BERLIN — After a full week of record arrivals, Munich appeared dangerously close on Saturday (Sept 12) to missing its pledge to provide a bed for every migrant heading its way. The police appealed to the public for donations of blankets and camping mattresses. Cookies and water would be welcome, too.

On Saturday alone, 13,000 people pulled into Munich’s main train station, a new peak. Munich’s mayor, Mr Dieter Reiter, had for days been urging Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and Germany’s 15 other states to shoulder their share of the burden — a mirror of the problem Berlin faced at the European level, as it asked for a plan to distribute the arrivals fairly among the European Union member states.

For most of the newcomers, their arrival at the station was the long-anticipated end of a journey that began under harrowing conditions in the Middle East. But for the authorities in Munich — and for Ms Merkel — it was a tipping point.

The chancellor, who last week posed for photos with grateful migrants in Berlin, now faced anger from within her conservative bloc and from the leaders of most of Germany’s 16 states.

At the same time, in Europe, she was making no headway with arguments for a fair distribution of migrants ahead of a crucial meeting in Brussels on the issue yesterday (Sept 14).

And one more problem was looming: In a week Oktoberfest would open its beer tents in Bavaria, drawing six million revellers, many whom would pass through the Munich train station. Officials feared the situation could spiral out of control.

As frustration mounted in Berlin, Munich, Budapest and Brussels, the chancellor did an about-face: After throwing open its borders a week earlier, Germany would reimpose controls on its open borders.

Although not unprecedented, the step dealt a blow to European pride in freedom of movement — and signalled that Germany’s patience was spent.

Some of the pressure on Ms Merkel had come from the governor of Bavaria, Mr Horst Seehofer, who complained that she had opened the borders with very little advance notice and that his state was scrambling to accommodate a relentless flow.

Mr Seehofer, the conservative leader of Bavaria’s governing Christian Social Union, is nominally the chancellor’s ally in her centre-right bloc. But the two are wildly dissimilar: She is the scientist raised in East Germany who has steered her party to the centre, while he presides over the bloc’s deeply traditional Roman Catholics.

He likes to chide her, and now he feared for public security in Bavaria.

By midday Saturday, as the authorities in the state’s capital faced a record number of arrivals, Mr Reiter, the mayor, warned that the situation was becoming unbearable.

“This is too much, even for Munich,” he said. “I keep hearing from Berlin that there are talks about a way to distribute refugees, but we are not talking days or weeks, it’s got to happen right now.”

Anger had also reached a boiling point among leaders of other states, which in Germany not only must take in a certain quota of migrants, but are also required to pay for housing and educating them. The governors insisted that the €6 billion (S$9.51 billion) Ms Merkel had offered in assistance was woefully inadequate.

Under pressure, Ms Merkel called on her interior minister, Mr Thomas de Maizire, to announce the new border policy. It was cast as a signal to European partners that even wealthy Germany could not shoulder the burden of accommodating up to 800,000 migrants this year.

By yesterday, Ms Merkel’s deputy, Mr Sigmar Gabriel, was arguing that in fact the country could face an even greater number of migrants in 2015.

“There are many indications that in this year we will not see 800,000 refugees, as predicted, but a million,” Mr Gabriel wrote in a letter to members of his centre-left Social Democrats.

“Germany is strong and can handle a lot,” Mr Gabriel wrote. “Nevertheless, in the past few days we have experienced how despite our best efforts, our abilities have reached their limits.”

Yesterday, the measure on the border had an effect: The flow of migrants into Munich dropped by half, to 7,000 or so for Sunday, according to the regional government in Upper Bavaria. But the move backed traffic up along two main European highways and several other roads, as the police initiated spot checks on vehicles crossing from Austria to Germany.

Commuters honked and fumed, with many arriving late for work.

Reverting to her custom of governing from behind the scenes, Ms Merkel sent out her spokesman, Mr Steffen Seibert, yesterday to emphasise that controls did not mean the borders had closed, or that Germany would stop providing asylum.

“We will manage,” Mr Seibert said, recapping one of the chancellor’s phrases from last week. “Nobody said we would manage it all overnight.”

The decision to reimpose controls on the open borders on which Europe has prided itself for two decades was the second such time recently; Germany temporarily imposed border controls in June, to tighten security for the summit meeting of seven world leaders in Bavaria.

The depth of consternation over Germany’s actions in recent weeks was clear from Austria’s interior minister, Ms Johanna Mikl-Leitner, when she arrived in Brussels on Monday, where Mr De Maizire and all their EU counterparts were trying to reforge a common policy on migration and asylum.

Ms Mikl-Leitner effectively blamed Germany for touching off the migrant chaos. After the international media reported in late August that Germany was offering asylum to any Syrian — which Berlin insists is not true — “thousands of people set off, even more strongly”, she said.

That helped power the wave of thousands of migrants who got stuck in Hungary early this month and essentially forced the opening of the borders on Sept 5.

The warm reception for those migrants in Austria and Germany in turn spurred more to set out from Turkey via Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary toward western Europe, Ms Mikl-Leitner said.

“We reckoned that Germany would have to react at some point,” she said yesterday as Austria scrambled to enact similar controls, sending 2,200 soldiers to the border to help. “It was clear to everybody that it could not go on.” THE NEW YORK TIMES