Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022 with FRANK TRENTMANN
Duration:
55m
Broadcast on:
14 Aug 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
What can we learn from Germany's postwar transformation to help us address today's environmental and humanitarian crises? With the rise of populism, authoritarianism, and digital propaganda, how can history provide insights into the challenges of modern democracy?
Frank Trentmann is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is a prize-winning historian, having received awards such as the Whitfield Prize, Austrian Wissenschaftsbuch/Science Book Prize, Humboldt Prize for Research, and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Award. He has also been named a Moore Scholar at Caltech. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation. His latest book is Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022, which explores Germany's transformation after the Second World War.
Audio Block
Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3.
Learn more
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Up until now, you've been mostly a professor of global consumer culture, but you've notably written Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. More recently, you've taken what some might think of as a swerve to examine the complexities of the moral remaking of Germany and how its people grappled with questions of guilt and identity in Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022. How did Out of the Darkness grow out of some of those ideas you'd reflected on in previous books? It's a very interesting span of history you take in, focusing on what you call the “awakening of conscience” in Germany. Other historians might choose 1945 as the period when it began to emerge out of darkness, but you chose 1942.
FRANK TRENTMANN
The bridge between Out of the Darkness and my previous work, which looked at the transformation of consumer culture in the world, is morality. One thing that became clear in writing Empire of Things was that there's virtually no time or place in history where consumption isn't heavily moralized. Our lifestyle is treated as a mirror of our virtue and sins. And in the course of modern history, there's been a remarkable moral shift in the way that consumption used to be seen as something that led you astray or undermined authority, status, gender roles, and wasted money, to a source of growth, a source of self, fashioning the way we create our own identity. In the last few years, the environmental crisis has led to new questions about whether consumption is good or bad. And in 2015, during the refugee crisis when Germany took in almost a million refugees, morality became a very powerful way in which Germans talked about themselves as humanitarian world champions, as one politician called it. I realized that there's many other topics from family, work, to saving the environment, and of course, with regard to the German responsibility for the Holocaust and the war of extermination where German public discourse is heavily moralistic, so I became interested in charting that historical process.
And why did I start in the middle of the Second World War? The reason for that is that 1945 in Europe isn't really in a proper sense a sharp break. The German people enter peace with a number of preoccupations, values, fears, assumptions which have been created in the course of the Second World War. And there's a big moral turmoil that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942, 1943, the time period we now call the Holocaust. A growing number of Germans started asking themselves troubling questions about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
It's a powerful entry point that helps us understand. Of course from there you bring us all the way up to 2022. And when you talk about family in your book, it's kind of an expansive sense of family, like being part of this greater Mother Earth or the acts of compassion towards refugees, but I was surprised to read, as you cite, that over 50 percent of the population in Germany have been helping refugees in a quite hands-on in a way that I don't think you would see in other countries. So whatever the legacy of guilt or shame, which is so complex, the post-war transformation has been remarkable in that way. And yet, it's complicated. Do you feel Germany has come to terms with its past and moved on? We see now the rise of right-wing groups throughout Europe, the entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany into Parliament in 2017, and, of course, more recently, the wake of unrest in England and Northern Ireland with anti-immigration protests. So, this is not an old narrative. Its roots are buried deep, but they sprout up shoots every so often.
TRENTMANN
Yes, it's not a finished story. You have, in addition to the truly impressive number who were welcoming refugees or helping them in active ways, a sizable minority that does not want to have refugees that are openly skeptical or even hostile, sometimes violently, towards migrants or asylum seekers. You have a rise of populism that is disproportionately high in East Germany, the former communist GDR. Germany was divided and then reunified, so it continues to have serious regional divides up to the present. The first difference the partition of Germany left behind is memory culture. The West German state in 1949 saw itself constitutionally as the rightful successor of the German empire before it, and that included taking on responsibility for debts accumulated, so the Federal Republic introduced major reparations for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. East Germany was radically different. In their minds, they were a radically new state with no obligations towards all the evil that Nazi Germany had committed in the past, so East Germany paid no reparations or compensation to Jews. So when 1990 happened, and the two parts reunified. We have a lack of coherence in collective memory, which remains present to this day. I think there was a certain naivety in many German circles, which assumed that the moment you have an official memory culture, in which the responsibility for the Holocaust is a central source of what it means to be German, problems such as racism will just go away. So many commentators and politicians were deeply confused last autumn after the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7th of October, when suddenly, you had more or less complete silence in the German population, no show of empathy, no mass demonstrations, a steep rise of anti-semitic attacks. And I think that commemoration, public memory, and public history are all very good and important but do not automatically translate into everyday life and people's attitudes towards German Jews in their midst or towards foreigners.And I think that was the mistake—the belief that once you reform collective memory and draw attention and remember the terrible things previous German generations had done, in the present, people living in Germany would all become wonderfully tolerant people. It's not that simple.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Indeed, you can, with the benefit of hindsight, reform collective memory. But when these moral questions arise in real time and current events are just happening too quickly, we don't always see it. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit more about Neo-Nazism in Germany and the significance of this strand of Neo-Naziism, given Germany's legacy and history. Additionally, your book discusses how Germany became a major supporter of Israel. Do you think that Germany's past has affected its present-day stance on Israel's actions in Gaza? And do you believe that Germany's history has impacted how Germany has treated people protesting Israel's actions? Have any of these more recent events caused you to reconsider or reflect on any of the conclusions you came to in Out of the Darkness?
