CANR
WORK TITLE: OUT OF THE DARKNESS
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 395
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:London School of Economics, M.A.; Harvard University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator. Taught at Princeton University and Center for European Studies, Harvard University; Birkbeck College, University of London, assistant professor, 2000-07, professor of history, 2007—; Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, professor. Former Fernand Braudel senior fellow, European University Institute; visiting professor, Bielefeld University, British Academy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of St Gallen.
AWARDS:Moore Distinguished Fellowship, California Institute of Technology, 2014; Humboldt Prize for Research, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2017; Bochum Historians’ Award, History of the Ruhr Foundation, 2023.
WRITINGS
Contributor of numerous articles to periodicals, including Der Spiegel, Guardian, New Republic, Huffington Post, La Repubblica, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Times Literary Supplement, and chapters to scholarly books. Author of introduction to Object Love (exhibition catalogue), edited by Anne Berk, Museum Hedendaagse Kunst (Sittard, Netherlands), 2018. Guest editor of special issue of Science Museum Group Journal, “Material Cultures of Energy,” spring 2018.
SIDELIGHTS
Frank Trentmann is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he teaches and researches on the history of consumption, energy and everyday life, and political economy and culture. He has written books on these topics—including Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain and Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First—and has edited or coedited numerous other volumes. Speaking with Karen Shook of Times Higher Education, Trentmann commented on an early influence in his academic career: “In the first year of graduate school, we were set the exercise of writing a proper review of a seminal history book. I must have been in a rather overconfident mood, because I picked Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism—three thick volumes on the transformation of the world from the 15th century to the 18th century. … Braudel made me think about how to integrate the micro and macro, instead of settling for one or the other.”
Free Trade Nation
In his 2008 work Free Trade Nation, Trentmann traces the history of free trade in Britain and how it gave rise to the growth of democratic culture. Free trade was, as Trentmann argues, a gift the British gave the world in the nineteenth century. For the proponents of free trade, it was not simply an economic policy but was instead a matter of morality. Free trade became synonymous with free speech and representative government. If tariffs were imposed it was with the intent of raising revenue rather than a matter of protectionism. Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, as the author shows, Britain in fact refused to retaliate in trade wars, relying on its policy of free trade and its benefits for all. However, as Trentmann further points out, all of this began to unravel during and after World War I and into the Depression. Former supporters of free trade began to criticize it for allowing cheapness to trump both domestic welfare and international stability. Since that time the popularity of free trade has never returned to its nineteenth-century levels and in the twenty-first century globalization and open markets have become the focus of criticism from many quarters.
Reviewing Free Trade Nation in History Today, Peter Mandler called it an “absorbing book.” Mandler added: “Trentmann squeezes his richest material out of the three general election campaigns won by free- trading Liberals in the decade before the Great War. … The enduring moral appeal of free trade up to 1914 is made all the more puzzling by its sudden collapse during and after the war.” A writer in the Contemporary Review also had high praise, noting: “After this book, no study of Victorian liberalism can be conducted in quite the same way.” Similarly, International Social Science Review contributor Michael Lusztig commented: “On balance, Free Trade Nation is well worth the read. Trentmann writes in a straightforward, narrative style that makes the book broadly accessible without in any way undermining its scholarly attributes. The quality of the research alone is sufficient to recommend the book as a must-read for a contextual understanding of the politics of free trade in Britain during the immediate pre-World War I era.” Cultural and Social History reviewer Paul Ashmore also had a high assessment, noting: “ Free Trade Nation provides a new marker in the historiography of free trade and protection. But more than that, it demonstrates the need to blur the abstract boundaries between cultural, economic and political history as a way to finding more nuanced understandings of historical phenomena that were never so neatly demarcated.” Likewise, Carolyn Neel, writing in the World History Bulletin, remarked: “The book takes on a special relevance today as we begin—once more—reconsidering the need of a state to regulate its economic activities. In a very engaging and readable manner, Trentmann tells the story of an idea and a society’s turmoil as its members struggle to reconcile that idea with the political and economic realities of their age.” H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online writer Anthony Howe was also impressed with this study, remarking that it “brilliantly reconstructs the story of the Edwardian peak of popular enthusiasm for Free Trade in Britain (his account is deliberately and emphatically upper case), and the rapid dissolution of the secular religion of Free Trade in the post-1914 world,” and further lauding the “intellectual pleasure which this carefully constructed, engagingly written, finely illustrated, and suitably well-marketed, book will provide for its readers.”
Empire of Things
In his 2016 study Empire of Things, Trentmann offers a “wide-ranging exposition of the human life of buying, selling, and trading from the Renaissance until now,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. He starts his investigation with the early Ming dynasty in China and with England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. He argues the high mortality rates brought about by the Black Death created new labor demands, leading to higher wages, cheaper goods, and the development of the middle class. Goods became monetized with Spanish silver brought from the New World, which in turn opened trade to the Far East. Consumption picked up to the degree that the higher classes demanded laws that prevented those in lower classes from dressing above their rank. As the population shifted from the countryside to the cities, consumption also increased. Trentmann covers a large variety of consumption, from piped water to coffee, and from cotton to the use of credit cards in this “masterly work,” as the Kirkus Reviews critic described it.
Empire of Things earned praise from many quarters. Guardian Online writer Ian Thomson noted: “Trentmann’s history of five centuries of material culture is impressive in its breadth and scholarship.” Irish Examiner Online contributor J.P. O’Malley similarly commented: “A book like this has the potential to be boring, dull, and full of academic snobbery. But it isn’t. And, Empire of Things is written with the kind of colour, verve, and strength of storytelling required, for the reader to stay committed till the very end of the book.” Independent Online reviewer Marcus Tanner also had a high assessment, observing: “Trentmann has written a suitably gigantic book for a gigantic subject but the mass of detail he provides never overwhelms. This is a book that can be dipped into and enjoyed at leisure. The first half, in which he describes how the consumer culture took off, is especially fascinating. You can’t not learn something new here.” NPR.org critic Jason Heller was also impressed with Empire of Things, writing: “Combining a dizzying array of disciplines—economics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, religion, geopolitics, and even etymology—[this book] deftly juggles a colossal load.” Likewise, Wall Street Journal Online writer Edward Rothstein termed the study a “sweepingly detailed history of humanity’s passion for the possession of objects,” while Washington Post Online contributor Carlos Lozada called it a “massively ambitious—and just plain massive—history of what and how and why we consume, a work spanning continents, centuries, ideologies, political systems, faiths, and lots and lots of physical stuff.”
[open new]
Out of the Darkness
Trentmann surveys life after National Socialism for the German polity and public in his monograph Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022. A moral reckoning was both necessary and inevitable not just in the wake of the Holocaust but in the midst of World War II, when Trentmann begins his narrative. The war had been framed by Hitler and the Nazis as morally defensible, but citizens gradually learned of atrocities from relations overseas, and millions of soldiers’ deaths and Allied offensives that left millions more homeless were recognized as due punishment by the world order. Following postwar occupation, Germans wanted to regain respectable stature, and war criminals were duly put on trial. Konrad Adenauer, who became the German Federal Republic’s first chancellor in 1949, surprised many by pursuing extensive reparations for Jewish refugees and the state of Israel. Yet as Adenauer’s chancellorship was sustained into the 1960s, his policy of Wiedermachtung, or “making good again,” allowed former Nazis back into civil service positions. While the citizenry of East Germany channeled their energies into socialist-style productivity, West Germany saw greater societal upheaval. After the humbled conformity of the 1950s, counterculture of the 1960s saw younger Germans aligning with antiwar movements and taking internationally conscious moral stands. Protests became more widespread with questions of nuclear deployment in the 1980s. With reunification, East Germans were distressed to find themselves in a country that was unified but in which their national identity felt unanchored. Through the end of the twentieth century, Germany took a leading role in the formation and prioritization of the European Union, such as through the financial crisis of 2008. In the twenty-first century, the environment and refugee crises became the latest staging grounds for German assertions of moral positivity, if not superiority. During the 2010s, refugees from the Middle East were not just accepted but welcomed and embraced. But as Trentmann points out, Germany’s leadership role has narrowed in the 2020s, with an insistence on pacificism muting any response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with fears of antisemitism stifling protests of apparent Israeli war atrocities against the people of Palestine.
