Historian Frank Trentmann shortlisted for major book prize

Frank Trentmann is among six writers competing for the £50,000 Wolfson History Prize, which for the past 52 years has championed the best in history writing with past winners including Simon Schama, Antony Beevor, and Antonia Fraser.

A judging panel, including Mary Beard, selected books that combine excellence in research with readability, demonstrating the relevance of history to society today.

Out of the Darkness is published by Penguin (Image: Penguin)

They described Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 as: "A wide-ranging and engaging portrait of Germany since World War II, highlighting the remarkable regeneration of its people in the post-Nazi era and the strength and vitality of its political culture."

Trentmann's book is up against studies on slavery, the NHS, Nelson Mandela and the British Raj - with the winner revealed on December 2.

The Birkbeck Professor feels "humble to be recognized among the many great historians who have been prize winners in the past."

His book follows Germany's moral, political and economic turnaround from the Nazi regime to European powerhouse.

Mass Demonstration against Nuclear Weapons, Hamburg, 1958 (Image: FZH Hamburg)

It starts in 1942, which Trentmann sees as a turning point: "The instinctive thing would be to start in 1945, but very quickly the archives proved that didn't work. One of the most fascinating discoveries was that the moral soul searching starts long before that.

"1942 was the winter the German army were defeated at Stalingrad and there was ever more frequent aerial bombing of cities. People started asking what is the war about, why are our sons being sacrificed, what if we don't win?

"They were starting to reflect on their own potential responsibility and complicity. Some started connecting what was happening to them as retribution for what had been done to the Jews."

By September 1945, Germany was on its knees: "Millions are bombed out, have lost homes and family members, millions of soldiers are disabled or in POW camps, and millions of people of German descent had been expelled from their regions".

It was a moment with potential for anger and instability: "There was no reason to assume these people would accept they had lost the war and the loss of territory, but the remarkable accomplishment of the two Germanys was they find a way to recognise and integrate these victims in a way that accepts the status quo."

Of course "some of these victims are also perpetrators."

Liberating armies forced German civilians to confront atrocities committed in the camps, and even bury the dead, but Trentmann points out the victims of the Nazis; the Jews, Sinti, Roma, disabled weren't part of post war Germany because they "are dead or had left the country."

"By 1950 the Jewish population of Germany is just 50,000."

He credits Germany's turnaround to the "economic miracle" and the generosity of the US.

"West Germans were tremendously lucky in having the US supporting this new state. At the time of the cold war they were a heavily indebted country and the US wiped out an enormous chunk of debt.

"The boom years of a rising standard of living, new houses and new careers is crucial for absorbing a lot of anger - there are some nostalgic about their lost 'heimat' (homeland) but it's a private nostalgia that doesn't grow into large scale right wing nationalism."

Germany was also lucky in its leadership: "Someone like Adenauer probably wouldn't be a successful politician today. Time and again he would ignore popular opinion and mass demonstrations, and manoeuvre from one compromise to the next."

In the 50s the German army introduced a crucial moral code that a soldier can disobey an order if it breaches international law. The country also saw a mass peace movement with thousands opposed to rearmament and nuclear weapons, and from the 60s onwards, "a growing movement of war resisters and conscientious objectors."

By 1968 a new young generation were taking their elders to task and confronting the Nazi past.

"A peace movement takes off which battles over memory and the past to recognise the war crimes, and what became known as The Holocaust. There were youth tours to Bergen Belsen, the play based on the diary of Anne Frank was an enormous hit, and you saw school groups repairing Jewish graveyards."

Post East/West unification in 1990, came the "peace dividend" when Germany reduces military spending and focuses on growth to become a powerful global economy.

The jumping off point for Trentmann was the migrant crisis, when instead of closing borders like many other countries, Germany accepted around 1million migrants from the likes of Syria and Afghanistan. 

"In 2015 there is a remarkable majority, over 50 percent of the population, who helped a migrant with money, clothes or other assistance," he says.

"Alongside it we have right wing populist voices warning Germany is overrun by other cultures, but there's a remarkable humanitarianism that we cannot just explain as 'once we were Nazis now we are humanitarians.'

"Most people did not have Nazi guilt driving them, there were more localised concerns about how can we stabilise our country."

Since writing the book, elections in Germany and Austria have seen record post war support for far right candidates.

Trentmann admits: "Increasingly aggressive voices have gained the upper hand," but says: "This is an example of how looking at the whole history from '42 to the present is much wiser.

"You can see this whole period as a tug of war between competing ideas of what makes a good German and what is the right thing to do.

"It's not a linear progression from bad to good, sometimes it's more to the right more to the left. It is not just pragmatic or economic it is a moral battleground."

While the historian, who has dual German British citizenship, believes that right wing populism in Germany is similar to elsewhere, driven by people who are "relatively comfortable fearing they might be losers," he believes there is "enormous power" in the idea that "because we are German we might end up in 1933," and in the 'Never Again' slogan of anti far right marchers.

"History is a kind of a negative script in Germany, it casts a long shadow. I don't believe history simply repeats itself but for some there is this worry that if we are not careful we could end up with a second Hitler."

The rise of the right has lead to an uncharacteristic plan to impose border controls.

"Germany's success and stability is tied to the European project. That means freedom of movement. For the German government to think the only way to respond to populist pressure is to introduce serious border controls is a high risk strategy that threatens the European project which is what Germany has been about since the 1950s."

Trentmann, who came to London as an undergraduate and stayed says as both insider and outsider he has "one foot in and one foot out".

"I can sometimes intuitively understand why certain debates in Germany were going the way they are when at the same time other societies confronted similar problems in a different tone. That helped me to see there are historical problems that need to be explained."

Another motivation in writing the book was to counter ignorance about his native country.

"It's extraordinary that we are now almost 80 years since the end of WWII and the little that British people know about Germany is Hitler or if you are lucky the First World War.

"They know very little about the period since, I try to changing that."