TRENTMANN
The populist party Alternative for Germany includes some spokespeople and members who have been, by the courts, defined as having fascist leanings. That doesn't mean all populists are Nazis, but Neo-Nazis exist, and they need to be taken seriously. Where do they come from? For a long time, historians and politicians worked with this assumption that since West Germany confronted the past, people woke up and right-wing Neo-Nazi leanings were becoming extinguished, so if you look at older accounts regarding extremists that endanger the Federal Republic, they tended to be written about the left, such as the Baader Meinhof group or the Red Army Faction. But since the resurgence of Neo-Nazi and right-wing attacks on foreigners, asylum seekers, shootings, murder, and so forth, people have revisited the 1970s and 1980s and come to recognize that current fascist groups didn’t come out of nowhere. There were army sort of paramilitary groups in the 1970s and 1980s; a neo-Nazi party, which was founded in the late 60s, and did fairly well in some local elections; Neo-Nazi activists have existed for some time; and a lot of people who have now moved to the populist groups, used to vote for the Christian Democrats which had right-wing values and attitudes. On Israel and Germany, what we've seen is a very robust and persistent attitude by the German government which is firmly standing side by side with Israel, with policies very careful not to issue any criticism of Israeli military strategies. And on the other hand, a majority of the population is either openly critical of the measures and military actions used or thinks Germany should just turn its back on the Middle East and live without concerning themselves too much with international affairs, so Germany is really divided on the question of what to do in the conflict in the Middle East.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes. And going back to your previous book Empire of Things, you cover how we became a world of consumers and the rise of our material world, examining the global challenges and our relentless pursuit of more from waste and debt to stress and inequality. It just leads me to ask what you feel about the real price of our consumer culture habits, which actually I feel helps fuel modern slavery.
TRENTMANN
Consumption is a tricky business. We've moved ourselves into a situation where on the one hand, we now recognize that possessions are an important source of identity. Most of us believe people should have the right to choose the kind of lifestyle they want to have; on the other hand, we have the environmental costs of that lifestyle, which is causing havoc with our planet and, ultimately, with our lives. And so we're caught in a social-political acceptance of the freedom to choose and a growing awareness that the world is heading towards environmental disaster and taking us down with it. We haven't found a way of resolving that ambivalence. Climate activists, economists, and so forth have come up with solutions from zero growth to simple living, but as a historian who's followed the rise of and transformation of consumption over 600 years, I can assure you that it's too simple to try and demonize consumption and hope that by just drawing attention to environmental problems, people will somehow reform themselves. I think we have to take seriously that in the course of modernity, consumption has become deeply embedded culturally, socially, politically in our lives.Just waving an alarmist poster will not shock us out of the kind of lifestyle that has become normal for us. People tend to equate consumption with individual choice and motivation or desire. But from an environmental point of view, a huge amount of our hyper-consumption lifestyle is not organized or conducted through individual choice. They're social habits. These days, people have a shower as a matter of habit. Some people have two or three showers a day. And then they get to their leisure activities or their work with a car if they have one. They're used to driving, and that's a habit. So lots of things that cause damage are habitual forms of consumption. Those are not driven by individual choice but because our cities have been planned in a particular way—state and other authorities have built highways, car manufacturers get certain subsidies. There's an infrastructure of gas stations and electric charging points. And so if you want to tackle environmental consequences, perhaps a more effective way would be to intervene, try to disrupt those habits and plan cities and mobility in different ways that are environmentally friendlier.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Indeed, that illusion of choice is so interesting. Of course, you point to the fact that we, as individuals, do not always make the best choices. I mean, we do sometimes need to be guided or sometimes regarded in ways that are not always good for the welfare of us individually or for the planet. And when we think about AI, which is becoming a new mass surveillance system, it's a new Great Game for powerful multinationals to embed their products and systems and influence our choices. So it's something we have to reflect on a lot. Even if we feel like we have that illusion of choice, who's really making the choices?
TRENTMANN
Yes. When I finished the book in 2016, artificial intelligence already existed, but wasn't much of a topic. The jury is still out on how AI will play out. Some people pin their hope on AI to give straggling Western economies a huge productivity boost they would urgently need. And that point leads back very well to what we talked about earlier with populism. One thing we've seen, and Germany is a good test case for that, is how democratic habits and understandings we've built up from a different era do not necessarily work for generations that are more reliant on social media where there could be outside manipulation, whether by autocracies or AI. What you really need among education reformers is a new democratic skill set and communication tools that teach young students and citizens how to evaluate information, distinguish between fake news and what's not fake news, to be on their guard, and develop critical media and consumption skills that are fit for our much more digital world. There's a lot that needs to be done. In Germany, you have debates and worries about interference with elections or the posting of fake news, and Germany is a country where lots of people don't use digital communication at all. So you have a dual shock on the one hand, being well behind with digital culture and digital communication. On the other hand, a rapidly evolving technological scene generates more fake news and more potential for surveillance.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, that’s interesting, and it makes me think again about East and West Germany. And seeing your involvement with museums, I wonder, what are your reflections on the importance of the arts and the humanities, and how do you feel museums can stay relevant and do a better job of expanding access while meeting community needs? And finally, as you think about the future and make sense of history in order to create a better tomorrow, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
TRENTMANN
Museums have seen funds being cut, so they had to be innovative, not just in terms of finding sponsorship money, but in how to make their collections more attractive to more people. Going back to New Labor in Britain, museums and other cultural institutions were tasked to become more socially engaged and open to groups normally underrepresented, so they've done, I would say, a pretty good job, given the constraints of Brexit, where before Brexit, British museums would often work together with other museums in the EU, but now, that’s a serious challenge because of visa rules and objects needing to be specially arranged. So even though we've seen a certain regionalism or growing provincialism, and that's very sad. I think museums continue to be very important. And well, I would like young people to resist the stories they hear from school teachers or career advisors, or sometimes even from their own parents, especially if they're being urged to move into particular subjects in engineering or the natural sciences. I think history is tremendously important. All the contemporary topics we’ve talked about—environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.