Peter Fritzsche of the New York Times summed up the thrust of this “remarkably rich” book on modern German life: “For the last 80 years, Trentmann writes, all aspects of life from family to work to the environment have been debated in terms of right and wrong, featuring ‘conflicts about guilt, shame and making amends.’ Paradoxically, reunification in 1990 stirred up rather than settled questions about who Germans have been and how they should shape their future.” In the New Statesman, Brendan Simms appreciated how Trentmann “draws on hitherto little-used sources such as diaries, letters and petitions, and his Germans leap vividly off the page, both as archetypes and as complex, multilayered individuals.” Simms further admired how the book “introduces moral light and shade without in any way playing down the enormity of Nazi crimes or the extent of German society’s complicity in them.” A Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Out of the Darkness as a “magisterial history” filled with “fascinating insights on how a country of poets, philosophers, and scientists emerged from totalitarianism and genocide.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Contemporary Review, autumn, 2008, review of Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain, p. 406.
Cultural and Social History, October, 2009, Paul Ashmore, review of Free Trade Nation, p. 525.
Foreign Affairs, July- August, 2016, Victoria de Grazia, review of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty- First.
History Today, May, 2008, Peter Mandler, review of Free Trade Nation, p. 60.
International Social Science Review, fall-winter, 2009, Michael Lusztig, review of Free Trade Nation, p. 195.
Journal of Social History, summer, 2008, Gary Gross, review of Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, p. 1073.
Journal of World History, December, 2005, Richard H. Robbins, review of Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, p. 505.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2016, review of Empire of Things; March 1, 2024, review of Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022.
Library Journal, February 1, 2016, Scott Vieira and Rebecca Brody, review of Empire of Things, p. 84.
New Statesman, December 8, 2023, Brendan Simms, review of Out of the Darkness, p. 78.
Spectator, January 6, 2024, Stuart Jeffries, review of Out of the Darkness, p. 40.
Times Literary Supplement, October 27. 2023, Ben Hutchinson, review of Out of the Darkness, p. 10.
Victorian Studies, spring, 2008, Betty Joseph, review of Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c. 1880-1950, p. 513.
World History Bulletin, fall, 2009, Carolyn Neel, review of Free Trade Nation, p. 36.
ONLINE
Birkbeck College, University of London website, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ (August 11, 2016), review of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation; (April 22, 2024), author profile.
EH Net, https://eh.net/ (October 1, 2008), Peter J. Cain, review of Free Trade Nation.
Evening Standard, http://www.standard.co.uk/ (January 28, 2016), Andrew Neather, review of Empire of Things.
Fashion, http://anglo-american.history.ac.uk/ (June 7, 2013), Bryce Evans, “Food and War.”
Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/ (August 11, 2016), Rebecca Spang, review of Empire of Things.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 9, 2016), Ian Thomson, review of Empire of Things.
History Today, http://www.historytoday.com/ (May 5, 2008), Peter Mandler, review of Free Trade Nation.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.networks.h-net.org/ (September 30, 2016), Mark Hampton, review of Free Trade Nation.
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (March 20, 2008), Christopher Harvie, review of Free Trade Nation; (January 21, 2016), Marcus Tanner, review of Empire of Things.
Irish Examiner, http://www.irishexaminer.com/ (May 14, 2016), J.P. O’Malley, review of Empire of Things.
National, http://www.thenational.ae/ (January 7, 2016), Saul Austerlitz, review of Empire of Things.
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (February 20, 2024), Peter Fritzsche, review of Out of the Darkness.
NPR website, http://www.npr.org/ (March 31, 2016), Jason Heller, review of Empire of Things.
Politics and Culture, https://politicsandculture.org/ (September 19, 2010), Anne Kaun, review of Citizenship and Consumption,
PopMatters, http:// www.popmatters.com/ (June 21, 2016), Erin Giannini, review of Empire of Things.
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (January 21, 2016), Karen Shook, “Books Interview: Frank Trentmann.”
Truth Dig, http://www.truthdig.com/ (April 8, 2016), Carlos Lozada, review of Empire of Things.
University of Helsinki website, https://www.helsinki.fi/en/ (January 12, 2023), “Frank Trentmann Receives Bochum Historians’ Award.”
Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/ (April 1, 2016), Edward Rothstein, review of Empire of Things.
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (April 1, 2016), Carlos Lozada, review of Empire of Things.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, SCHOOL OF HISTORICAL STUDIES
Email
Birkbeck: f.trentmann@bbk.ac.uk
f.trentmann@bbk.ac.uk
OVERVIEW
RESEARCH
SUPERVISION AND TEACHING
PUBLICATIONS
OVERVIEW
HIGHLIGHTS
For a full CV go here:
https://www.davidgodwinassociates.com/frank-trentmann2
I am a historian of modern Britain, Germany and the world. My work explores the interplay between material, political and moral transformations. I am Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and also an associate at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, Helsinki. I have written about consumer culture; energy and water; everyday life; trade and political economy. In addition to academic audiences, my research has engaged with a wide range of groups and stakeholders, from government ministries to school children, companies and consumer groups, museums, media and visual artists.
Before joining Birkbeck, I was Assistant Professor at Princeton University. I was educated at Hamburg University, the London School of Economics (BA), and at Harvard University (MA, PhD)
I was the principal investigator of the AHRC project “Material Cultures of Energy” (2014-17), a member of the EPSRC–ESRC research centre DEMAND (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand), and from 2002 to 2007, the director of the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research programme, co-funded by ESRC and AHRC.
I have been Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics, Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence as well as a Visiting Professor at Bielefeld University, the University of St Gallen, the British Academy, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. In 2014 I was awarded the Moore Distinguished Fellowship at Caltech, in 2017 the Humboldt Prize for Research (Humboldt-Forschungspreis) by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. In 2023, I was awarded the Bochum Historians' Prize.
My new book, Out of the Darkness, the Germans 1942-2022, tells the story of the German people from the Second World War to the present and assesses their moral transformation, and its limits. The book has been published simultaneously in English and German in November 2023 by AllenLane/Penguin (UK) and Fischer (Germany), and will be followed by an American edition by Knopf in February 2024, and translations in French, Dutch, Russian and Chinese.
Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022
Aufbruch des Gewissens: Eine Geschichte der Deutschen von 1942 bis Heute
My last book Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First unfolds the rise of our material world and examines the global challenges of our relentless pursuit of more – from waste and debt to stress and inequality. 690 pages text, 72 illustrations. UK edition: Allen Lane 2016; US edition: HarperCollins 2016; Penguin paperback February 2017. The book has appeared in several foreign editions: German (DVA and Pantheon); Italian (Einaudi); Russian (Eksmo); Turkish (Pegasus Yayinlari); a Complex Chinese translation in Taiwan (Ye-ren); a simplified Chinese translation with Ginkgo in mainland China. Audiobook: audible. Book of the Year: The Times, The Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement; BBC History Magazine; Bloomberg; Exame (Brazil). Shortlisted for the NDR non-fiction prize (Germany). Winner of the Austrian Wissenschaftsbuch/science book prize in 2018 for the best book in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/559/55961/empire-of-things/9780141028743.html
For articles and reviews, see: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/empireofthings/
I was guest editor of the special issue of the Science Museum Group Journal on “material cultures of energy”, 9 (spring 2018), http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/issues/spring-2018/ . I have written the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Object love (2018), curated and edited by Anne Berk, Museum Hedendaagse Kunst, Sittard (Netherlands), and Museum Morsbroich (Germany).
I have communicated academic research to public audiences, e.g. most recently in an article for Der Spiegel (9 Dec. 2023: "Dare More Empathy") and an article “The Unequal Future of Consumption”, in The New Republic (Sept 2020), and published articles in The Guardian; Huffington Post; La Repubblica; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Times Literary Supplement. TV and radio appearances, including BBC, Arte, NDR, Deutschlandfunk, Swiss TV.
Lectures and keynotes to public and academic audiences include:
‘Grenzen des Konsums’ (Limits of Consumption), 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome report, Bundesumweltministerium (Federal Ministry of the Environment), Berlin, 10 October 2022.
“Decarbonisation Déjà Vu”, Nesta event on energy transitions, 14 December 2021.
“Geschichtliche Grundfragen: Relevanz der Geschichte”, Panel discussion: Freie Universität Berlin, 29 November 2021;
“Freiheit oder Konsumterror? Selbstverwirklichung und ihre Grenzen im Zeitalter des Konsums”, DAI (DAI Heidelberg), in cooperation with DGB und GEW Rhein-Neckar, Series, 21 April 2021.
“Consuming and Mobility”, invited lecture to BMW, Munich (digital), 30 June 2020.
“Material Histories of the World”, keynote to the History Conference of Denmark, M/S Maritime Museum of Denmark, Elsinore/Helsingør, 20 August 2018.
“Nachhaltiger Konsum”, Nachhaltigkeitskongress "Mehr TateN! - Mehr Zukunft", 10 Jahre Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart 13 April 2018.
“The Social Life of Energy Futures: Experts, Users and Standards in the Golden Age of Modernization” (with Rebecca Wright), Lisbon, World Energy Council, Secretaries Strategy Day, 16 October 2017.
“The Power of Things: A New History of Consumer Society”, Yale University, Annual Lecture of the Center for Historical Enquiry & the Social Sciences, 7 March 2017.
“Materielle Kultur und Konsumenten: Potenzial und Herausforderung für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung” (Material Culture and Consumers: Opportunities and Challeges for Sustainable Development) Carl-von-Carlowitz lecture, annual congress of the German Rat für Nachhaltigkeit (the German government’s Council for Sustainability), Berlin, 3 June 2015
“Scales of Disruption”, Birkbeck, 10 February 2015. Workshop with Defra, DECC, EDF, Transport for London, Climate UK.
My previous publications include Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), recipient of the Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society for the best first book on British history; a Japanese edition appeared with NTT Publishing Co., Tokyo; for reviews, see http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199567324.do ; The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford University Press, 2012; editor); Food and Globalization (Oxford: Berg, 2008, with Alexander Nützenadel); Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c. 1860-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, with Kevin Grant and Philippa Levine); Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006, with John Brewer); Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2009, with Elizabeth Shove and Rick Wilk); Work in progress: Economy and environment in the hand of experts (Munich: oekom, 2018 with Anna Barbara Sum and Manuel Rivera); Infrastructures in Practice: The Evolution of Demand in Networked Societies (London: Routledge, 2018, with Elizabeth Shove), and Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800-2075 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019, with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, John Brewer and Neil Fromer).
My scholarly articles have appeared in major journals, including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Historical Geography, and Environment and Planning.
RESEARCH
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My work has focused on consumption, politics, morality and material culture. I have written about consumer culture; everyday life; water and the modern city; free trade and fair trade; and energy. History of morality in modern/contemporary Germany
CV: https://www.davidgodwinassociates.com/frank-trentmann2
1.12.2023
University of Helsinki
Frank Trentmann receives Bochum Historians’ Award
Historian, Professor Frank Trentmann has been awarded the eighth Bochum Historians’ Award. Trentmann works at the University of London and at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki.
Professor Frank Trentmann.
(Image: Jon Wilson)
“We are honouring a work of the highest, internationally recognised excellence and a historian who, as a public intellectual, is heard both nationally and internationally far beyond the academic milieu", stated Chairman of the Board of the History of the Ruhr Foundation, Professor Stefan Berger.
The €30,000 prize is awarded every three years by the History of the Ruhr Foundation to honour a historian's lifetime work. The award was presented at a ceremony on 15 November 2023.
Frank Trentmann
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frank Trentmann is a professor of history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist in the history of consumption.
Career
Trentmann is professor of history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.[1] He was educated at Hamburg University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and at Harvard University, where he completed his PhD. He has taught at Princeton University and at Bielefeld University. He was Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute.[2]
Trentmann won the Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society for his 2008 book Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press).[1]
Research
Trentmann is a specialist in the history of consumption. He was director of the Cultures of Consumption research programme,[3] which received £5 million of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.[4]
Selected publications
Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024)
Empire of Things - How we became a world of consumers from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first (UK: Allen Lane/Penguin 2016; US: HarperCollins 2016; German edn: DVA 2017; Chinese: Ginkgo 2017).
Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, editor (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk (eds), Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2009).
Is Free Trade Fair? New Perspectives on the World Trading System, editor (Smith Institute, London 2009).
Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, edited with Alexander Nützenadel, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008).
Governance, Citizens, and Consumers: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics, edited with Mark Bevir, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
(Co-edited with Philippa Levine and Kevin Grant) Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, 1880–1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Citizenship and Consumption, edited with Kate Soper, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, edited with John Brewer, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006).
The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Editor), (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006).
Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, edited with Flemming Just, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Civil Society: A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics (edited with John A. Hall), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Worlds of Political Economy: Knowledge and Power in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (edited with Martin J Daunton), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-edited with Mark Bevir (Chinese edition in press).
Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges, co-edited with Mark Bevir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History, (Editor), (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2003, 2nd rev. paperback edition. 1st edition 2000).
AFTER THE NAZIS
The story of culture in West Germany
MICHAEL H. KATER
544pp. Yale University Press. 25 [pounds sterling] (US $35).
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
The Germans 1942-2022
FRANK TRENTMANN
880pp. Allen Lane. 40 [pounds sterling].
In 1965 a young Israeli journalist decided to travel around the "new" Germany. From Berlin to Bavaria, Hamburg to Cologne, everywhere he went Amos Elon was struck by the inconsistent approach to the recent war: at the national level it was appalling and reprehensible; at the personal level it was sanitized and honourable. Cognitive dissonance defined a country busily restoring its future by repressing its past. "Moral schizophrenia", as Elon saw it, was the new German pathology.
