Review by Liz Dexter
Over the course of the last eighty years, Germany has gone through a remarkable moral and material regeneration. The two have pulled the country in opposite directions. Growth, prosperity and comfort have been powered by exports, much more so than in neighbouring countries. In material terms, Germany today is more deeply entangled with the world than ever before. Germans’ moral reorientation meanwhile has been mainly inward looking, first preoccupied with their own suffering, later with their role as perpetrators and collaborators … as a whole, … the field of vision has been provincial, preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to terms with the Nazi past.
Having read Brigitte Reimann’s (trans. Lucy Jones) Siblings last year, I was aware that I knew very little about the history of Germany post-the Second World War. So when I found out about this book from its inclusion on the shortlist for the Wolfson History Prize 2024 (https://www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/2024-wolfson-history-prize-shortlist-announced/) I knew I had to read it. Much of it was rather surprising to me, but the author is very legitimate, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Helsinki and has won numerous science and history prizes. He’s been writing the book since 2015 and in the Acknowledgements decently thanks his research assistants and mentions that the book was written for both those who have little understanding of 20th century Germany outside the Nazis and the Holocaust and for the Germans themselves, to “let them see their past and present in a new light”. The book is also very firmly footnoted and referenced, of course!
This book very much looks at Germans, their attitudes and morals, and the changes in these, using official and other primary sources including a lot of diaries, letters and essays written in education and when applying for positions, from a range of people, from Nazis to Jewish people, soldiers to conscientious objectors, Germans and “guest workers”. Having such a range of primary sources from ordinary people really helps to grasp the attitudes and inner thoughts of people to make this a social and almost psychological history: it examines the Nazis’ “moral code” as much as it looks for reasons why people have helped each other, volunteered en masse or reached out to the Global South with charity initiatives.
After two useful maps of Germany in 1942 and after 1945, the Introduction makes it clear that the Germans had work to do in 1945 to work through being “part of it” and had to “redefine themselves” as in some way “good”, and places Germans’ redefinition of themselves in the context of other countries, such as Britain and America’s reckoning over our crimes of slavery and empire. He also sets out here how he’s going to arrange the book and how he’s going to deal with West and East Germany. He does this by first looking at the Second World War and its legacies up until the 1960s, taking in the retribution the Allies imposed on Germany citizens in various pretty grisly ways, the attempt at “denazification” and the start of making amends, including generational changes in attitudes as the war receded into history and the main concern was for social cohesion and justice rather than “an urge to atone for Nazi crimes”. Here, West and East Germany are compared and contrasted as we go. Then, he looks at the East and West separately for their different systems of control and politics, before a section “After the Wall” which takes in reunification and Germany in the world context. Lastly, he takes three big themes from the 1950s until the present day: money, including pensions and social benefits; family/community/state which looks at self-help, volunteering and old age; and mother nature, which includes ecology, animals and energy – rather damningly reporting on the failure to change over to renewable energy from a country I thought was much greener than it actually is. It’s very up to date, looking at the current leadership, the pandemic and the roots of the rise of populism again.
These surprises kept coming: I thought a lot more denazification had happened (in both West and East Germany former Nazis kept positions including as judges or returned to them), was surprised at the post-war antisemitism that clearly was there, with Germans more worried about the displacement of what they considered their own kind from the border changes, disabled soldiers and war widows, was shocked at the reliance on family money for old age support rather than the state, and bewildered by my assumption that refugees were welcomed, and recycling and vegetarianism a bigger thing than they were. It was interesting to find out how the seeds of democracy were resown in companies, schools and other organisations: there’s a lot of detail here about exactly how things were done which I can’t have expected to know. I found I understood more about East Germany than West, and this book was very informative in filling in gaps between perception (mine and in general) and reality and its mechanisms.
With sets of plates (some showing grim scenes) and a good long index as well as the aforementioned notes, this is a comprehensive offering that rewards a long and careful read. Although it might seem negative in the way I have portrayed it, written by a German expatriate to Britain and Finland, it’s clear-eyed and able to view the country’s people from the inside and the outside.
Liz Dexter knows a lot more about post-war Germany than she did before, and will continue exploring this fascinating history. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022 (Allen Lane, 2023) 978-0241303498, 838pp., ill. paperback.
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