Ghosts of Germany’s past
KATJA HOYER is impressed by a study of a nation’s attempts to grapple with the crimes it perpetrated during the Second World War
Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942–2022 by Frank Trentmann
Allen Lane, 880 pages, £40
“Free Palestine from German guilt,” have rung the chants at many of Berlin’s demonstrations since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war. Meanwhile, chancellor Olaf Scholz insists that “Germany’s history and the responsibility arising from the Holocaust made it Germany’s perpetual duty to stand up for the existence and security of Israel.” The conflict in the Middle East has cut deep into the soul of a country that is still trying to come to terms with itself.
Nearly eight decades have passed since the end of the Second World War, humanity’s most devastating military conflict. Under its guise, Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 8 million non-Jewish civilians, nearly half a million Roma and Sinti, and hundreds of thousands of others it considered undesirable.
Since then Germany’s moral comeback has been celebrated, not least by Germans themselves. When Angela Merkel allowed more than 1 million refugees into the country in 2015, the head of the Green party told the German parliament: “When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions.” Today, many Germans are proud of their country’s desire to do the right thing as well as its continued confrontation of the past. “There is no German identity without Auschwitz,” declared President Joachim Gauck in 2015.
But Germany’s moral recovery from war and genocide has neither been straightforward, nor is it complete. In Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942–2022, historian Frank Trentmann charts this “long and difficult” journey. Few are better placed to navigate the “thicket of moral challenges” that postwar Germany – a country occupied, divided and reunited – has grappled with over the past 80 years. Trentmann was born and raised in Hamburg but has lived abroad since 1986, mostly in Britain and the United States. Now professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, he has observed modern Germany’s ongoing identity crisis from within and from the outside.
Trentmann conducted seven years of meticulous work on this book, producing a fascinating patchwork of vignettes, statistics and analysis. Collectively, they give a deep insight into how Germany and its people grappled with questions of guilt and identity.
We hear, for instance, about West Germany’s desire to “make good” (Wiedergutmachung) the damage done to Nazi Germany’s victims, especially Jews. Yet in reality, victims often struggled to receive compensation. Elsa Hodapp, for example, was incarcerated in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942 for attempting to help a Jewish woman flee to Switzerland. Her claim that she was a victim was rejected after the war on the grounds that she couldn’t prove that she had acted out of “principled opposition to the Nazi regime”.
Trentmann’s engaging style provides a calm voiceover to the big and small stories of postwar Germany’s grappling with what’s right and what’s wrong, suggesting rather than drawing sharp lines between good intentions and moral complacency. He navigates complex issues like self-pity, denazification, immigration, reunification and military intervention with refreshing clarity.
This book couldn’t be more timely. With global issues gathering urgency, Trentmann challenges Germany to take more responsibility. But in order to do that, it has to do more than state what it is against. Germany also needs to work out what it is for.
Germany’s moral recovery from war and genocide has neither been straightforward, nor is it complete
Katja Hoyer is visiting research fellow at King’s College London and author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 (Allen Lane, 2023)