The book that Elon published in 1967 was called Journey Through a Haunted Land, a title that has lost none of its resonance more than half a century later. The "schizophrenia" (by which he meant split personality) was built, of course, into the structure of the nation, divided as it was between two competing visions of both future and past. Capitalist West and Communist East emerged out of the same black hole, but had very different centres of gravity. The founding force of one--"Never again"--was the foundational myth of the other, self-appointed heir to anti-fascism. History split into stories.
Although the stories of the postwar Germanies have been told many times, it has mostly been in the political and economic terms of reconstruction, rivalry and reunification. Two excellent new books take a different approach. Michael H. Kater's After the Nazis tells the story of West Germany through its culture; Frank Trentmann's Out of the Darkness, more ambitiously still, undertakes an explicitly moral reckoning with the past eighty years of Germany, from the war in Russia to the war in Ukraine. Taken together they offer insight into not just German history, but history more generally, understood as an aggregate of mutually enlightening methodologies.
A history of culture is not quite the same thing as a cultural history. Where the latter tends to be both more capacious (including everyday events and ways of living) and restricted (offering a cultural history of x or y), the former focuses on high culture in all its forms. Such, at least, is the approach taken in After the Nazis, which seeks to explore not only the details of West German culture, but also its importance to the nation in the first place. Kater's central thesis--that the success of the Federal Republic was based to a large extent on its imbrication of culture and politics--sets out the stakes. Aesthetic education, that most Germanic of concepts, would be the path to righteousness.
The cast list of this culture is both familiar and faded, which tells us something about how we now view the forty years of the FRG. Across the art-forms, the main figures--from Joseph Beuys to Gunter Grass, Karlheinz Stockhausen to Marcel ReichRanicki - now feel dated, not so much because their time has passed as because their ecosystem has. My schoolteacher would be horrified to hear me ask, but does anyone still read Heinrich Boll?
Such clearly defined parameters are also, however, what makes the Federal Republic an intriguing case study. Kater begins by tracing the emergence of a recognizably West German culture out of the rubble of Nazism. Wolfgang Koeppen's Das Treibhaus (1953; The Hothouse, 2001), is as good an image as any for the overheated environment of the postwar years: reborn as an ally, the FRG was pumped full of pro-western sentiment in a kind of Marshall Plan of the mind. The early years of the republic were characterized by an awkward paternalism, as the Allies sought to re-educate penitent Germans through promoting a mixture of morally edifying classics (such as Gotthold Lessing's Nathan der Weise) and mildly entertaining cinema (the so-called rubble films of the late 1940s). Radio plays became a hallmark of the period: in 1949, 47 per cent of West German listeners declared themselves fans. A recognizably postwar culture started to emerge.
The caesura of the Third Reich exacerbated the usual generational conflict. The older generation of emigres--embodied, above all, by the emblematic Thomas Mann in his Californian exile--was rapidly displaced by a younger cohort, angry at the farce of denazification. Hans Werner Richter's Gruppe 47 came to dominate German literature, but they too would duly be challenged, most famously by the young Austrian Peter Handke in 1966, railing against the "descriptive impotence" of the postwar literary establishment. In West Germany, as in the West more generally, the generational clash gathered pace in the 1960s, with the difference being that for young Germans it took the form of a reckoning with parental responsibility for the war. Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, or "coming to terms with the past", became the defining activity of the Federal Republic; culture--as determined, not least, by that other quintessentially Germanic institution, the Feuilleton--became its principal field of expression.
The landmarks of this field are reliably signposted by Kater. Having written a series of books on the cultural life of twentieth-century Germany, he is well positioned to survey not only the principal genres--including literature and film, music and art, drama and media--but also their epiphenomena, such as the protest movements of the 1960s and their descent into violence in the 1970s. He is good, too, on the importance of place, on the emergence of provincial cities such as Kassel and Darmstadt as centres of art and music. For better and worse the "Bonn Republic" was nothing if not provincial.
Inevitably one can quibble over omissions or points of emphasis. The twelve pages on cultural feminism merely reinforce the sense that the Federal Republic was a boys' club. But it was hardly unique in that, and Kater hints nicely at a possible counter-narrative--highlighting, for instance, the importance of film-makers such as Margarethe von Trotta (not to mention the leading role played by women such as Ulrike Meinhof in the Rote Armee Fraktion). The more fundamental question that emerges from his narrative relates to the role played by culture as a whole. The question is particularly pertinent to Germany, which has long thought of itself--not least as a way of compensating for its belated unification--as the land of poets and thinkers. Yet this emphasis on high culture, on the importance of Bildungsburgertum (the educated bourgeoisie), did nothing to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust. What Schiller called "aesthetic education" palpably failed.
It was always going to be problematic, then, to reassert the continuity of German culture "after the Nazis". West German poets and thinkers sought to avoid this by averring a new beginning or by taking refuge in abstract and non-representational forms of art that hinted at a sense of historical responsibility while bypassing its cruder forms. But the basic paradox of instrumentalizing culture remained, and remains. Art in the service of a political goal--even one as noble as "coming to terms with the past"--risks renouncing its autonomous power in favour of a pre-packaged "message" (which is no doubt why the subtlest postwar German writing, such as that of Paul Celan or W. G. Sebald, tells the truth, but tells it slant). Kater says strikingly little about the critique of culture in these years. Yet its various manifestations--in the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, in the meta-historicism of thinkers such as Hans Blumenberg or Reinhart Koselleck, or even in the imported influences of French poststructuralists in the postmodern Berlin of the 1980s--have proven to be among the more lasting cultural contributions of the Federal Republic. Kater's story of culture, compelling though it is, might have benefited from a theory of culture.
Frank Trentmann takes a broader approach to the story of postwar Germany. From his epigraph, taken from Schiller--"The realm of history is fertile and comprehensive; it embraces the whole moral world"--his adjectives are emphatic: history is not just moral, it is all-embracing. His methodology is correspondingly capacious, casting its net across a vast range of human activity in Germanies West and East, pre- and post-reunification. Equal parts histoire des mentalites and histoire des moeurs, Trentmann's study marshals an immense amount of evidence in response to a single basic question: how did Germans reassert their sense of themselves as morally oriented human beings?
The early chapters on the war are predictably horrific. As he will do throughout the book, Trentmann begins by picking out a representative individual experience as a way of humanizing the statistics. A seventeen-year-old schoolboy is called up and sees action in the Balkans; he kills someone for the first time; he has misgivings about the morality of his comrades' behaviour, but persuades himself that he is above the bestial instincts of the lesser soldiers. Reinhold Reichardt's diary, Trentmann suggests, offers a window onto a moral universe shared by many recruits. What would happen to his "solipsistic sense of moral superiority" is the focus of the book.
The author's project of seeing postwar Germany in these terms is particularly propitious not just because of its horrific background, but also because of "the German habit of turning all social, economic and political problems into moral ones". Anyone who knows the country will endorse the insight, since it defines German history both before and after the wars. If Kant's categorical imperative made moral law the basis for modern philosophy, Adorno's "new" categorical imperative--"that Auschwitz must never repeat itself"--made moral law the basis of modern Germany. What Karl Jaspers called "the guilt question" has never gone away.
