Munich: Amid a sense of rising panic, events seemed to happen with exceptional speed in Munich on Friday night. Rain in the air, I was returning home from the central city pool with my 7-year-old, when a blaze of police cars mounted tram-lines as we prepared to cross the street.

Moments later came the buzz of choppers overhead. Switching on the mobile flashed the horror of multiple killings.

Events in Nice, Paris and Brussels made one think immediately of terrorism, amplified by a knife-axe attack on a train in Bavaria last week,   falsely claimed by Islamic State, intent on washing the new media universe with bloodshed.

Suddenly the fear of terror attacks, which had always seemed remote in Germany's safest city, had arrived.

By now there was a contradictory mix of theorising: the mandatory TV specialists discerning either the work of Islamic radicalism or the counter-reactive far-right. From the roof of the shopping mall — the video footage beamed around the world — a Bavarian had screamed expletives at the killer about being a foreigner, as if foreignness might be reason for heinous crime. The French president issued a communique decrying a terrorist act in the first line of the text.

To their credit, the German police acted with professionalism, announcing on twitter in four languages "an acute terrorist situation", shutting down public transport and calling on citizens to stay indoors. As if confirming Anglo cliches about disciplined Germans, they did.

Within half-an-hour, the cafe and cocktail bar opposite our apartment had packed away their sidewalk tables, the Italian pizza bar was in darkness. Craning from the front window, I could see that the Indian restaurant next door had turned its lighted street signs off.

Only by the morning after long hours of uncertainty, did we learn that the killer was a lone wolf teen, a German of Iranian descent, born and raised in Munich. Any affiliation with IS was categorically ruled out. The killer was obsessed with mass killings (books were found in his abode). The nearest analogy was neither France nor Belgium but the Breivik shootings in Norway five years ago.

Munich people or Münchner as the denizens of the Bavarian capital are known, have struck me as a remarkably tolerant and organised bunch since moving here two years ago. It was here, at Munich central station, that 20,000 refugees arrived on the first weekend of September in the first wave of what became known as "the EU refugees crisis".

Compared to the shameful refugee camp at French Calais for example, Munich's near outskirts are dotted by decent-looking refugee living facilities: box-buildings, pebbled play areas for the children.

A French friend couldn't believe the speed and efficiency with which "the Germans" had erected a refugee facility near his house in the suburbs. At Pöcking near Lake Starnberg, family friends meet refugees once a month for coffee in a local church.

But Friday showed how recent terrorist attacks have shaken the collective Bavarian, not to say German, confidence. Police received precisely 4310 distressed calls. In the first hours post-attack, there was speculation of incidents at four additional city sites.

Terrorism's hard idiocy defies rational appraisal of course but it's no arbitrary idea to suggest Germany has been somewhat immune to radicalism of the Islamic variety since the September 2001 terror attacks and the eruption of the Arab world.

Unlike France and Belgium, Germany has not bombed IS positions in Syria and Iraq, some three million Muslim Turks are well-integrated in German cities and despite many Germans in the ranks of radical Islam abroad, American specialists have reported - based on interrogations- about the reluctance of German recruits to partake in terrorist acts on German soil. 

The problem of course is that it takes only one terrorist to wreak havoc, as Nice amply showed (where 84 people were mowed down by a truck).

But what the Munich 'one' highlighted is that the Western affliction surrounding the problem is the tone of current politics (the media not immune), ready to pounce on any gun or knife crime as grist for often squalid political ends.

One can only feel sympathy for the nine people, mostly teenagers, who died in Munich on 22 July. But the shooting rampage turned out to be the act of a disconnected sick kid, when the hair-trigger reflex was to suspect radical terrorism intent on raising hell in the West, hitting us with its lunatic cravings for past (the far-right) or other-worlds (radical Islam).

Honesty is needed in describing and dealing with the threat, and the threat in rhetorical terms is terrorism pushing maniacal ideas.

What's required at all costs is to guard against making the situation worse, by preparing the bed of the dangerously alluring black-magical extremes. On Friday, the German authorities reacted to their credit but there was no hiding that Europe's deep terrorist fears have reached even the humane and sober burghers of the Bavarian capital, not to say Germany as a whole.

*Richard Ogier is an Australian journalist in Munich. He is a former Australian Embassy press attaché in Paris.