In 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?
FRANK TRENTMANN, author of Empire of Things, is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. Previously, he taught at Princeton University. He has been awarded the Whitfield Prize and a Humboldt Research Award, and he was a Moore Scholar at Caltech. Empire of Things was named the science book of the year by the Austrian government. He grew up in Hamburg and lives in London.
