Bibliograph

Out of the darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022, Frank Trentmann

Type

Label

Out of the darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022, Frank Trentmann

Language

eng

resource.accompanyingMatter

technical information on music

Form of composition

not applicable

Format of music

not applicable

Literary text for sound recordings

history

Main title

Out of the darkness

Music parts

not applicable

Oclc number

1422825968

Responsibility statement

Frank Trentmann

Sub title

the Germans, 1942-2022

Summary

A gripping and nuanced history of the German people from World War II to the war in Ukraine, including revealing new primary source material on Germany's transformationIn 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel's tenure as chancellor in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe, welcoming more than one million refugees, holding together the tenuous threads of the European Union, and making military restraint the center of its foreign policy. At the same time, Germany's rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with Vladimir Putin have cast a shadow over the present. Innumerable scholars have asked how Germany could have degenerated from a nation of scientists, poets, and philosophers into one responsible for genocide. This book raises another vital question: How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder, a people who cheered Adolf Hitler, reinvent themselves, and how much? Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of World War II through the Cold War and the division into East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the struggle to find a place in the world today. This journey is marked by a series of extraordinary moral conflicts: admissions of guilt and shame vying with immediate economic concerns; restitution for some but not others; tolerance versus racism; compassion versus complicity. Through a range of voices--German soldiers and German Jews; displaced persons in limbo; East German women and shopkeepers angry about energy shortages; opponents and supporters of nuclear power; volunteers helping migrants and refugees, and right-wing populists attacking them--Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait spanning eighty years of the conflicted people at the center of Europe, showing how the Germans became who they are today

Transposition and arrangement

not applicable

Classification