Out of the Darkness

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Telegraph and Der Spiegel Book of the Year

Sueddeutsche Zeitung's Number One Most Important Political Book of 2023
Die Zeit, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, taz Number One, Best Non-Fiction Books December 2023 and January 2024

A groundbreaking new history of the people at the centre of Europe, from the Second World War to today

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?

Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.

© Frank Trentmann 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics Review

I could not put the book down. The way Frank Trentmann writes history, the way he brings together things great and small, analysis with narrative, is wonderful
Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader
Outstanding ... A meticulous and well-judged account of Germany from 1942 to today [that] shows how it transformed itself from pariah nation to leader of a continent
Daily Telegraph, Best Books of the Year
An impressive account of how Germany built a new identity for itself after the barbaric Nazi years ... terrifically insightful ... This book runs to 838 pages, but barely a word is wasted. Trentmann is a skilful and unflashy storyteller with flickers of gentle irony. Echoing Tolstoy's theory of history as the 'sum of human wills', he aims to stitch the scraps of everyday experience into a quilt of grand narrative. This results in a good deal of richness, colour and subtlety
The Times
Frank Trentmann's enthralling account of the Germans since 1942 is rooted in a brilliant insight: that the morality Germans invoked in their struggle to make sense of their place in history was never a transcendent standard, but a malleable and contingent substance whose nature was always contested. This fascinating and compelling moral history takes us to the centre of modern Germany's self-understanding, moving elegantly between politics, economics, culture and the private reflections of individuals
Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring
Compelling ... vivid ... fresh ... one of the most impressive studies I have read of German guilt and shame ... an eloquent and original account of the last eighty years of the country's history
Literary Review
Absorbing... Frank Trentmann's approach is novel [and] his Germans leap vividly off the page, both as archetypes and as complex, multi-layered individuals... an excellent book
New Statesman
Superb
Spectator
In Out of the Darkness Trentmann does something different and extraordinary. He has composed an account of recent Germany that is not primarily political or economic or social, but moral.. [His] moral history is enormous, but never heavy-going: he is a gifted and intelligent writer
London Review of Books
Masterly. Frank Trentmann's wide-ranging, deeply researched, nuanced evaluation of changing German mentalities and moral challenges since the Nazi era is a tour de force
Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler and Personality and Power
Excellent ... Trentmann's study marshals an immense amount of evidence in response to a single basic question: how did Germans reassert themselves as morally oriented human beings?
Times Literary Supplement

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