Out of the Darkness traces its consequences in a number of surprising ways. "Hypermorality", as Arnold Gehlen termed it, manifests itself in unexpected places: in courts and churches, naturally enough, but also in clubs and causes, in the myriad ways in which Germans have engaged with themselves and others. Trentmann's central section contrasts the moral cultures of West and East Germany. The "economic miracle" of the FRG is well known--in the course of the 1950s its GDP trebled and exports quadrupled--and it drove an increasingly liberal culture, one in which West Germans were becoming ever more interested in politics. (Turnout in elections reached 88 per cent in the 1960s). Willy Brandt's progressive call to "dare more democracy" replaced Konrad Adenauer's regressive slogan "No experiments". The corollary of this was that the state stepped back from moral policing, leaving a gap for self-appointed righteous individuals, in true Protestant tradition, to contest its authority. The left-wing terrorists of the 1970s were nothing if not moralists.
The East, meanwhile, cultivated its own sense of left-wing righteousness. The contrast between the two polities is instructive, and not always in the ways one might expect. Beyond obvious instances of surveillance and repression Trentmann cites a number of startling statistics suggesting the extent to which the GDR was more socially permissive than the FRG, at least in certain carefully prescribed senses. East Germany stopped punishing homosexuality in the late 1950s; West Germany, owing in large part to the conservative influence of the churches, remained a hostile environment until the fall of the Wall. East Germany allowed abortion; West Germany didn't. East Germany offered free preschool places for 54 per cent of children under the age of three, and 94 per cent of children between three and six; in West Germany, the corresponding averages were 2 and 68 per cent. The socialist dictatorship both coerced its citizens and cared for them--or perhaps it coerced its citizens by caring for them.
A further instructive contrast lies in the relationship that the two states pursued with the outside world. Beyond the obvious blocs of power dictated by Cold War politics, both East and West Germany were largely inward-looking, albeit for different reasons. The West, however, looked outwards for the cheap labour that would power their economic miracle. Trentmann's chapter on the Gastarbeiter who came from southern Europe--and, above all, from Turkey--amply documents the "dark side of affluence". Individual stories are complemented, as ever, by well-chosen statistics: in the 1960s, for instance, taxes on foreign workers raised ten times as much as the state spent on them. Max Frisch's much-quoted dictum--"We called for workers, and instead there came people"--summarizes the mismanaged expectations.
By the time Trentmann's story reaches the years following reunification, the country had started down a different path. With the fall of the Wall the old problem of Germany's "semi-hegemonic" status raised its head again: too small to lead Europe by itself, it is too big not to dominate it. It comprises a quarter of Europe's economy and its financial might inevitably leads to resentment, as vividly demonstrated by the debt crisis of the 2010s. Part of the problem is that its commercial interests were turning towards the East--the much-maligned policy of Wandel durch Handel ("change through commerce")--while its centre of strategic (and moral) gravity remained in the West. Its dormant military has also been searching for a role: one of the most symbolically important moments in postwar German history came when it was decided, in the context of the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, to send aircraft into action for the first time since 1945. As Joschka Fischer famously declared in the Bundestag, the old adage "never again" could also be used to justify military intevention.
Angela Merkel's decision in 2015 to welcome more than a million Syrian refugees is also part of this larger moral history. By 2022, Trentmann notes, Germany hosted the third largest number of refugees in the world, about 2.2 million people. German concern for the environment, too, is famously longstanding - few things are more characteristically Germanic than the fetishization of forests--although the author is rightly sceptical of the reality behind the rhetoric: in 2019, in another of his alarming statistics, he tells us that Germans were responsible for 9.8 tons per capita of greenhouse emissions, over a ton more than the average European. Solar panels struggle to keep pace with large cars and barbecues. Trentmann's own moral position--and the irony of taking a moralizing approach to a moralizing nation--emerges clearly in his epilogue. For all the efforts Germany has made to face up to the past and for all the divergences between West and East that this occasioned--it has remained, in his telling, too provincial. Deliberately making itself small, it has taken pride in not being proud, tipping over at times into self-satisfaction. "Learning to take responsibility for past crimes made Germans forget to take responsibility for living in an interconnected world in the present." Germany's many recent turns, or Wenden--from the original Wende of reunification, via the continuing Energiewende, to the Zeitenwende (historic turning point) proclaimed by Olaf Scholz in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine--make Trentmann wary of its more inflated claims to enlightenment. Too often, he cautions, moral and material interests pull in opposite directions.
In the end, perhaps the most striking aspect of these two studies is their shared authorial perspective. Both are written by emigre Germans who grew up in Germany and then spent their adult lives elsewhere. This insider-outsider viewpoint encourages both identity and distance: the authors are simultaneously a part of the story and apart from it. Modern German history, likewise, is simultaneously a part of Europe and apart from it. Anyone with a serious interest in its development will want to read these two important books.
Ben Hutchinson is German Editor at the TLS. His most recent book, On Purpose: Ten lessons on the meaning of life, was published earlier this year
Caption: The Tunix protest in West Berlin, 1978
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hutchinson, Ben. "New moral order: A younger generation's clash with the wartime generation." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6291, 27 Oct. 2023, pp. 10+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A772235391/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=60521b87. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022 Frank Trentmann Allen Lane, 880pp, 40 [pounds sterling]
The Germans are never (quite) as bad or as good as they seem. In the 1930s and 1940s, during the Third Reich, the Germans were, of course, very bad. More recently, especially between 2015 and 2020, they seemed rather good. The Germans, John Kampfner's recent book told us, "did it better". They made stuff that people actually wanted to buy, were mastering the "energy transition", did a good job during Covid, and, having admitted a million Middle Eastern refugees, were celebrated as a "moral superpower".
In fact, as Frank Trentmann shows in his absorbing new book, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022, the story was (and is) more complicated. There are, of course, many histories of modern Germany, but the author's approach is novel. His starting point is "the German habit of turning all social, economic and political problems into moral ones". He draws on hitherto little-used sources such as diaries, letters and petitions, and his Germans leap vividly off the page, both as archetypes and as complex, multilayered individuals.
Trentmann begins his story in 1942, right in the middle of the nightmare of war and genocide. The extent of the unprecedented German crimes during this period have been extensively documented, of course, but the author reminds us that the Nazis believed they were following their own morality. In his infamous speech to a secret meeting of SS leaders in 1943, Heinrich Himmler spoke of the way in which his men had carried out their brutal tasks and yet remained "decent". Wanton sadism was not encouraged. Indeed, that same year an SS man was sentenced to ten years in prison for murdering Jews on his own initiative, allowing his unit to indulge in "vile brutalisation" and taking "shameless and disgusting" photographs of his murders. This was a form of morality, just not as we know it.
Out of the Darkness introduces moral light and shade without in any way playing down the enormity of Nazi crimes or the extent of German society's complicity in them. Trentmann cites the case of the German-Jewish woman Susanne Vogel, whose father took his own life rather than allow the Nazis to take it, yet who refused to later renounce her two Nazi housemates--one of whom was also a devout Christian who sheltered Jews, and both of whom had kept her background a secret.
The reckoning with the Third Reich began well before the end of the war and, as Trentmann writes, was widely discussed. Many Germans saw the Allied bombing raids and the violence meted out against them at the end of the war as punishment, whether deserved or not, for their earlier actions. The author shows how "private guilt" gave way to "public liability" --for example, through compensation payments to Jews and other victims (though not all of them)--and then to "collective shame". Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar German Federal Republic, knew that this process, agonisingly slow and incomplete though it seems to us, was essential to the moral rebranding of Germany after the Nazi years.
Another important step in the return of (West) Germany to the club of civilised nations was the embrace of "Europe". It was no accident that the first president of the German section of the Union of European Federalists was a camp survivor, Eugen Kogon. The cause of European political integration gave Germans a path back to participation and respectability, and genuinely seemed to many the only way of avoiding a repeat of the mid-century traumas.
