An ambitious history of Germany interrogates the country’s moral makeover

But for many of the principal characters in this book — Germans depicted in diary entries, letters and interviews who surveyed the rubble during what’s long been called the country’s “zero hour” — it was their own misery that dominated their thoughts, not the magnitude of their nation’s crimes.

“We constantly get to hear what the others have suffered,” Renate Bock, who had survived the Allied firebombing of Hamburg during the war, wrote in a diary in May 1945, just weeks after Germany’s surrender. “But no one is allowed to talk of our own terrible suffering.” Other Germans focused on the fate of prisoners of war, the desperate housing situation in bombed-out German cities, shortages of food, rumors of bloody retribution exacted by the victorious Allies.

Such voices fill the opening chapters of Trentmann’s book, showing how an insular focus persisted for years after the Nazi defeat, even as West Germany reinvented itself as a flourishing liberal democracy and East Germany built its “socialist workers’ and peasants’ state” on a founding anti-fascist myth. The new communist regime rationalized even its most repressive measures, such as the Berlin Wall, in supposedly anti-fascist terms (in official jargon, the wall — meant to keep Easterners in — was an “anti-fascist protection barrier” meant to keep spies out).

“Out of the Darkness” is a rich, ambitious account of Germany’s improbable rise from a moral abyss to a prosperous democracy that is sometimes held up as a bulwark of stability and liberal values. Trentmann acknowledges the remarkable “moral and material regeneration,” but he also sets out to complicate the simple narrative that Germans’ “eventual reckoning with the past” made them “moral crusaders in the present.”

For starters, the moral reckoning was never as clear-cut as sometimes portrayed, with questions of guilt, responsibility and reparations remaining sharply contested and controversial for years. As Trentmann points out, the very term that Germans use to describe efforts to right the wrongs done to Nazi victims — “Wiedergutmachung” — is ambiguous. It literally translates as “making good again” but can be understood variously as reparations, redress, restitution, indemnity or compensation, and Germans spent years debating which form it should take.

West Germany’s first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, hoped that payments to Israel and Jewish refugees might settle accounts. But the bureaucratic nightmare into which some compensation claims descended — with former Nazi civil servants sometimes handling the cases of Holocaust survivors they once persecuted — left a bitter taste for some, even as that compensation eased West Germany’s path out of international isolation.

Trentmann has little patience for the way some pundits describe contemporary Germany as a “moral superpower,” noting how the country has been more than willing to set aside its scruples for the sake of commerce and to take moral stances often conveniently aligned with self-interest.

Although the book runs to more than 800 pages and its scope is extensive, in some ways encyclopedic, it remains fresh and surprising throughout, thanks in part to Trentmann’s knack for drawing on an astounding range of voices.

The utter depravity of Nazi Germany is well known, of course, but Trentmann highlights the perverted value system that the Nazis instilled at every level of the country’s life, and the contortions of soldiers, bureaucrats and civilians under the system.

One young German officer fighting in the Balkans and Moravia fretted that he was “surrounded by repulsive cruelty, badness, betrayal, and cowardice.” But he still portrayed himself as a righteous knight fighting in a just battle and sought to rouse his men with poems from Goethe and Rilke. Trentmann writes, “What would happen to this solipsistic sense of moral superiority is a major theme of this book.”

He also quotes the diary of Willy Peter Reese, who joined the war in 1941 on the eastern front, where he witnessed brutal fighting and war crimes. He described himself and his fellow soldiers as not only “unwashed, unshaven, lice-eaten, and sick” but “spiritually decayed, nothing more than a sum of blood, intestines, and bones.” Despite his disillusionment, Reese remained committed to the war and volunteered to return to the front, where he was killed in 1944.

When the SS commander and convicted war criminal Kurt “Panzer” Meyer was released from prison in 1954, he was greeted with flowers and a brass band. Meyer had initially been sentenced to death for executing Canadian prisoners of war, and he was also implicated in other atrocities.

The cloying self-pity expressed by many Germans around the end of World War II is outrageous and has been well-documented in previous books. In addition to offering his own examples of that self-pity, Trentmann interrogates the totality of the image, highlighting the voices of Germans who recognized the enormity of their country’s crimes. The very first German movie made after the war, premiering the day before the Allies executed a dozen Nazi war criminals who had been condemned at the Nuremberg trials, was titled “The Murderers Are Among Us.”

Trentmann also rejects as a myth the idea that Germans largely avoided grappling with the war until their conspiracy of silence was smashed by a generation of young, middle-class radicals in 1968. He instead dates the key shift in German attitudes toward the war to the mid-1950s, citing growing public unease over lenient treatment of Nazi criminals as well as West Germany’s reparations policies.

Reckoning with the Nazi legacy is at the center of the book, but Trentmann also explores the changes in German attitudes over the last 80 years toward a range of matters, from gender relations and military service to pets, nature, nuclear power and meat consumption.