Photo credit: Jon Wilson
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Eva Sanborn with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Eva Sanborn. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Nadia Lam. Additional production support by Katie Foster.
What can we learn from Germany's post-war transformation to help us address today's environmental and humanitarian crises? With the rise of populism, authoritarianism and digital propaganda, how can history provide insights into the challenges of modern democracy? Frank Trepmann is a professor of history at Birkbeck University of London and at the University of Helsinki. He is a prize-winning historian, having received awards such as the Whitfield Prize, the Austrian Science Book Prize, the Humboldt Prize for Research, the 2023 Book of Historians Prize, as well as being named a more scholar at Caltech. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation and recently published his new book, Out of the Darkness, the Germans 1942 to 2022, which explores Germany's transformation after the Second World War. Professor Frank Trepmann, welcome to the creative process. Hello, thank you. Thanks for joining us today. Before we dive into your book, Out of the Darkness, just to give us a little background on you, up to now you've been mostly a professor of global consumer culture, also writing about energy and water, also museums, but you've notably written Empire of Things, how we became a world of consumers from the 15th century to the 21st century. But more recently, you've taken what somebody think of as a swerve to examine the complexities of the moral remaking of Germany and its people grappling with questions of guilt and identity. Your book navigates so many complex issues, but just first, how did Out of the Darkness grow out of some of those ideas you'd reflected on in previous books? And just to discuss also, you know, the very interesting span of history you take in. I think the other historians who were focusing on the awakening of conscience in Germany might choose 1945 as the period when it began to emerge out of darkness, but you chose 1942. Yes, I mean, the bridge between the new book Out of the Darkness, which is about Germany in the last 75 years, and the previous work, which looked at the transformation of consumer culture in the world, the bridge is morality. So one thing that became clear in writing Empire of Things was that there's virtually no time or place in history where consumption, so what people buy and what they do with the things they buy isn't heavily moralized. So our lifestyle is often treated as a mirror of our virtue or of our sins. And in the course of modern history, there's been a remarkable moral shift in the way that consumption used to be seen as a negative, something that led you astray or undermined authority, status, gender roles, or just wasted money to something positive, a source of growth or a source of self-fashioning, the way we create our own identity. Of course, at the moment, on the last few years, the environmental crisis has led to new questions about whether consumption is good or bad. In any case, morality emerged as something I became very interested in, and autumn, winter of 2015, and the so-called refugee crisis, when Germany took in almost a million refugees, humanity became a very powerful way in which Germans talked about themselves as humanitarian world champions, as one politician called it, welcoming these refugees, suddenly a penny dropped, and I thought, "Wow, interesting how this topic is so moralized," and I then realized that there's many other topics from family to work, to saving, to the environment, and of course, with regard to the German responsibility for the Holocaust and the war of extermination, where German public discourse is heavily moralistic, and so I then became interested in charting that historical process. Your second question was about the starting point. Why the book doesn't do what many listeners will probably think as the obvious choice, namely 1945, the end of the second world, or why I start in the middle, and the reason for that is what's often called our zero, May 1945 in Europe, isn't really, in a proper sense, a sharp break. The German people enter peace with a number of preoccupations, values, fears, assumptions, which have been created in the course of the second world war, and there's moral turmoil that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942-1943, so that's the time period when both what we now call the Holocaust is fully underway, so we have mass murder of the Jews on the one hand, but we also now have the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, and then in the course of 1943 ever more relentless aerial bombing, and that creates a moment where not all Germans, but a growing number, start asking themselves troubling questions about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost, what's increasingly curious that the war may not be won, but the outcome is uncertain, and this uncertainty creates anxiety and worries about being held responsible, and that opens up for the first time for many people, serious questions about what the war is about in the first place and whether it's a just war. Indeed, and getting into heads perhaps now is a good time for you to share a passage to take us back to 1942. Without having planned it, we end perfect synchronicity, the passage I've chosen and I will read in a moment is taking us into the winter of 1942-43 and then moves a little bit closer towards the end of the war, and the passage is concerned with one of the three seas, as I call it, that run through the book, complicity, compassion and conscience, and so this passage is about complicity. We know today that the Allies bombed German cities to break the home front, not to avenge the murder of the Jews. For many Germans at the time, however, these two issues were linked. But the intelligence reports in 1943 cited a growing number of these voices. In Schweinford, a center of the armaments industry in northern Bavaria, locals said they were being bombed in August 1943 and revenge for the Kristallacht, a pogrom of 1938. In Butt-Blückenau, a spa town in the rolling hills of the Wuhn mountains to the north, some said that the whole attitude to the Jewish question and its solution had been fundamentally wrong. Now the German population had to pay the price for it. Berliner put it succinctly in November 1943. Do you actually know why our cities are being bombed? Because we have bumped off the Jews. What did he mean by "we"? Now knowledge of German atrocities undermined condemnation of Soviet crimes. In the spring of 1943, Nazi propaganda tried to exploit the discovery of mass graves in the cotton forest in Smolensk, Russia, where the Soviets had executed Polish officers and intelligentsia by presenting them as the "work of Jewish butchers". The public reaction, back home, ranged from aggressive anti-Semitism to critical self-examination. In Berlin, the security service reported the gist of opinions which it said circulated especially among educated and religious groups. We do not have the right to get upset about Soviet measures because Germans have eliminated far more Poles and Jews. Similar views were uttered in rural lower Franconia. In Halle, opinion was split between those who wanted to kill the Jews, and those who said that if the Germans had not attacked the Jews in the first place, they would already be enjoying peace. The shock of Stalingrad has still not faded away, the district president of Svabia observed in June 1943, and there were fears Russians might kill German prisoners of war in revenge for German mass executions of Jews in the east. By November 1944, the Security Branch in Stuttgart criticized Nazi propaganda about the Red Army massacre of German civilians in what is now Lithuania, because it is so easily backfired. Numerous voices in the population were saying, "Every thinking person who