Ill Literacy, Episode 179: Out of the Darkness (Guest: Frank Trentmann)
Download MP3Everybody, and welcome to the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank. We are in the episode 170 something range of the podcast, maybe even 180. Not really, never really sure what the episode number is. But so we've been around for a while now.
Tim Benson:But for those of you just tuning in for the first time, basically, what we do here on the podcast is I invite an author on to discuss a book of theirs that's been newly published or recently published on someone or some ideas, some event, something, etc, etc, etc, that we think you guys would like to hear a conversation about. And then hopefully at the end of the podcast, you go ahead and give the book a purchase and give it a read. So if you like this podcast, please consider giving Illiteracy a five star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this show and also by sharing with your friends as that's the best way to support programming like this. And my guest today is Doctor. Frank Trentman, and Doctor.
Tim Benson:Trentman is the professor of history at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and also an associate at the Center for Consumer Society Research in Helsinki. You may have seen his work in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Tablet, Financial Times, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among many, many others. And he is the author of Empire of How We Became a World of Consumers from the fifteenth Century to the twenty first, free trade nation, commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain, and lastly, Out of the Darkness, the Germans nineteen forty two to 2022, which was published last February by Knopf or Knopf, never sure. I've heard it pronounced both ways, so I'm never sure which one it is, but so I'll do both. Anyway, and that is the book we will be discussing today.
Tim Benson:So Doctor. Trentman, thank you so, so much for coming on the podcast. I do appreciate it.
Frank Trentmann:Yeah, very good to talk to you.
Tim Benson:Well, thank you. So normal entry question for everybody that comes on the podcast and that's is, you know, what made you want to write this book? What was the the genesis of the project? I mean, you're primarily a historian of consumer issues, no? So how did you decide to take on this much broader subject?
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. No, I did, as you mentioned, I had finished or I was in the final stages of finishing the book Empire of Things, which looks at our changing relationship to possessions and how consumption became so important to us really over five hundred years. And one thing that's a kind of red thread running through that book is morality and the ways in which people's shopping and spending and buying or not buying has always been moralized. So are you a good person if you buy certain goods or should you boycott them? What does it do to you to lust after lots of things?
Frank Trentmann:So these were very big ethical concerns that divided and polarized societies And it only softened that morality in the nineteenth and twentieth century. And people became a little bit used to being consumers. So I've been working on that. And we are in sort of at the end of twenty fifteen. And that was the time when the so called refugee crisis happened in Syria and in Europe.
Frank Trentmann:And Chancellor Angela Merkel is in power and decides that Germany would welcome what turned out to be in that year almost 1,000,000 refugees. It's a huge debate ever since really. Sort of reading the German newspapers and working in London and looking at the British and American and other European press, I suddenly noticed how the topic of how Germany should respond to this challenge was heavily cast in a moral frame. So it was partly about the refugees, but it was also about, you know, are we good people? Have we become good people?
Frank Trentmann:Have we overcome finally the sort of guilt and sins of our fathers. And this kind of moral discussion didn't really take place in any other European country. So I sort of took a note of that. And then I started observing how many other topics in German society were also heavily moralised. So do you recycle?
Frank Trentmann:Do you sort your recycling? That was an indication not just whether you're helping the environment but whether you're a virtuous person or not. Are you looking after your aging parents or putting them in a care home? Who looks after the children? Do you save?
Frank Trentmann:Are you a thrifty person? Or are you an American style consumer? All of these things had these moral overtones. So I thought, Hey, I'm a historian. These are important questions.
Frank Trentmann:Where does this come from? How did this develop? And so I then started this book project and it led me back to the Second World War.
Tim Benson:As a historian of consumerism, do you know what the morality is of buying thousands and thousands of books? Just off the top of your head.
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. No. Well, the interesting thing is no, no. I mean, the interesting thing about this is that
Tim Benson:Asking for a friend, by the way.
Frank Trentmann:People moralize certain aspects of consumption. There's always how other people consume. That's a moral dilemma. So the question you said I mean, I had a very senior historian, a very eminent historian, who reviewed my book, gave it very positive review, and I ran into him at some point and he said, Wow, aren't you exaggerating? I'm not a big consumer.
Frank Trentmann:And I said, Look, how many books do you have? 7,000? He said, Yeah, but that's books. That's not consumption. So, you know, it continues to be
Tim Benson:It's a debilitating habit is what it is.
Frank Trentmann:Other people's style of consuming that gets negative verdicts.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Right. Alright. Well, we would so basically, in the book so what it means to be German after Hitler and after the third Reich and the Holocaust is a is an unavoidable question. But over the last eighty years, Germany has gone through a very remarkable moral and material regeneration from the end of the war.
Tim Benson:So how do the Germans see themselves today? And does that view match reality?
Frank Trentmann:Well, that's the core questions which I'm trying to get at in the book. And at the same time as I chart this ever more intense sort of moral reorientation and repositioning as being good people, I point out that in reality a lot of problems are outsourced or swept under the carpet. So you have a fair bit of hypocrisy trying to maintain this moral standard. And you can see this all the way to the present. So the book, for listeners, the book goes up to the beginning of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022.
