Name: Frank Trentmann | Book Talk: Out of the Darkness - The Germans 1942-2022
Start: 2024-04-02T19:00:00-0400
End: 2024-04-02T20:00:59-0400
Location: Online

How can a nation reinvent itself? Author Frank Trentmann will tell the story of how the German people were able to rebuild after World War II and redefine their place in the world - and what we can learn from it today. This program is moderated by Jim Falk, Global Santa Fe's Program Chair. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants on the day of the event.

WorldNow with Jim Falk is hosted by The World Affairs Council of Connecticut with Global SantaFe in partnership with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville, American Council on Germany, World Affairs Council of Albuquerque, WorldOregon, World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth, World Affairs Council of Greater Houston, World Affairs Council of Hampton Roads, and the Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation, and has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, a Moore Distinguished Fellowship at Caltech, the Austrian Science Book Prize, the Humboldt Prize for Research, and in 2023 the Bochum Historians' Prize. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University. He grew up in Hamburg and lives in London.

Trentmann's book Out of the Darkness details the story of how German people were able to rebuild after World War II and redefine their place in the world - and what we can learn from it today.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 Markel'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.

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