or tolerated by the state.
Measured against that map, the classification of Europe's Muslims is complete. The legal differentiation is advancing. The marginalisation is structural. The dehumanisation is pervasive. The disenfranchisement is progressing. Sporadic violence is rising, from mosque arsons to Christchurch and Hanau. Systematic, state-organised violence has not happened in Western Europe since Bosnia.
So we are not in 1935. We are somewhere between 1920 and 1933.
Every one of the earlier stages was already in place in Germany before 1933. What was added then was not new machinery. It was a political actor willing to use it, and a crisis to provide the cover.
That is why the most important part of the answer is not the date. It is the unit of measurement.
The distance between where Europe's Muslims stand and the machine's full activation is not measured in decades. It is measured in political events. In crises. In elections. In the decisions of leaders who may not yet hold office. It could be long. It could be short. Nobody can say which, and anyone who tells you it is certainly long is guessing.
The people of Weimar who read their situation early were called alarmists. In some places, for some people, the alarm proved unnecessary. In the place and the time where it mattered most, they were right.
The purpose of knowing where you stand is not to be frightened. It is to stop being surprised.
The question is no longer where we are on the timeline. It is what we do with the time.