A Demon-Haunted Land

Witches, Wonder Doctors and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany

Monica Black

Metropolitan Books 2020

Hb, 352pp, £21.60, ISBN 9781250225672

It is hardly surprising that in the aftermath of World War II, forced to face and account for the horrors of the Third Reich, Germany was haunted by ghosts of its recent past, but historian Monica Black poses an interesting question: what if the haunting wasn’t merely metaphorical? What if those ghosts took other forms? She doesn’t suggest that literal spirits or demons flooded Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s, of course, but belief in the supernatural seemed to skyrocket – a symptom, she argues, of the tempestuous anxiety roiling beneath the cracked surface of a traumatised society, escaping and taking new forms.

Her central character is controversial Wunderdoktor Bruno Gröning, who practised “miraculous” healing through simple talk of faith, the manipulation of a mysterious healing wave and balls of tinfoil, gaining fame and a following. His brand of naïve, intuitive talk therapy apparently worked to heal people suffering from psychosomatic maladies they didn’t understand or couldn’t articulate, but it also led to what looks like classic cases of mass hysteria.

Black calls this a “vertical” haunting, as people sought a saviour figure immediately after the war. There was also “horizontal” haunting, in the form of neighbours accusing one another of witchcraft, resulting in scores of witchcraft trials between 1947 and 1965. Many Germans still believed in witches in the mid20th century, and the media were attracted to the novelty of the superstition’s survival. No doubt it helped drive coverage that witches and Wunderdoktors were much easier to discuss than what really haunted the country.

Black identifies, names and captures these haunting spirits, translating them back to their original forms, as part of her engaging effort to find the messages they carried.

J Caleb Mozzocco

★★★★