Out of the Darkness

In 1942, the tide of war changed; by 1945, Germany was ruined. Following brutal conflict and a genocide, the world watched in satisfaction as the Third Reich crumbled. By the end of Angela Merkel's time in office in 2021, however, Germany paradoxically had become the moral voice of Europe, welcoming over one million refugees, holding together the tenuous threads of the European Union and making military restraint the centre of its foreign policy. At the same time, its rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with a dictator cast a shadow over Germany today. An innumerable number of scholars have asked how Germany degenerated and yet, until now, a similarly vital question has been overshadowed. That is, how did a nation marked by mass murder, a people won over by the horrific ideology of a war-hungry dictator, reinvent themselves?

Trentmann tells this dramatic story from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division of East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany's struggle to find its place in the world. This journey is marked by a series of internal, moral conflicts: professions of guilt and shame vying with immediate economic concerns, restitution for some but not others, tolerance versus racism, compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; displaced persons in limbo; East German women and shopkeepers angry about energy shortages; pro and anti-nuclear power supporters; Syrian refugees trying to piece together new lives in Berlin - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait of the German people over eighty years, asking who are they, and have they really changed?