This was, as Trentmann stresses, an elite project, but it proved an extraordinarily enduring one. From the 1950s to the 1990s, German leaders ritually invoked the idea of European unity. Over the past two decades the specific goal has been less emphasised, but Angela Merkel's role in shoring up the euro and the EU more generally has been central to Germany's understanding of itself (and to others' understanding of Germany, in both the positive and negative sense). If Germany had a purpose after the catastrophic hubris of the Nazi period it was to complete the European project.
The central arena of moral activity in Germany, though, was and is the economy. Its stupendous performance in the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was seen as vindication of the moral principles underlying the "ordoliberal" social market economy. More recently, Germany recommended these principles to struggling economies in the eurozone periphery, especially Greece. As chancellor, Merkel told them they should stay within their means and save like the traditional "Swabian hausfrau". These virtues of thrift and saving, as Trentmann shows, needed to be taught to Germans after 1945: many had completely lost trust in the banks and the system, and lived only for the moment.
Germans saw themselves not only as economic champions but also increasingly as a moral vanguard. It was only seven years after the war that the prominent Social Democrat Carlo Schmid suggested, during a discussion about whether rearmament was necessary to deter the Soviet Union, that without weapons Germany might "exercise a moral pull on the rest of the world".
From the 1960s onwards, German moral discourses took a new turn. The country was shaken by a student revolt against universities and what they saw as a conformist society and a repressive "system" more generally, the left-wing terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Group, and the decline of traditional morality in the shape of widespread use of birth control and the erosion of traditional family values. Trentmann shows this to have been less of a generational clash than often assumed because many older Germans welcomed, for example, their children's refusal to serve in the new German army, the Bundeswehr. There were also many who demanded that Germany do more for the developing world and challenge the Western military-industrial complex. This sentiment, which was greatly energised by anger at American policies during the Vietnam War, took off in the 1980s during the debates over the deployment of nuclear weapons in Germany. Huge protests mobilised wide sections of civil society, from students and the churches to politicians and activists.
Over the past 40 years, the environment and energy have emerged as key battlefields in the moral discourse. West Germans felt their natural world was being sacrificed for material gain, though, as Trentmann reminds us, things were much worse in the East German Democratic Republic. For a time, it was possible to imagine a new form of German leadership based on its position leading the Energiewende, or energy transition, one of the few recent German phrases to make it into the global vocabulary.
The decision by Merkel's government in 2015-16 to admit about a million refugees from the war-torn Middle East marked the apotheosis of Germany's moral transformation. After a prolonged period of dealing with "difference"--beginning with the arrival of Italian, Yugoslav and Turkish guest workers in the 1960s, and continuing through the increase in asylum seekers from the 1980s--Germany claimed the title of Willkommensgesellschaft, a "welcome society". The speed with which the German authorities and civil society received, housed and began to integrate these immigrants was indeed impressive.
Trentmann is sympathetic to the demands for a more environmentally conscious society, but he gently skewers some of the myths underpinning them. The author tells us that the German forest did not "die", as many warned in the 1980s, that Germans spend very little on "fair trade" goods, and that despite all the rhetoric they are, thanks to their industrial base and addiction to air travel and the automobile, among Europe's worst offenders in terms of emissions--even though they have "outsourced" much of their production to other countries. Moreover, recent events in Ukraine have completely discredited an energy policy based largely on the steady supply of Russian gas. Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz's famous Zeitenwende ("turning point") speech shortly after Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine, in which he promised a more politically and militarily engaged Germany, not enough has been done. Neither under Merkel nor her successor has the Federal Republic taken on the European leadership role that many on the continent, not least the former Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, implored them to adopt. In this sense, Germany is a country whose time came but went again.
One criticism of Trentmann's excellent book is that its structure is heavily front-loaded, thinner in the middle and thick again towards the end. Important phenomena such as the complicated reaction to the Polish Solidarity movement, domestic terrorism and the first Gulf War are dealt with too quickly or not at all.
In the end, a note of exasperation creeps in to Trentmann's account, as well it might. The subtitle to his epilogue asks: "What is Germany for?" He notes that despite benefiting so much from the global order, Germany has contributed little militarily to its upkeep. What is the point, one might also ask, of producing such good tanks if one does not send them--or only sends them late and very grudgingly--to where they are most needed, as happened with Ukraine? What is the point of a Germany that is no longer leading Europe towards political unity? These are the questions that will shape Germany for the next 80 years.
Caption: Student revolt: Young adults demonstrate in Hamburg, Germany, in 1968
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Simms, Brendan. "What it means to be German: Frank Trentmann's history reveals how modern Germany found a new moral purpose after the horrors of Nazism." New Statesman, vol. 152, no. 5746, 8 Dec. 2023, pp. 78+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776957374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=560bc6e4. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Out of Darkness:
The Germans, 1942-2022
by Frank Trentmann
Allen Lane, [pounds sterling]40, pp. 838
In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about 'how you would feel in such a situation'. Even if, like me, your childhood was spent crying over lost games of Monopoly, nothing could quite prepare you for the cheerless experience of playing 'Flight and Expulsion Across the World'. It's unlikely an updated version has been commissioned for our home secretary, with players assigned counters representing the Bibby Stockholm, inflatable life rafts and Rwanda-bound jets, but you never know.
A group called German Youth Europa launched the game in order to close Germany's empathy gap. West Germany, critics claimed, was Ubergfremdung (swamped by foreigners). What nonsense, retorted German Youth Europa: Germans made up 93 per cent of the Bundesrepublik's population, despite having absorbed 12 million expellees after the second world war. Taking in an estimated 30,000 Vietnamese boat people should be no problem. In any case, had not Germans a particular responsibility to care for the world's most unfortunate to atone for killing six million Jews?
Across the Elbe at the same time the GDR was boosting its coffers by letting Africans and Asians land at East Berlin's Schonefeld airport, then walk into the western sector where they would claim asylum. The socialist republic, with the blissful disregard for historical responsibility that Politburo-dwelling historical materialists often demonstrate, officially allowed no admissions of guilt or shame for the Holocaust and other evils of the Third Reich.
Frank Trentmann narrates these and other incidents to trouble the Pollyanna tendency whereby Germans have mutated from perpetrators of the greatest crime in history into a nation of Gutmenschen (do-gooders), whose new historical destiny is to teach the rest of us moral invertebrates what it is to be human.
Theodor Adorno's 1965 essay On the Question 'What is German?' suggested that the answer involves 'the transition to humanity'. The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, the author of a book on the influence of Wagner, Hitler's favourite composer, argued that Germany had done just that, becoming 'the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes', which seems unfair on South Africa. The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in Capitalism and the Death Drive: 'To be German means to be committed to a form of humanity that radically breaks with capitalism.' This seems strange to those for whom Germany is indelibly associated not just with Goethe and Hegel but with global capitalism's most successful brands, from BMW to Miele. And similarly curious given Germany's leading role in the Troika which meted out fiscal punishment beatings to the recalcitrant Greeks in line with neo-liberal economic theory.
