Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022

Frank Trentmann

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews, and was one of The Telegraph's 50 Best Books of 2023. In 1945, Germany lay ruined. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel's tenure in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe, welcoming over 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, its rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with Russian leader 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. And yet, until now, a similarly vital question has been ignored. That is, how did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder, a people who cheered Adolf Hitler, 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 today. This journey includes a series of internal, 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 of the German people over eighty years, showing how they became who they are today.