sees this blood sacrifice will immediately think of the atrocities that we have committed in enemy lands, indeed even in Germany itself. Have we not slaughtered the Jews in their thousands? Do soldiers not report again and again that Jews in Poland had to dig their own graves? And what we have done to the Jews in Alsace in the concentration camp? Jews are human too, thus we have shown the enemies how they can treat us if they win. That was a lot of whiz, a sense of complicity for crimes committed in their name, was spreading among those on the home front." So that kind of dichotomy of thinking, it's a powerful entry point that helps us understand, and of course then from there you bring us all the way up to 2022. As you point out, it's so easy for people to see and you like to really emphasize that all motivation cannot stem from guilt you write about, of course the environmental movements or the present day acts of generosity and welcoming of refugees or by German people, but it's more complex than that. So how did you go about picking apart the disparate threads and, as you say, taking us into the minds and the hearts? Well the book is a title, the title, it's not into the light, it's out of the darkness. So obviously, compared to the murderous regime of Nazi Germany, the post-war era, both in Western East Germany, is much better certainly by our standards, but the book doesn't try and tell a sort of linear success story. So it's not that we move from the Germans being bad to the Germans being good. In most areas of life, morality works as a form of debate and conflict. So they had serious conflicting views and one thing that's interesting about the Germans and the book in many ways is that we're dealing with deeply conflicted people. So this is an ongoing process and to make sense of that, I really worked in two steps. The first was to, I think, recognize purely from working in the archives and reading about various topics that it's too simple to reduce the question of the remaking of the German people to a confrontation with guilt. That's enough easy for us to do now because the Holocaust is a central part of our memory, not just in Germany but in most other parts of the world. And so we can have the tendency of reading back that this must have somehow also been the cause motivating people to reorient themselves in the past. But the problem, of course, is that the Holocaust did not become a central part of memory culture or public discourse until, in a way, halfway through my story. People in the late 40s and 50s and 60s, some of them wanted to give more attention to the victims of the Nazi regime, but for a large number of people, this was not the primary concern. So the first thing we need to do, and that's in a way step one, is to, well, what historians call historicize these different moments and to take seriously how people talk differently and act differently about subjects in their own time. And that made clear that perhaps the central driver in the immediate post-war years wasn't so much a concern about other victims, it's really a concern about themselves. So it's a fairly self-centered discussion about fairness and solidarity in which different groups of Germans are competing with each other for attention and for recognition and ultimately also for resources of help. And we have to, I think, remember that we're dealing with many millions of orphans, widows, disabled soldiers, returning POWs, people who've been bombed out, it's a far larger number than the smaller groups of survivors who are in Germany and are desperate to get out. So that was a step one. The second step was to think sideways, if you want, about the key topics which become part of the moral terrain. And so the way the book is organized and parts is that I tell a story in a chronological way, but then I also give attention to particular subject matters that are deeply moralized in Germany. And those are money. So the Germans and their money are quite interesting, a fair, if you want. It's social fairness, justice, and the family. And then it's nature and the environment. And in each of these three, there is a highly idealized version of what the good life should look like. With money it means you should save and be thrifty, that's the ideal. Many people can't follow that for a number of reasons, but that's the ideal which becomes really part of a national identity or cult. If you want, with social justice and fairness, that's really heavily centered around the family. So the family should always be the first point of call and people should look after each other. It's the children who are responsible for their parents just as much as the parents are responsible for their children, which means an old age. It's really mostly wives or daughters who are often responsible to look after and care for people in their own homes rather than sending them to a cow. And with nature and the environment, there is a preoccupation with nature that goes back to romanticism, but it's re-energized in the 70s and 80s with sort of major campaigns to save what's called the German forest. So these are not just trees, but they have an identity themselves, they're German and they need to be rescued because Germans care for nature. And then the growing campaign in a way not just to save their own skies from pollution, but to save the world by being supposedly front runners or in the vanguard of environmental reform and new technologies. So the book tries to take seriously that this history is not a sort of sudden confrontation with the crimes of the Second World War. It produces its own dynamic and charts out and flows into a number of domains from politics to everyday life. Indeed, and when you talk about family, there's this, as you say, it's kind of an expansive sense of family, like the family are being part of this greater, like Mother Earth and being stewards of the planet or the acts of compassion towards refugees, but I'm surprised to read as you cite that like a 55% of the population in Germany would be helping refugees. Quite hands on, in a way that I don't think you would see in other countries. So whatever the legacy of guilt or shame, which is so complex, the post-1945 transformation has been remarkable in that way. And yet it's complicated. I wonder, do you feel, has Germany, is it possible to say it's come to terms with its past and move on? We see now just taking it globally with the rise of right-wing groups throughout Europe, the entry of the far-right alternative for Germany and to Parliament in 2017. And then, of course, more recently, all the wake of unrest in England, Northern Ireland with anti-immigration protesters and right-wing groups. So this is not like an old narrative. Its roots are so very deep, but they're sprouting up shoots every so often. Yes, it's not a Finnish story. So most of the topics you mentioned are hotly contested and perhaps more so than 10-15 years ago. So you have, in addition to the truly impressive number who were welcoming refugees or helping them in active ways, you have a sizable minority that does not want to have refugees, that is openly skeptical or even hostile, sometimes violently, towards migrants. As well as asylum seekers, you have a rise of populism that is, on the one-hand part of the general story in the West, but comes with particular German characteristics and is disproportionately high in the East of the country. So the former communist GDR, and perhaps we can come back to that and talk a little bit about what it means to be German in a story as the country was divided and then reunified, but continues to have serious regional divides up to the present. So many of these things are not accomplishments. There may be moral ambitions, but they are contested. And that goes all the way to doubt about the degree to which memory culture and commemoration of the Holocaust and the acceptance of responsibility, whether that culture has, in a way, failed. And I say that because