Trentmann, who was raised in Hamburg but has taught history in the United States and Britain for decades, points out that the “moral reorientation” of Germans has been a largely internal process, with a fundamentally provincial view that remained “preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to terms with the Nazi past.” Those were, and still are, central and laudable tasks, but they have sometimes left Germans bizarrely blinkered, out of touch or even absent when confronting new challenges and moral debates.

“The long and bitter conflict over guilt and memory eventually provided Germans with a new identity and self-assurance, giving them a sense of pride in not being proud that, at times, turned into self-satisfaction,” Trentmann writes. The result was a country growing rich from global trade with dubious regimes but often scrupulously keeping its own hands clean of the realities of geopolitics.

Trentmann shines light on just how rarely victims had a direct voice in Germany’s conversations about amnesty, compensation and forgiveness. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Germans found themselves isolated, in a more ethnically homogenous country than ever before or since. The Nazis had driven Jews into exile, then murdered many of those who didn’t escape. Although millions of survivors of Nazi persecution found themselves in occupied Germany after the war, few had any interest in remaining among their tormentors and, as Trentmann points out in painful detail, few Germans took serious interest in their fate.

“By 1955, there were just 15,000 Jews in Germany,” Trentmann writes, before adding with astounding understatement: “The history of postwar Germany might have been far more antagonistic if more victims had decided to stay.”

Instead, Germans were left to confront their past themselves, with their victims largely a distant and impersonal force. Trentmann shows how even anti-fascist Germans who had fled and missed the war often met with a cold reception when they returned home from exile.

Occupied Germany saw an influx of millions of ethnic Germans from the former eastern territories, first fleeing the advancing Red Army and then driven out by the postwar governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. “Hitler had called on all Germans to come ‘Heim ins Reich’ (‘back home to the Reich’). It was his defeat that accomplished it,” Trentmann writes. “Instead of a greater Germany, they found themselves driven into a smaller one, a country amputated and divided.”

He gets at a central irony of postwar German history: For all the efforts to repudiate the Nazi past and the debates about how to atone for the oppression and murder of German Jews, Germans have hewed closely to an ethnic understanding of the nation — even more so than countries like France, Britain or the Netherlands, where colonial legacies have complicated things. That helped make Germany an unwelcoming place for the waves of immigrants in subsequent decades who came as workers to East and particularly West Germany. Trentmann astutely notes that postwar Germany’s focus on guilt and atonement excluded those from outside the “Volk.”

“By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity,” he writes. “The sins of their fathers gave ethnic Germans a monopoly on the national past and made them gatekeepers of collective memory.”

Trentmann takes a particularly critical view of Germany’s harsh stance toward Greece and other debtor countries during the eurozone crisis, noting how Germany has long been the big winner in a trade bloc that guaranteed the country’s mighty exporters access to markets, cheap suppliers and a devalued currency. He also notes how West Germany’s postwar economic boom was powered in part by massive sovereign debt forgiveness in the 1950s.

To borrow a frequently invoked expression, Germany — especially under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel — became deeply dependent on the United States for security, China for exports and Russia for energy. Trentmann invokes that framework and convincingly shows how the pursuit of those relationships was often framed in flattering, morally superior terms while conveniently working to Germany’s advantage, at least in the short term.

Trentmann’s generally negative assessment of Merkel’s legacy (although he praises her decision to throw open the country’s borders to refugees in 2015) is part of a growing wave of criticism, particularly around the subject of foreign policy, since she left office in 2021.

Trentmann apparently finished his book before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and the response to the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine looms largest in his consideration of contemporary Germany. But he anticipates the ways in which Germany’s failure to integrate more recent immigrants into its culture of memory and attrition, and the country’s official policy of unquestionable support for Israel, have left an internal conflict between an entrenched view that sees a special German responsibility toward Israel, keen to police criticism of Israel for signs of resurgent antisemitism, and the view of more recent arrivals — especially Muslims — who think about the conflict through a starkly different historical lens.

In his introduction, Trentmann poses a question: “How did a people emerge from totalitarianism, conquest, and genocide, and where did they go from there?” In many ways, the account that follows only makes it more stunning that Germany turned into a stable and relatively tolerant democracy, despite so many continuities with the Nazi past. Trentmann cites the blunt comments of Hamburg’s Social Democrat mayor, Max Brauer, in December 1946: “Ninety-five per cent of the German people had worked in one way or another with the Nazi regime. With just 5 per cent, though, it is not possible to build a state.”

What emerges is a picture of a divided nation focused on its own very particular circumstances and only rarely on the wider world. The achievements of Germany over the period Trentmann covers are considerable: from the shattered remains of a genocidal dictatorship to a thriving, stable democracy selling its wares around the world.

He writes, “What Germans want from the world has been clear — that it buys their cars and chemicals — what they think they owe the world far less so.”

Bryn Stole is a journalist in Berlin.

Out of the Darkness

The Germans, 1942-2022

By Frank Trentmann

Knopf. 784 pp. $50