Tolerant, peaceful Holland is in the midst of one of the biggest crises in its multicultural history. In a period of less than two weeks, a descendent of Vincent van Gogh has been murdered over an Islam-critical film he made, mosques and Muslim schools have been burned and police in The Hague raided a house occupied by radical Islamists. The painful episode has thrown The Netherlands into an identity crisis that all of Germany's major newspapers are following -- many on Page One and most on the editorial pages. It's a painful episode for all of Europe, which has looked in recent years to the North Sea country as a model for successfully integrating immigrants.

"As integration debates flared up all over Europe," writes the left-of-center Sueddeutsche Zeitung, "in France's suburbs, in Spain, Britain and also Germany - everyone looked with envy at the Netherlands, the symbol of successful integration, the desired country for immigrants." But whereas Europe once looked for modern approaches to a multicultural society, "they can now discover how very wrong things have gone."

In its editorial, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung indirectly evokes memories of the crusades or the Spanish Inquisition in depicting this cultural war in diminutive Holland. "In the Netherlands a church battle is raging which, in its lack of restraint was until now unthinkable in our enlightened Europe," the paper writes. "Suddenly we are seeing that religion, which many people thought to be a dead relic from the past, still has explosive power." Modern societies of "apparently tolerant indifference," the paper notes, are not prepared for "predictable eruptions" of this kind. The paper points out that many suspect last week's killing in The Netherlands -- and Wednesday's raid in The Hague -- was part of a global wave of Islamic violence. More disturbing, it says, would be if the events were truly one-off acts. "Because then it would become clear that militant Islamism is lurking in the everyday life of Europe's societies."

The even more conservative Die Welt uses the cultural meltdown in Holland -- where both Christian and Muslim institutions have been sites of attacks this week -- as an excuse to tirade against liberal values. "The intellectual fabric of multiculturalism, tolerance and liberalism drew a veil over reality and was not capable of holding society together." Since most of Europe faces a similar battle over integration, "it could be that the Netherlands are once again the laboratory of the continent," Die Welt concludes.

Hogwash, says the Financial Times Deutschland. "After the shock of the state of emergency," the paper writes, "Molotov cocktails flying at church walls, arson attacks being committed against mosques, a member of parliament who has had to go into hiding out of fear for her life. The Netherlands' liberal model, some conclude, has failed," it continues. "But the model is still indispensable -- for this model has only failed in the integration of certain groups." The problem is a handful of people, "foremost violence-prone Islamists, don't want to play by the rules. People have been killed over their opinions and others in the future will be afraid to express their opinions." The state, the paper argues, must intervene to protect its people. "But it would be wrong, now in the name of peace to narrow the borders of freedom."

On Thursday, a number of German papers also look to what is almost universally described as an embarrassment in the state of Saxony, where the far-right National Democratic Party's leading contender, Uwe Leichsenring, got two more votes than his party has seats. That means two members of parliament voted for him over Christian Democrat Georg Milbradt in the running to become the state's premier. Two-second refresher: the NPD is a right-wing extremist party the federal government has unsuccessfully sought to ban. In recent elections, the party entered parliament in Saxony and afterwards elected a convicted neo-Nazi into its party leadership.