Out of the Darkness

March 11, 2024
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.