I think there was a certain naivety in many German circles, which assumed that the moment you have an official memory culture in which the Holocaust and the responsibility for the Holocaust is a central source of what it means to be German, the minute you have this memory culture, then problems such as racism or antisemitism will just go away. So many commentators and politicians were sort of deeply confused last autumn after the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7th of October, when suddenly in the following weeks, you had on the one hand more or less complete silence in the German population, no show of empathy, no mass demonstrations. And on the other hand, you had a steep rise of antisemitic attacks. How could this be? Many people said, didn't we have a successful confrontation of the past? And I think what this confused was that commemoration, public memory, public history, it's all very good and well, and it's important, and I think Germany should take certain pride in that register, but it doesn't automatically translate into everyday life and people's attitude towards German Jews in their midst or towards foreigners. One doesn't necessarily produce the other, and I think that was the mistake that once you reform collective memory and draw attention and remember the terrible things previous German generations had done and the crimes they had committed, that then in the present, people living in Germany would all become wonderfully tolerant, civilized people. It's not that simple. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, you can, over time, of course it wasn't overnight, as you say that it came out of the darkness, you can reform collective memory, but when these moral questions arise in real time and current events are just happening too quickly to reflect, we don't always behave as we might in hindsight, given reflection. I think we should go back to that question that you raised. What does it mean to be divided and unified in Germany, you've ridden of the mixed success of reunification, which seems to be a recurring theme in Out of the Darkness. Yes, I mean, the first difference, the division or partition of the country left behind for us now is that memory culture and collective identity was radically different in West Germany from that in East Germany. So the West German state in 1949 saw itself constitutionally as the rightful successor of the German Empire before it, and that also included taking on responsibility for certain debts accumulated. With that came a sense of reparation, which meant that under Chancellor Ardenau, the Federal Republic introduced major reparation compensation payments for German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. So there was a kind of responsibility for historical acts committed by other Germans or earlier generations of Germans. East German constellation is radically different. East German is a communist state, 1949, and the communist leadership saw itself victims of the Nazis. Indeed, many of the communist leaders had sat in concentration camps. So they interpreted the founding of the German Democratic Republic as a kind of historical justice in which the better Germany, as they began to call themselves, communist German communist resistance with the help of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, had overthrown fascism. So they had turned themselves from victims into victims in this historical drama. And that meant in their minds that they were radically due state with no obligations towards all the evil that Nazi Germany had committed in the past. And that also meant that East Germany paid no reparations or compensation to Jews. Indeed, it thought there would be foolish to give Jews who after all capitalists money in a new communist state. So you had radically divergent views of historical responsibility with practical consequences in terms of who was a deserving victim and also with a big difference on who was seen as a victim and remembered as a victim. So when 1990 happened, so year after the fall of the war, the two parts are reunified. Two parts come together where in one part, the central place in national identity is the Holocaust and the important victims are Jewish victims. And in the other part, these central victims had been Red Army soldiers. So people fighting for the Soviet Union or communists with very little attention paid to Jews. So we have a lack of coherence, if you want, in collective memory. And some of that remains present to the day. So it's one striking difference in Germany since 2022. So since the Russian attack on Ukraine is that in the eastern parts of the former GDR, there is very, very strong opposition to the German government and sending military support to the Ukraine. There's a strong demand for peace negotiations being really pushed on Ukraine. And many people want a resumption of Russian oil and gas, which given the geographic location was arriving first across the Baltic in the eastern parts. So that's a major difference in the ways in which not all East Germans, but a very significant minority who sees themselves as victims of a Western takeover after 1990, is siding with Putin and Russia because Putin and Russia are also seen as having been unduly victimized by the Western Alliance and NATO. So there are many differences remaining. The other big difference is populism. The populist party was originally founded in West Germany, but then it was a liberal economic grouping that wanted to bring back the Deutschmark and wanted liberal economic reform in the last few years has really moved further and further to the right. It does have support also in parts of West Germany, but the support it has in East Germany is twice or if you want to believe some polls three times as high. So the regions in East Germany where the alternative for Germany as the populists call themselves are currently standing in the polls at around 30, 33%. And then on top of that, you also have now a left wing populist grouping, which brings in another 15, 17% so half the voters are toying with voting for a populist party. There are many factors that come together. We could fill in the entire session talking about German populism, but one important one to link it to our discussion about historical memory is that the popular discussion in East Germany about the for many people traumatic years after reunification, which brought a collapse of industry in many firms, mass unemployment, so at its peak almost every fifth person in East Germany was unemployed, a sense of being left behind that debate in East Germany about why East Germany is still not in many social economic indicators on the same level as West Germany. That debate is conducted as if all the problems started in 1990. So after the collapse of the communist GDR, there's very little engagement or confrontation with the past of their lives in communist East Germany before the fall of the war in 1989. And so there is a certain logic if you want between an amnesia about one's own life and possibly complicity in a communist dictatorship. And on the other hand, focus on all the problems that happened after 1990, which is then pinned on West Germany. So there's a moral division of labor, if you want, that's being involved. And for many people who are thinking of voting populist or who've already voted populist in recent elections, populism is a way of getting back at what's seen as a Western controlled government, a Western controlled media, and distant uncontrollable capitalist forces. So there's a link there, I think, between the current very sensitive political situation and the ways in which many people in East Germany have been unwilling to confront the past before the fall of the war in a communist dictatorship. Hello, I have two questions concerning Out of the Darkness and present day Germany. First of all, I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit more about neo-Naziism in Germany and the significance