Out of the Darkness
The Germans, 1942-2022
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
#1 Most Important Political Book of 2023, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
A Best Book of 2023, The Telegraph (Great Britain)
A gripping and nuanced history of the German people from World War II to the war in Ukraine, including revealing new primary source material on Germany's transformation
In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure as chancellor in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe, welcoming more than one million refugees, holding together the tenuous threads of the European Union, and making military restraint the center of its foreign policy. At the same time, Germany's rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with Vladimir Putin have cast a shadow over the present. Innumerable scholars have asked how Germany could have degenerated from a nation of scientists, poets, and philosophers into one responsible for genocide. This book raises another vital question: How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder, a people who cheered Adolf Hitler, reinvent themselves, and how much?
Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of World War II through the Cold War and the division into East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the struggle to find a place in the world today. This journey is marked by a series of extraordinary moral conflicts: admissions of guilt and shame vying with immediate economic concerns; restitution for some but not others; tolerance versus racism; compassion versus complicity. Through a range of voices—German soldiers and German Jews; displaced persons in limbo; East German women and shopkeepers angry about energy shortages; opponents and supporters of nuclear power; volunteers helping migrants and refugees, and right-wing populists attacking them—Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait spanning eighty years of the conflicted people at the center of Europe, showing how the Germans became who they are today.
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.
