West and East Germans at the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 shortly before its fall [CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed]

IN 1960 I worked for six months in a saw-mill in the Bavarian city of Tübingen. War was 15 years in the past, but people were still trying to shake off the nightmare. Life was calm and orderly on the surface, but in the swimming pool one saw the physical scars and amputations. And one sensed a subterranean chasm of emotional scars, of memories that could not be revisited, things that could not be talked about.

My fellow labourers were excited to have a young Engländer in their clutches, but they were nice to me, as they were to the gentle Gastarbeiter – guest worker – from Turkey. They worked ferociously hard, and were strikingly obedient, rising silently as one man when the hooter terminated their 15-minute mid-morning break. Two of them had lost fingers in the mill’s unprotected machines, and one had lost half a hand when working there as a teenager, but that hadn’t deterred him from signing up for life as an adult. They never talked politics, or about the war in which they had all fought.

But that war kept surfacing in a multitude of ways. The family with whom I lodged were at pains to convince me that their father had had no part in any atrocities. And when I visited another family I saw a teenage girl being roundly ticked off by her Nazi mother for expressing sympathy with the Jews.

“Have you forgotten your Rassenkunde?” she thundered. That was the word for “race studies”.

And when a travelling exhibition of concentration-camp photos went on show – with exhortations to everyone to go and see it – people were struck dumb. Did this really happen? Were we responsible for this? For a few days the city was in shock.

One of the many virtues of Frank Trentmann’s magnificent book is that it explains why, 15 years after the war ended, most Germans were still living in this twilight zone of guilt, shame, denial, and moral confusion.

And the guilt was widely spread: by 1939, most “Aryan” Germans belonged to a Nazi organisation. Trentmann – professor history at Birkbeck, University of London – notes that even in 1960, one in three Germans still believed that “without the war”, Hitler would have been one of the greatest German statesmen of all time.

One strand of this story concerns the way the Nazi mind-set lived on in post-war Germany, and why deNazification did not work. Most lawyers in the West German judicial system were unreconstructed Nazis, while local authorities went on treating Roma and homosexuals as the Nazis did – as outcasts. Thorough deNazification would have caused an already shattered society to disintegrate further. For civic life to go on, “self-amnesty” was necessary.

The gruesome details of symbolic atonement insisted upon by the Allies were not generally known outside Germany. Entire communities – including children and the elderly – were forced to exhume dead bodies with their bare hands and, after looking into their dead faces, to rebury them with flowers in a fittingly respectful manner. Meanwhile, reparation between Nazis and their local victims often took place very directly, with clothes, furniture, and bicycles being handed over in the street.

Trentmann often touches on post-war German attitudes to Jews but, as he observes, there wasn’t much chance of reparation there, because the few Jews who didn’t emigrate wanted nothing to do with their oppressors. After 1965 there wasn’t a single rabbi left in East Germany. More to the point is another sub-text: that many Germans’ self-pity obliterated the pity they might have felt for their Jewish victims. Post-war, German anti-Semitism was by no means dead.

Trentmann’s analysis of the psychological mechanics of shame and denial makes clear how devastating these emotions were for everybody. How could they walk tall again when their president could declare, in 2015: “There is no German identity without Auschwitz”?

Apropos this, and looking back into the past, Trentmann draws on family accounts and survivors’ diaries to show that “Hitler’s war” had often not been seen that way at all by young patriots. Romantic poetry and the music of Wagner was what drove some, in their narcissistic quest for military glory; one Nazi diarist wrote with disgust about being forced to butcher civilians. That was not work for heroes to do.

The most important theme of this book is a paean of (carefully qualified) praise for the way this destroyed nation picked up its bed like Lazarus and walked; and for the way it became a shining example of political selflessness 80 years later, giving succour to a million destitute migrants. And there had been relatively few revenge killings in Germany in the war’s immediate aftermath, in contrast to the large number of such events in France and Italy. As Trentmann notes, Germany was way ahead of the game in moral self-cleansing: “Franco was only evicted from his mausoleum in 2019, while in Japan, war criminals continue to be honoured in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine.”

As the cradle of pacifism and ecological activism, Germany has taught the world how a nation can live down a murderous past.

But Germany’s biggest and most remarkable achievement has been the bloodless merger of the Federal Republic of Germany with the German Democratic Republic (a Socialist dream that failed). Three years after the borders were thrown open, only one in four Germans regretted that, thinking the country had bitten off more than it could chew.

If the second half of this book treads relatively familiar territory as the country got into gear and the economic miracle unfolded, the first half will – for most readers – be full of surprises. One example: where was the press coverage of the ethnic cleansing that went on in Central Europe between 1944 and 1950, in which 12 million displaced Germans suffered as the Armenians had suffered in 1915? That’s well dealt with here.

This book is a series of interlinked narratives brought to life through a myriad authenticating details, and it’s revelatory.

• Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022. By Frank Trentmann, Allen Lane, £40
• Frank Trentmann is giving a public lecture, ‘Out of the Darkness: the Germans from 1942 to the present’, on February 29, 6.30-8pm, at The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, WC1B 5DP. Free, but book a space through Eventbrite