Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022

"This is a story of redemption. It’s a story with a constant moral edge. There is nothing wrong with history taking a moral stance, but there are so many that you’ve got to take about this story. It’s a complicated story of two countries struggling out of the ruins of one, and their eventual reunification. It starts in Nazi Germany with the stories of individuals, illustrating the moral dilemmas of being part of a nation which is doing something utterly evil to some of its own people and to others too. Then there is the utter desolation, the devastation of 1945. Germany was a bit like an alcoholic, it had to reach utter baseness, utter defeat and destruction in order to recognize its problem. Then the next decades, as Trentmann lays them out, are interesting. They are a story of what happens when you, or most of you, have utterly rejected the ideology in which you’ve lived. You’ve painfully reconstructed something which the victors imposed, but which is very different in its embrace of democracy and its obstinate wish to tell truth. It’s a complicated story, because both the republics which emerged from World War II handled their past in different ways. They both repudiated it, but East Germany, the DDR, was much better at facing its past than the Federal Republic. West Germany had so much evasion in its first few decades about who was a Nazi and who wasn’t, who deserved punishment or repentance and who didn’t. Then there was that terribly painful set of generational conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, in both republics, but particularly in the West, where the furious, younger generation added a moral imperative to all the generational conflict they’d feel with their parents anyway. I remember it because I was there—on the streets, busking in the 1970s—and I experienced it at firsthand. Trentmann tells us the East German story too. I did feel that occasionally he was harder on the East than other writers have been. He’s very much a Federal Republic person, but we all come from somewhere in our books. Ultimately, it’s a celebration of a country which had nothing and reconstructed two different things. Now they’re one, and we see troubles again, but there is a sort of dogged optimism about the book which is encouraging. He lays out the evidence to allow you to draw a different conclusion if you want, but you see why the problems of the present day have emerged from the book. My analogy throughout was of the recovering alcoholic. You can never cease to be an alcoholic, but you can learn from your past, and you can build a life in the awareness of it. The important thing is remembering it and being aware of it. This book is a profoundly impressive document about remembering that past."