Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory of the Holocaust, the nature of the Sozialstaat, the tensions between an energy-intensive export nation and a deep-rooted environmental consciousness, and the legacy of the East-West divide are explored through the contemporary experiences of a range of voices and the detailed tracing of trends and events over 80 years. Trentmann invites us to look closer at Germany’s postwar moral landscape and figures through the lens of ‘conscience, compassion and complicity’, the better to understand Europe’s most consequential nation.

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an associate at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, Helsinki.

Matt Fraser is a freelance writer and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany.

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