A gripping history of the transformation of Germany, drawing on revealing new primary sources
In 1942, the tide of war changed; by 1945, Germany was ruined. Following brutal conflict and a genocide, the world watched in satisfaction as the Third Reich crumbled. By the end of Angela Merkel's time in office in 2021, however, Germany paradoxically had become the moral voice of Europe, welcoming over one million refugees, holding together the tenuous threads of the European Union and making military restraint the centre of its foreign policy. At the same time, its rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with a dictator cast a shadow. An innumerable number of scholars have asked how Germany degenerated and yet, until now, a similarly vital question has been overshadowed: how did a nation marked by mass murder, a people won over by the horrific ideology of a war-hungry dictator, reinvent themselves?
Trentmann tells this dramatic story from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division of East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany's struggle to find its place in the world. This journey is marked by a series of internal, moral conflicts: professions of guilt and shame vying with immediate economic concerns, restitution for some but not others, tolerance versus racism, compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and shopkeepers; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait of the German people over eighty years, asking who are they, and have they really changed?

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, was a Moore Scholar at Caltech and has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, the Austrian Science Book Prize, the Humboldt Prize for Research and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Prize. He grew up in Hamburg and lives in London.