The Hamburg-born Trentmann, professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, is well situated to both puncture German ethical hubris and offer a corrective to Britain's recent self-flagellating literary sub-genre which includes Philip Oltermann's Keeping Up With the Germans and John Kampfner's Why the Germans Do it Better. A glimpse of Oktoberfest lederhosen, the rise of Alternative fur Deutchsland and increasing anti-Semitism shows that Germans don't always do it better. Trentmann tells us that responsibility for the Holocaust has become a civil religion, key to German national identity, exemplified by the 2,711 stelae of Peter Eisenman's memorial to murdered Jews near the Brandenburg Gate. But that faith is not ubiquitous. In August last year police investigated attacks on two Berlin Holocaust memorials, one at Grunewald station, from which tens of thousands of the city's Jews were sent to their deaths. A Bucherbox, or mini-library, containing books visitors might borrow to educate themselves about the Holocaust was set on fire. Some Germans still can't resist burning books.
Consider, also, what happened to Mesut Ozil. Trentmann describes the former Arsenal midfielder as a poster boy for diversity. Born in Germany to Turkish parents, he played in the 2010 German World Cup team which included players from eight different countries. Two years later he was photographed with President Erdogan. Twitter erupted, attacking Ozil as a 'false German' who was endorsing a human rights abuser; but no one complained when Lothar Matthaus, another German international, was photographed with Putin after the annexation of Crimea. In 2018, Ozil was blamed and subjected to racist abuse for Germany's calamitous performance in that year's World Cup. He drew the inference: 'A German when we win, an immigrant when we lose.' Germans, says Trentmann, thought that by working through the past and facing up to the Holocaust they had successfully confronted racism. The truth, as he shows, is much less flattering to Germans' self-image: the Third Reich's Volksgemeinschaft (people's racial community) may not be dead.
Surely, one may counter, what Angela Merkel did in 2015 shows that Germany is indeed the world's moral exemplar. 'We have managed such a lot--we can do this,' she said at a refugee camp near Dresden. By the end of 2017, Germany had become a safe haven for more than a million Syrian refugees. The country seemed to have completed its metamorphosis from ethical black hole to shining beacon.'When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions,' the Green party leader Katrin Goring-Eckhardt declared in 2015. But virtue is rarely its own reward, and the phenomenon of virtue-signalling is Germany's latest folly.
Trentmann argues that Merkel's step was pragmatic: not the product of humanitarianism but simply the least bad option. Thousands were already marching on highways to Germany, so the chancellor's choice was either to accommodate them or beat them back--which would, to put it mildly, have been bad PR. Equally, Germany needed skilled workers. In autumn 2015, Dieter Zetsche, the head of Daimler, dreamed of a new German economic miracle, staffed by 'highly motivated' immigrants, including the many Syrians arriving with academic qualifications. There may have been an economic rationale when Santander offered paid leave to staff who volunteered to help refugees. But let's not be unduly cynical. Merkel could also count on many Germans to show something not part of Suella Braverman's philosophy--namely Willkommenskultur. Between 2015 and 2017, 55 per cent of the German people helped refugees in one way or another. These, says Trentmann, are 'impressive figures historically'.
Counterintuitively, he begins his history in 1942. Like Eric Hobsbawm's long 19th century, there is historiographical justification for this unusual time frame. The year was, morally speaking, Germany's darkest. It began with the Wannsee Conference, which decided the Final Solution to the Jewish question. It ended on the Eastern Front, with the Sixth Army encircled and on the brink of defeat at Stalingrad. Trentmann is particularly strong on post-war German victimhood and the marginalisation of Jewish suffering. In Nuremberg, emblematically, a monument was erected in 1957 to the victims of the city's bombing. Stones for the memorial were taken from the rubble of the synagogue on Hans-Sachs Square, destroyed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht. 'The fate of the Jews was literally buried in a monument to German victims.' The fixation of Germans on their own post-war suffering is the dismal thread running through this book.
Chancellor Adenauer's policy of Wiedermachtung --making good again--allowed Nazi civil servants to return to office, resulting in many Jews not being able to get justice. A 'Mrs B', Trentmann reports, lived for the first four years of her life in forced labour camps before being deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Her father perished in Auschwitz. From the age of 13, understandably, she had panic attacks when she saw anyone in uniform, including a postman; yet in 1974 Hamburg officials turned down her request for trauma compensation on the grounds that 'someone who cannot remember her childhood in a KZ [concentration camp] cannot possibly have suffered from it'.
Germany is also prone to a disease the British have long imagined themselves world champions of: hypocrisy. Long before Nordstream supplied 'green' Germany with fossil fuel from Putin, the country was trading with authoritarian regimes, including Pinochet's Chile and Galtieri's Argentina. As in Britain, economic priorities trump moral principles.
On page 716 of the book, Trentmann asks: 'What is Germany for?' Instead of answering, he shows compellingly how Germans themselves struggle with the question. When last year Chancellor Olaf Schulz announced [euro]100 billion to top up the defence budget after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the decision was presented as heralding a new era. Finally Germany was going to stand up to Putin rather than play footsie with him: it had overcome its military queasiness and was going to take an active role in Nato.
The truth, like so many told in Trentmann's superb book, is more nuanced. Unlike Britain, Germany agonises over doing the right thing, but, like Britain, it is laughably inept at managing public projects. By the end of last year, German troops only had enough bullets for two weeks' fighting--and the three dozen fighter jets bought from the US won't be operational until 2028.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Jeffries, Stuart. "From zero to hero." Spectator, vol. 354, no. 10193, 6 Jan. 2024, pp. 40+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A780023634/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=048b818e. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Trentmann, Frank OUT OF THE DARKNESS Knopf (NonFiction None) $50.00 2, 20 ISBN: 9781524732912
A magisterial history of Germany over the last 80 years.
A shambles in 1945, Germany now dominates the European Union. Nearly 800 pages on how this happened may seem excessive, but Trentmann, author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation, handles his material with aplomb. He emphasizes that the Nazis enjoyed broad support, even among poor German citizens, which withered during the disastrous years after 1942. Some Germans objected to the persecution of Jews within Germany, and many learned from family members serving abroad that the Nazis were committing atrocities. Although the horror of Nazi mass murder stunned the Allies after 1945, Germans were preoccupied with their own problems, including homelessness, starvation, and millions of German refugees expelled from former provinces and Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, many Germans rejected collective guilt for the war's destruction, and most were stunned when Konrad Adenauer (chancellor from 1949 to 1963) pushed through massive reparations to Israel and to Jewish refugees. This was effective for reestablishing Germany's global standing but it also got the country "off the hook of paying reparations for the war itself." In long, penetrating chapters, the author focuses more on people than politics, examining the economic miracle of the 1950s and '60s, how younger Germans began confronting their parents' hypocrisy, and the semidystopia of East Germany, whose collapse opened the way for the united nation's economic dominance. The explanation that this resulted from German thrift, organization, and hard work does not survive Trentmann's gimlet eye. In a thoughtful epilogue, the author summarizes the decades of "moral and material regeneration" that produced a resilient people who have fended off recent crises, but he refuses to predict the outcome of other situations, including the disturbing rise in jingoistic, racist, and anti-democratic movements.
Fascinating insights on how a country of poets, philosophers, and scientists emerged from totalitarianism and genocide.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Trentmann, Frank: OUT OF THE DARKNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238272/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=454a6e96. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Ukraine, Gaza and the Long Shadow of German Guilt
In “Out of the Darkness,” Frank Trentmann details the way people in the country that started World War II are still confronting and atoning for the atrocities of their government.
Share full article
A photograph of rows of tall concrete slabs. A face and hand of someone holding a smartphone apparently to take a picture can be seen between two of the slabs. Across from this person, the head and hand of another person can be seen apparently posing between another set of slabs.
