WIESBADEN, Germany >> The pianist starts his show abruptly, with a wail. The words and music are Arabic, but the pain is clear in any language.

“How, God?” he sings, “How could God bring you this scourge?”

He is performing for a German audience in a quiet German town with fairy-tale spires. But Aeham Ahmad is thinking of his pulverized, starving neighborhood in Syria, where a few years ago, before coming to Germany as a refugee, he embarked on a strange career by playing concerts in the rubble.

He jumps up, bobs his head in an impish little bow, and says by way of introduction: “I’m sorry, I’m not a good piano player. I learned in Syria. It’s not like Mozart and Bach, but this is the way we play it.”

In a Germany deeply torn between embracing and fearing the million migrants who have arrived in the past year, Ahmad, 27, has set himself the task of putting a human face on his fellow refugees. His aim is to ease their integration and maybe even help the millions more, not least his wife and children, whom he left behind.

That mission has become more urgent lately, after Germany was shocked by two attacks in which refugees linked to the Islamic State tried to kill civilians. Only the assailants died, but the attacks have left many Germans angry, anxious and ready to slam the door shut. There is talk of accelerated expulsions.

Onstage, Ahmad flatters his listeners, reassures them, owns them. He tells of his flight from bombs, hunger and repression. He sings of minarets and church bells “calling for peace.” He declares that “terrorism has no religion,” and that refugees come “to build Germany,” not to harm it.

“History will remember that Germany has taken in the Muslims,” he declares, then leads them in a singalong of “All My Little Ducks,” the German equivalent of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

He leaves the hall, as usual, in a shower of hugs and selfies.

But the next day in his tiny room in Wiesbaden, he lacerates himself over the role he has honed so well: He is “the good refugee,” making “good Germans” feel good about themselves. He cannot help seeing a touch of minstrel show in his act. He imagines how he might look through German eyes: a charity case, a trained animal dancing for treats.

“He’s a refugee dog,” he says in a singsong voice. “They play with him, and he’s playing, and he’s happy.”

Before the Syrian catastrophe, Ahmad, a third-generation Palestinian refugee and the son of a blind violinist, was a piano teacher and music shop salesman. Now, his message of resilience, along with Germans’ desire for a reassuring symbol, has made him Germany’s most popular refugee.

He sings, he plays and, sometimes, he smacks the piano in grief and rage.

Ahmad is booked virtually every night, crisscrossing the country from stadiums to modest provincial bars. He has appeared in dozens of uplifting German news accounts and received a prestigious prize named for one of his idols, Beethoven.

“I feel like I’ve been taken out of reality,” he says one day on a bullet train between venues.

He grew up, he continues, hearing his father spin his life story into legend, “like you tell stories about Sinbad the sailor.” But even the true-life tale of a self-made, blind musician who learned to play the violin pales in comparison with his own fantastical voyage, from Syrian government siege and Islamist extremist rule through shipwreck and exile to uneasy celebrity.

Onstage every night, he re-enacts that journey. And on every road trip in between, he re-examines it — rather mercilessly, like the self-doubting artist he has always been.

“I feel like a frog that’s being dissected,” he confesses, collapsing into a seat at the start of a four-train, five-hour trip to his next gig, which, as always, because of labor restrictions on refugees, he will play for free.

“I’m selling myself,” he says, “and I’m not even getting the money.”

Worse, he wonders if he is making any difference: “They clap for me, but the rest” — back in Syria — “are still in prison, under siege, under bombs.”

Ahmad’s life as the piano-playing refugee began three years ago when he parked his instrument on a street of destroyed buildings — walls collapsed, awnings askew — and began to sing.

He lived in Yarmouk, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, that started as a refugee camp for Palestinians in the 1950s. Over the years, it grew into a bustling district of a half-million Palestinians and Syrians.

But it was now gutted by the Syrian civil war. Government troops kept it cordoned off, pounding it with artillery and sometimes airstrikes. Insurgent groups vied for control. Lack of regular access to food and medicine was beginning to kill; some of the most vulnerable starved to death.

His only audience was his neighbors, trapped with him. And his goal was almost painfully modest: to keep everyone from losing their minds.

“I want to give them a beautiful dream,” he said back then, over a spotty internet link. “To change this black color at least into gray.”

Ahmad played with a young men’s chorus he called the Yarmouk Guys. Some of his songs were sad, yearning for those who had fled, some rollicking and funny, skewering Arab and world leaders. His toddler would sit atop the piano; girls and old women joined in; his father had cameos with his violin.

Soon, videos of the performances spread online, first among Syrians, then more widely, a different kind of dispatch from a war so brutal that it had left much of the world numb.

Ahmad became a symbol of hope and defiance and began to embrace a larger mission: showing that there were human beings stuck in Yarmouk.

Eventually, his new fame would help him escape the siege — to join the emigrants he sang of. That helps drive his ambivalence and fuel a colossal case of survivor’s guilt.

A German journalist sent enough money to get him and his family out of Yarmouk.

Halfway to Turkey, security forces stopped them and threw them in jail, the children included. They got out a week later, but, shaken, they decided that his wife and their children would wait in Syria; because relatives are still in danger, we are not disclosing their names. Ahmad went on alone.

For a while, he was just another refugee. He faded into the masses fleeing then, last August, as the exodus to Europe grew.

Paying smugglers, he crossed mountains, dodging checkpoints and border guards.

His first boat from Turkey sank, and several people drowned. Ahmad filmed his second crossing for the BBC. Safe in Europe, he started posting his progress on Facebook.

Now, he was traveling openly as the Piano Man of Yarmouk.

In recent weeks, things have improved for Ahmad. He received residency status and a small apartment. He will be able to incorporate a company, hire a manager and be paid for concerts. And finally, days ago, his wife and children arrived.

Still he wonders onstage: “Are they feeling the music I’m feeling? Or do they just feel pity because I’m a refugee?”

Germans, he tells an audience in Wiesbaden, often ask if he has heard of Mozart. He pauses a beat, then charges into a high-speed medley: Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca intercut with Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.”

He slows down, speeds up, flashes a grin, then swipes a hand up and down the keyboard like Little Richard, or Liberace. The crowd laughs, clapping in time. It is a musical joke, a jab at racist assumptions. And they are in on it.