Out of the Darkness
The Germans, 1942-2022
-
- USD 15.99
-
- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
Shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History Prize
A Telegraph and Der Spiegel Book of the Year
Sueddeutsche Zeitung's Number One Most Important Political Book of 2023
Die Zeit, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, taz Number One, Best Non-Fiction Books December 2023 and January 2024
A Telegraph and Der Spiegel Book of the Year
Sueddeutsche Zeitung's Number One Most Important Political Book of 2023
Die Zeit, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, taz Number One, Best Non-Fiction Books December 2023 and January 2024
A groundbreaking new history of the people at the centre of Europe, from the Second World War to today
In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?
Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searching chronicle of post-WWII Germany, University of London historian Trentmann (Empire of Things) portrays the past 80 years as a series of deep but not always consistent moral improvements. Though some Germans acknowledged culpability for the Holocaust, the country failed to compensate most victims and let many perpetrators off the hook. East Germans spent decades subject to a tyrannical communist surveillance state that implicated many of them in betrayal, while West German democracy was slow to extend rights to women, gay people, and the disabled. Post-unification, the country's prosperous economy underwrote foreign aid programs but also a heedless consumerism, while patchy social-welfare systems left some workers impoverished. In recent decades, Germany pioneered environmentalism and green politics but made slow progress in decarbonization, and brought in waves of migrants as guest workers but, by treating them as permanent aliens, spurred resurgent far-right xenophobia. Trentmann's sweeping narrative is grounded in vivid snapshots of moments when the nation's ethical heel-turns were brought into sharp relief, including public outrage over a former SS officer accused in the 1950s of wartime mass executions insisting he was just following orders, and an East German peace activist divorcing her husband in the 1980s when the opening of state archives revealed he had been reporting on her to the Stasi. The result is a penetrating and immersive look at a society attempting, if sometimes failing, to morally right itself.