Visitors at “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” in Berlin.Credit...Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times
By Peter Fritzsche
Peter Fritzsche is a professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author, most recently, of “Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich.”
Feb. 20, 2024
BUY BOOK ▾
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
Get it sent to your inbox.
OUT OF THE DARKNESS: The Germans, 1942-2022, by Frank Trentmann
“Stalingrad” is what Germans talked about as they settled down for coffee and cake on Sunday afternoons in the first five decades after World War II — the “bitter fate” of prisoners in Soviet camps, the five million German soldiers who lost their lives in the wider conflict, and the widows and orphans they left behind. They brought up “Dresden” and the 20 million people who had lost their homes in the Allied bombing. Almost every family told stories of one of the 12 million refugees who fled the Red Army’s advance or had been expelled from the eastern territories, from Breslau, Danzig and Königsberg. One after another, they followed paths of self-pity.
“Everything that the German Volk did to the Jews,” a liberal justice minister told an audience of Jewish attorneys in 1951, “happened to itself.” War stories gathered up victims, all of whom, on both sides, deserved “the same high degree of care,” a Bavarian assembly president insisted. Few of the Sunday coffee visitors saw Allied victory as liberation or fully recognized the grave injuries German soldiers had inflicted on Europe’s civilians across what The New York Times called “the new dark continent.”
This attitude did not hold forever. In the remarkably rich “Out of the Darkness,” the historian Frank Trentmann tracks the “moral transformation of Germany,” from the Battle of Stalingrad in the early 1940s right through debates about Germany’s historical responsibilities in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine eight decades later. In a country where the austere concrete slabs of “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” anchor the capital complex that surrounds the old Berlin Wall, World War II casts a very long shadow.
The tense debate over whether the country that started the Second World War should send arms to Ukraine — whether it should confront Russia or appease Putin and avoid any whiff of militarism — is only one in a series of dramatic developments shaping the nation’s temper. Just this century, the country has seen the near bust-up of the European Union over Greek debt after the global financial crisis of 2008; the absorption of hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia in 2015; and the entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany into Parliament in 2017. For the last 80 years, Trentmann writes, all aspects of life from family to work to the environment have been debated in terms of right and wrong, featuring “conflicts about guilt, shame and making amends.” Paradoxically, reunification in 1990 stirred up rather than settled questions about who Germans have been and how they should shape their future.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
As the damage of a lost war became clear and hunger spread, most German citizens saw their own hardship first. “In July 1946,” Trentmann notes, “the average German man in his 20s weighed 130 pounds. By February 1948, that had dropped to 114 pounds.” But the poker game of who suffered most gradually gave way to a more broad-minded accounting of responsibility and obligation. In West Germany, a massive redistribution of state resources in the early 1950s recognized the general claims of Jewish Germans and other survivors of the Holocaust. Germany’s restitution remains incomplete, but “never in the history of the world,” Trentmann emphasizes, “has a state been so generous to its victims.”
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.
The public debate “between those clinging stubbornly to the idea” that World War II had been a “regular war,” he writes, and “those seeking to confront the past” structured civil society. By the mid-1950s, a protest culture made up of students and trade unionists opposed the establishment of a new German army and demonstrated against lenient sentences for war criminals. On Saturday mornings, information booths set up by citizen activists dotted market squares across Germany.
Editors’ Picks
How Can Our Friends Choose a Realtor Other Than My Husband?
For $367 a Month, She Has 345 Square Feet, a Hot Tub and a River
Traveling Light: How to Pack a Carry-on
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Image
The cover of “Out of the Darkness” shows the German parliament building glowing red at night under a dark sky with about a dozen white searchlights arrayed in front of the building. In the foreground, a crowd of people can be seen standing in silhouette. One is raising a fist in the air.
As Trentmann shows, the story was not the same on both sides of the wall. The construction of the wall in 1961 established a genuine East German identity, a “second birth”: Citizens adjusted their futures to the socialist project, allowing East Germans to put the past behind them and leave atonement to the capitalists in the West. East Germans joined factory brigades and tenant collectives, but mostly they “beavered away at home and in their dachas,” three million cabins for 16 million people.
Their moral stasis, kept in bounds by an extensive surveillance apparatus, would not last. By the end of the 1960s, East Germans had TVs, young people owned cameras and mopeds, and 40 percent of the population was overweight. Still, images of Western affluence remained stuck in their heads. In 1985, ninth graders in Magdeburg asked to complete an essay on “the year 2010” disclosed dreams about fancy cars and Cinderella marriages of hairdressers to bankers; only one student hoped that “everything should be as under socialism.”
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
When dreams did come true with reunification, former East Germans were shocked to find them tarnished by unemployment, lack of respect and a civic culture developed on the other side of the gate that was more attuned to German misdeeds than German suffering. Many young East Germans felt they had become exiles in their own country. “No work, no love, no homeland, no happiness,” Katja Kramer, a once-optimistic 36-year-old computer engineer, wrote as the wall fell and she was laid off.
Given the mixed success of reunification, Trentmann refrains from writing a happy ending in which “a nation of sinners turned into saints.” He also recognizes the costs and complexities of the quest for moral security in the East and West: the amnesty granted to German war criminals in the 1950s after the initial wave of denazification trials, the postponed engagement with the Holocaust, the ostentatious (and sometimes insidiously self-absolving) performance of the “good German.”
Nonetheless, as Trentmann captures, the post-1945 transformation has been remarkable. The willingness of Germans to open their borders to refugees — mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — stands out. An astonishing 55 percent of the population, he observes, “helped refugees in one way or another.” One-quarter were “‘active helpers’ who accompanied refugees to doctors and the authorities, taught them German, helped with the shopping or took them along to the local sports club.” The arrival of so many new residents (in a country of 80 million) showed a clear way of being at home in the war-torn world by making new homes for others.
Of course, moral tensions still abound. Issues such as aid to Ukraine or open doors to immigrants divide Germans, especially in the East, where many see the “blossoming landscapes” they had been promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 as invaded by “outsiders.” This is ironic, Trentmann writes, because these are the same regions that most need “to attract newcomers to survive.”
And Jews continue to remain awkwardly set apart in German society, as the response to protests against the war in Gaza has made clear. Since October last year, government agencies have restricted demonstrations and cultural institutions have rescinded awards and canceled exhibitions in an effort to penalize antisemitism, muffling pro-Palestinian voices and equating disagreement with Israel, even by Jews, with racial prejudice.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Criticism of the government of Israel, comparisons of current events with others in the Holocaust, shock at the mass death of Palestinians — none of this is self-evidently antisemitic. Nor does it constitute evasion of Germany’s crimes in the past or its responsibilities in the present. In the name of moral clarity (or perhaps simplicity), such protective measures have pressed Jews, unsurprisingly people with varied opinions, into the old monolithic category of “the Jew.”
“Out of the Darkness” usefully reveals the roots of these ethical knots. Trentmann is still hopeful that Germans can untangle them. “Time and again,” he points out, racists “have found themselves outnumbered by the tens of thousands of citizens who joined candlelit processions” against intolerance, xenophobia and assaults on democratic institutions. “There is no German identity without Auschwitz,” Joachim Gauck said in 2015, when he was the country’s president. He was taking note of a civic achievement rather than a state rule.
OUT OF THE DARKNESS: The Germans, 1942-2022 | By Frank Trentmann | Knopf | 774 pp. | $50