of this strand of neo-Naziism given Germany's legacy in history. Additionally, your book discusses how Germany became a major supporter of Israel. Do you think that Germany's past has affected its present day stance on Israel's actions in Gaza? And do you believe that Germany's history has impacted how Germany has treated people protesting Israel's actions? Have any of these more recent events caused you to reconsider or reflect on any of the conclusions you came to in Out of the Darkness? Yeah, two very important big questions on the neo-Nazis. First thing I think is we need to be clear that the populist party, the alternative for Germany, include, in some regions, some spokespeople and members who have been, by the courts, defined as having fascist leanings. So there is that group, but that doesn't mean all populist on Nazis. They may be far right in some of their beliefs, but that doesn't equate with neo-Nazis. So the neo-Nazis exist and they need to be taken seriously. Where do they come from? I would say that for a long time, historians, commentators, politicians, worked with his assumption that since West Germany confronted the past, people woke up and over time the source of right-wing neo-Nazi leanings was being extinguished. And so if you look at older accounts, if there are extremists that endanger the Federal Republic, they tended to be written about on the left. So think of the Bader-Meinhof group, the Red Army Fraction, which murdered and bombed in the 1970s. You wouldn't really see much about fascist activity. I think since the resurgence of neo-Nazi and right-wing attacks on foreigners, asylum seekers, shootings, murder and so forth, people have revisited the 1970s and 1980s and come to recognize that the current fascist groups, they don't come out of nowhere. There were army paramilitary groups in the 1970s and 1980s. There was a neo-Nazi party which was founded in the late 60s, which did fairly well in some local elections. So these neo-Nazi activists have existed for some time and my personal view is what has changed is that a lot of people who used to vote for the Christian Democrats who had right-wing, not neo-Nazi, but right-wing values and attitudes, they now have moved to the populist groups because the conservatives and Christian Democrats have moved to the center. So effectively these voices who want to return to authority, who are skeptical about democracy, who don't like foreigners, who want traditional gender roles, all of that stuff, they don't have, they've lost the party which used to listen to them. So we have a combination of forces. On the one hand we have ongoing neo-Nazi activism, but then we have a shift in national politics and national political discourse. So those, I think, two forces explain a lot. On Israel and Germany, I think it's a very, very complex situation with multiple conflicts and debates of crisscrossing each other. But the big picture, I think, is that what we've seen is a very robust and persistent attitude policies by the German government, which is firmly standing side by side with Israel, with policies that have been very, very careful not to issue any criticism of Israeli military strategy or policies, and on the other hand, a by now a majority in the population, which while recognizing the right of Israel to defend themselves, are either openly critical of the measures and military actions used in that defense, or, and I think that's equally troubling, voices that say, well, what has this got to do with us? The Middle East has always been a mess. Why should we get involved in this in any way? We think Germany should just turn its back on the Middle East and live happily among themselves without concerning themselves too much with international affairs. So you have seen in the last 10 months now a growing divide between official policy, which has made support for Israel a reason of state and growing concern about the consequences of Israeli policy for the population and Gaza. So Germany is really divided, I would say, on the question of what to do in the conflict in the Middle East. My name is Eva Samborn, and I am a student at Brandeis University studying history and English. Throughout this conversation, I have been especially struck by the discussion of the idea of a memory culture in Germany and the broader world, and how just remembering historical atrocities does not truly make you infallible or incapable of falling into the very same historical traps. Being aware of antisemitism and racism is not the same as actively fighting against them. And Germany's culture of memory, especially relating to the Holocaust, has not prevented groups with fascist leanings and even neo-Nazi groups from posing a genuine threat to the country. And it's true that the threats facing our world today may appear to be very similar to the threats of the recent and distant past. This idea made me think about a current project I am working on. In the coming semester, I am going to be directing a production of Julius Caesar that will explore themes such as the fragility of democracy and creeping authoritarianism. Julius Caesar is one of those works that always seems to be relevant, no matter when it is being performed. After all, Rome's aesthetic influence on current and former world powers cannot be overstated. Nation after nation has declared themselves the heirs of Rome, and used Roman aesthetics to exemplify this. Nazi Germany famously took great influence from the Roman Empire, but so did Russia by calling their rulers Zars from Caesar, fascist Italy under Mussolini, and even America, which imitates Roman architecture symbols and even uses its eagle as its presidential seal. Recently, I have been seeing many articles comparing present-day America to Rome, positing that the country is doomed to fall just as Rome once did. It is a platitude repeated by people with wide-ranging ideological beliefs, but the common sentiment is that history is cyclical. So perhaps, if we want to really learn from the past and avoid this fate, we have to realize that memory alone is not a shield, and being aware of these parallels is not the same thing as pushing back against them. It's oft repeated that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but the more I think about it, the more that I believe that this idea is incomplete. Remembering is not enough. You have to actually work to prevent these atrocities from occurring again by genuinely fighting against the rise of authoritarianism, and this is the only way that we can have a real chance of preventing history from repeating itself. Now back to the interview. And I wanted to go back a little bit to your early years, and your upbringing in Hamburg, and now you teach in the UK, and I was wondering how you came to a point where you felt you had permission to write about Germany. I mean, there is this moral thread, but there's an emotional weight that when it has to take on when you're bearing witness and writing about the complicity, compassion, and conscience. That's an interesting question, and I think you're right. I mean, you said when I had a commission, I think I know what you mean. I mean, ultimately, I gave myself a commission to do this, but you're right that while many of the things I'm writing about in the book have been in the back of my mind, or now and then I've asked myself questions when following German affairs, I never actually sat down and said, "Oh, I need to make sense of this as a historian," but ultimately also for myself. I was born in 1965, so in the middle of this history I've written about, and I went to school in Hamburg, which was part of West Germany, and left as a university student first studying in England, and then doing my PhD in the United States. So for more years in my life now, obviously I go back and forth and I visit friends and family, but for more years of my life I had one leg outside the country. So over the years I developed a fairly ambivalent attitude. So