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.
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