Out of the Darkness

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One of The Telegraph’s 50 Best Books of 2023

A gripping and nuanced history of the German people from the Second World War to the present day, including hugely revealing new primary source material on every aspect of its transformation.

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.One of The Telegraph’s 50 Best Books of 2023

“I could not put the book down. The way Frank Trentmann writes history, the way he brings together small things and great, and analysis with narrative, is wonderful.”
—Bernhard Schlink, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Reader

“Extraordinary. . . . Trentmann’s moral history is enormous . . . but never heavy-going: he is a gifted and intelligent writer.”
—London Review of Books

“An impressive account of how Germany built a new identity for itself after the barbaric Nazi years . . . terrifically insightful. . . . This book runs to 838 pages, but barely a word is wasted. Trentmann is a skillful and unflashy storyteller with flickers of gentle irony. Echoing Tolstoy’s theory of history as the ‘sum of human wills,’ he aims to stitch the scraps of everyday experience into a quilt of grand narrative. This results in a good deal of richness, colour, and subtlety.”
—The Times

“Outstanding . . . A meticulous and well-judged account of Germany from 1942 to today [that] shows how it transformed itself from pariah nation to leader of a continent.”
—Daily Telegraph

“Compelling. . . . vivid . . . fresh . . . one of the most impressive studies I have read of German guilt and shame . . . an eloquent and original account of the last eighty years of the country’s history.”
—Literary Review

“Absorbing . . . excellent . . . reveals how modern Germany found a new moral purpose after the horrors of Nazism.”
—New Statesman

“Superb.”
—The Spectator

“Excellent. . . . Trentmann’s study marshals an immense amount of evidence in response to a single basic question: how did Germans reassert themselves as morally oriented human beings?”
—Times Literary Supplement
 
“A magisterial history of Germany over the last 80 years . . . Trentmann handles his material with aplomb . . . In long, penetrating chapters, the author focuses more on people than politics . . . Fascinating insights on how a country of poets, philosophers, and scientists emerged from totalitarianism and genocide.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)FRANK TRENTMANN is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. Previously he taught at Princeton University. He has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, a Moore Distinguished Fellowship at Caltech, the Austrian Science Book Prize, and the Humboldt Prize for Research.US

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