on the one hand, belonging and having memories of growing up in the country, and also understanding having a certain sensibility or sensitivity towards German topics. On the other hand, having the privilege of being often an outsider and being able to look at the German situation from the outside, without all the preoccupations that come with living in the country. And I think that was very, very important for writing the book because if I had been a German author who had gone to German university, who taught at a German university, I would have been so preconditioned, intellectually regimented, by certain ways of writing about German history, that the book would probably have been, well, boring, perhaps. So I had the privilege of coming to this as an outsider and saying, "Look, I want to write, I have a certain sense of big questions, but I'm just going to do it the way I would as a curious historian without having to worry too much about academic conventions within Germany." So I think that was very important and gave me some freedom from writing about this country. Yes, I think it's so important that insider, outsider perspective, which you also bring to bear in your previous book, Empire of Things, and you cover how we became a world of consumers and the rise of our material world and examining the global challenges and our relentless pursuit of more from waste and debt to stress and inequality. So it just leads me to ask what you feel about the real price of our consumer culture habits, which actually I feel helps fuel modern slavery. Consumption is a tricky business because ultimately we've moved ourselves into a situation where on the one hand we now recognize that things, small things, big things, leisure, sessions, everything from the clothes we buy to make up or wrist watches or bags or the type of holidays we play. All those things are an important source of identity and we believe, or most of us believe, people should have the right and the autonomy to choose the kind of lifestyle they want to have. That makes them themselves who they want to be. On the other hand, we have the environmental costs of that lifestyle, which is causing havoc with our planet and ultimately with our lives. And so we're caught. We caught in a social, political acceptance of the freedom to choose, if you want to call it that. And a growing awareness that the world is heading towards environmental disaster and taking us down with it. We haven't found a way of resolving that ambivalence. Obviously there are people, climate activists, but also others, economists and so forth, who've come up with very, very radical solutions from zero growth to simple living and many others. As a historian who's followed the rise of and transformation of consumption over 500, 600 years, I can assure you that it's too simple to just try and demonize consumption and hope that by just drawing attention to environmental problems, people will somehow reform themselves. I think we have to take seriously that in the course of modernity consumption has become deeply embedded culturally, socially, politically in our lives. So just sort of waving an alarmist poster will not sort of shock us out of the kind of lifestyle which has become normal for us. I think that's one thing. The other thing I would say is that, and one thing I came to appreciate when working on empire things is people tend to confuse or equate consumption with individual choice and motivation or desire. And yes, sure that there's a fair bit of consumption which falls into that category. But from an environmental point of view, a huge amount of our lifestyle, hyper consumption lifestyle is not organized or conducted through choice, individual choice, but their social habits. So think of mobility, you know, it's or domestic comfort. So it's not that in the morning, someone just gets up and says, "Oh, what shall I choose to do this morning? Shall I just have a shower? Shall I have a bath? Shall I deny that or just splash some water on my face? No. I mean, these days people have a shower as a matter of habit. Some people have two or three showers a day. And similarly, what they have for breakfast, that they have breakfast in the first place. And then how do they get to their leisure activities or their work? There's a car, if they have one, they're used to driving and that's a habit. So lots of things that cause damage are habitual forms of consumption. And those are not driven by individual choice. They're there because our cities have been planned in a particular way. State and other authorities have built highways, car manufacturers get certain subsidies. There's an infrastructure of gas stations or electric charging points or not. And all those things together create daily patterns of carbon emitting activities. I think the lesson from that is if you want to tackle environmental consequences, yes, you can talk about choice, but perhaps a more effective way would be to intervene and try and disrupt those habits and plan cities and mobility in different ways that are environmentally friendlier. So you need to think about transforming habits. I think one lesson to take away from this whole story. Indeed. And that illusion of choice is so interesting. Of course, you point to the fact that we as individuals do not always make the best choices. I mean, we do sometimes need to be guided or sometimes regarded in ways that are not always good for the welfare of us individually or for the planet. So as you write, many people are more and more buying things for that temporary fulfillment. But as you've seen in Germany and elsewhere, there's this wider cultural shift with people now looking for ways out of mass consumerism, weaning ourselves off of fast fashion and learning to reuse things, of course, the right to repair. And I know that's very big. In Germany and the circular economy, we've had many conversations with German environmentalists about this. So I mean, just on a personal level, what are those ways? How do you reconnect? I asked you before this conversation began, what your reflections are, your personal memories about the beauty and wonder of the natural world? How do you in your family? How do you reconnect to that sense of stillness and calm and identify what's really important to you? What's really important in this life? Well, on repair, I'm completely the wrong person to talk to. I have two left hands. I can just about hit a nail in the wall. I'm not good at fixing anything. I would love to have more repair cafes, more skilled repair people at networks. But I'm talking to you from Brexit, Britain. And that has meant serious skills shortage and an exodus of people who were artisans and craftsmen after Brexit. So that's a real problem. On nature and environment, I am very fortunate. We live near what's called hamster teeth, which is kind of the lung of London. So it's a mixture of park forests and ponds in what's still central London. So that's very, very important. But it goes back to my childhood. You rightly ask us to reflect on sort of the linkage between personal life and biography and intellectual interests. When I was little, I grew up with a single mother who did not have a driver's license and consequently also not a car. We would travel by train and some are holidays. We would normally go to the Austrian Alps, which at that time, so in the 1970s, you still have lots of valleys and small towns that were pretty unspoiled compared to now. So natural world is a natural part of my biography. Though one obviously needs to note what strikes you as natural often has many man-made features in it, including in part of the Alps. But yes, so hiking and being away from some of the comforts of modernity have a deep attraction for me. Yes, I think it makes us all appreciate just the wonder of the creation that we live in. And I think we'll go into this in a moment when we think about AI, which is becoming, I think, a new mass surveillance system. It's a new great game for powerful multinationals to embed their products and systems and maybe influence our choices, influence our personal lives. So it's something we have to reflect on a lot. Who is making the choices even as we feel like we have that illusion of choice? Yes, no. When I finished the book in 2016, artificial intelligence already existed but wasn't much of a topic, I would say the jury is still out how AI will play out itself. Some people pin their hope on AI in giving straggling western economies a huge productivity boost. They would urgently need, and that would mean more growth than the other things. Other people point out that the more AI that will just add to increase digital communication systems and energy consumption. But surveillance, I'm not the expert really to know how much we should be worried about surveillance via AI, but I'm sure you're right. Yes, we're staying on for a moment. Yes, of course, we see the advances and it's kind of in bed with the advertising industry. And it seems like the ultimate tool is, you say, for persuasion and influence. And that can have consequences on our not just consumerism, but education and election. So what are your reflections on AI in those fields when things can be pushed on us in a very nuanced psychological, hypnotically friendly way where we think that we're having those ideas. Yes. Well, I mean, and actually, that point leads back very well to what we talked about earlier with populism. Because I think one thing we've seen in Germany is a good test case for that is how the kind of democratic habits and talents and understandings and ways of interacting we've built up from a different era and do not necessarily work for generations that are more reliant on social media, which open themselves up to outside manipulation, whether by, you know, autocracies or whether by AI. So what you really need and there's some discussion among education reformers is what you do need is you need a sort of second new democratic skill set and communication tools that teach young students pupils and also citizens how to evaluate all that information that's coming their way to be able to distinguish between fake news and what's not fake news to be on their guard to develop critical media and consumption skills that are fit for our much more digital world and also potentially helping us to expose surveillance threats and others that endanger our democratic society. So there's a lot that needs to be done. But to add to that point, I mean, we have, I mean, that's one very curious thing about Germany. On the one hand, you have debates and worries about interference with elections, for instance, or posting of fake news. On the other hand, Germany is a country which is in digital terms is still in the Stone Age. So you have lots of people who don't use digital communication at all. The digital network is completely backwards. So you have kind of a dual shock on the one hand being well behind with digital culture and digital communication. On the other hand, a rapidly evolving technological scene, which generates more fake news and more potential for surveillance. It's such an interesting dichotomy. It makes me think again about East and West Germany. And I also see that you've been involved with museums, which are also undergoing a transformation. So I wonder what are your reflections on the importance of the arts and the humanities. I know this is not your main focus. And then also how do you feel that museums can stay relevant and do a better job of expanding access while meeting community needs? I mean, British museums have done, I would say, a remarkably good job in meeting that challenge. So museums have, on the one hand, they've seen funds being cut, so they had to be innovative, not just in terms of finding sponsorship money, but in how to make their collections more attractive to more people. On the other hand, going back to new labor in Britain, museums and other culture institutions were tasked to become more socially engaged and open to groups normally underrepresented. So they've done, I would say, a pretty good job given the constraints that are fighting. I mean, I mentioned Brexit. It's a serious challenge for the big museums here, because before Brexit's, if you wanted to have a big blockbuster exhibition, the big British museums would often work together with big museums in France, Germany or Italy or other parts of the EU, and that was no problem. That is a serious challenge now, not just because of visa rules, but objects can't just travel across the channel. That also needs to be especially arranged. And so we've seen, as with the world economy, I mean, in the world of culture, we've seen a certain regionalism or growing provincialism, a retreat, and that's very, very sad. But no, I think museums are and continue to be very important and nowhere more so than in increasingly de-industrialized parts of the Western world. So I think if you look at visitor numbers, it's quite impressive how those have expanded. Yes, and finally, as you think about the future and reflect on just making sense of history in order to create a better tomorrow, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember? Well, I would like young people to resist the stories they hear from school teachers or career advisors or sometimes from their own parents, where they're being urged to move into particular subjects in engineering or the natural sciences, because supposedly that's the only way where there's a future. They should continue their interests in history to consider studying history. I think history is tremendously important. All the topics we've talked about, and contemporary topics from environmental crises to Gaza to the war in Ukraine, all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. So history is hugely important, but strangely enough, history and the humanities in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, have come under huge pressure. So we've seen falling student numbers, we've seen jobs being cut or jobs being frozen in history and the humanities, and that's, I think, a real shame because history, like literature and philosophy, continue to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that don't just make us wiser and more reflective. I think it's also creating the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. So my main hope is that people will not just continue reading history in terms of reading popular history books or watching history series, but that among the young generations, there will be people who will feel inspired by history and have the ambition to themselves research the past and write about the past. That would be my main hope. Yes, well, you really bring us out of the darkness and make history live so that we can imagine better futures. So thank you, Frank Trentman, for helping us unfold a historical memory of complexity, compassion and conscience, inviting us to examine the complexities of confronting the past and the moral remaking of Germany so we can move forward to create more equitable and fair societies for all. We all live on one planet. We call home. Thank you for adding your voice to one planet podcast and the creative process. Thank you. The creative process podcast is supported by the Anne Michalski Foundation. This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Eva Samborn with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate interview producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Eva Samborn. Associate text editor was Nadia Lam. The creative process is produced by Mia Funk, additional production support by Katie Foster. Wintertime was composed by Nicholas and Adolas and performed by the Athenian Trio. We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast. If you'd like to get involved with our creative community exhibitions, podcasts, or submit your creative works for review, just drop us a line at team@creativeprocess.info. Thanks for listening.