Frank Trentmann:And it came out in winter twenty twenty three-twenty twenty four. So a fair bit has happened in these last two and a half years, but the moral or the divide and the ambivalence continues all the way to the present. So if you just take Germany's position in Europe, the population is deeply divided over fundamental questions. So some think that sending weapons to Ukraine is the right moral lesson to draw from the German past. Others see it exactly the opposite.
Frank Trentmann:And you have similar debates about Israel, about migration and so forth. So Germany is really in a tight spot. It mainly has put itself in this tight spot where it has created certain expectations of what Germany should be like, both in terms of material comfort, but also moral position in the world. And it finds it ever more difficult to reconcile these. And I think, I mean, that's sort of my personal view.
Frank Trentmann:I think this will get harder now because Germany is being pulled into assuming greater responsibility in Europe financially, but also militarily. And it's been a bit a country in denial. You know, you didn't need to. You could be moral because you never had to take much responsibility. I mean, militarily, Germany relied entirely on NATO and particularly on The United States.
Frank Trentmann:Environmentally, Germany tried to be a sort of crusader for environmentalism but ultimately kept its coal industry going and shut down nuclear, but you keep coal going. So there are all sorts of compromises that have been made. One should perhaps point out, because it's a history book, so I don't just look at the present, I try to put the present in this longer perspective. It is quite remarkable how much has changed in Germany. So if you take just the military side, these days people look at Germany as so this country doesn't have an army, doesn't spend much for national security.
Frank Trentmann:It got sort of this idea that there would always be peace. In the early 1970s, under Chancellor Willy Brandt, Social Democrat, Germany spent 3.5% of its on the army. So the majority of Germans went and did their military service in the army. You had compulsory military service. So you know, the way Germany is now, Germany wasn't in the seventies or sixties.
Frank Trentmann:So we're dealing with change over time.
Tim Benson:Right. Before we get into all that stuff, I guess so let me just ask you. So sort of explain to everybody what the you know, what was the purpose of starting the narrative in 1942 instead of 1939 or 1933 or even, you know, say 1945? Why specifically the year 1942?
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. So I start in the winter of 'forty two-'forty three and the main reason for that is that there are three big developments coming together. I mean, Holocaust is now underway and on top of that you get in February 1943 the final defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, So the Eastern Front is now in crisis. And then on top of that, you have increasingly relentless aerial bombing. So that gathers speed as well.
Frank Trentmann:So you have three things coming together. And as they're coming together, more and more Germans are trying to make sense of a situation that now looks to them ever more uncertain. So the war isn't lost at this point, but there's the possibility it might be lost. And that really shakes people up and they start to ask themselves questions which they didn't or hadn't in the first half of the Second World War. And so it's partly a, if you want, a literary device so I can use that period to open up to readers how did people on the ground experience this growing pressure cooker?
Frank Trentmann:How did they try to make sense of it? What sort of answers did they reach? So it's partly that, but it's also that this period shows how some people, not all people, but some people started to reposition themselves. So they started to ask themselves basic questions such as, you know, why are we being bombed? There must be a reason for that.
Frank Trentmann:And so some people's answer is, well, this is probably payback now for how we treated the Jews. We went too far. And we should reconsider perhaps our attitude to the Nazi regime in response of that. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people for whom this growing pressure is confirmation that everything Hitler and Goebbels have been saying is absolutely right. So they're seeing the bombing as evidence that the Americans and Jews are trying to annihilate the German nation.
Frank Trentmann:So the response they take from this is not a retreat from Nazi ideas, but to call for ever more relentless acts of extermination. So you can use this period to sort of see how a whole population is in flux, trying to make sense of these changes. I mean, may sound a little bit abstract to some listeners. So let me give you one just one example of a school teacher from Northern Germany who was a fervent supporter of the war effort in the first half of the Second World War. So he thinks Hitler is a genius, the greatest military leader of all time.
Frank Trentmann:He volunteers to write secret intelligence reports on people in his school and in his small town for the Nazi regime. His son then joins the army and is moved to the Eastern Front. And so in December they still have some letters from him and they then sort of dry up and they know he's sort of near Stalingrad. And so he listens to the news on radio in which slowly becomes clear this is a real catastrophe happening there in Stalingrad, and he and his wife start to worry. He keeps a diary and you suddenly have in JanuaryFebruary 'forty three that same man who was absolutely convinced of Hitler and the German war effort asking questions such as, I'm no longer sure who the worst criminal on earth is.
Frank Trentmann:Is it really Stalin or perhaps Hitler? He's sort of angry as Goebbels rails against the enemy and Jews. He says, you know, this is really bad because he puts our boys who might be prisoners of war in real danger. He then decides he's no longer going to hoist the swastika, the Nazi flag, out of his balcony. He also takes off the party badge and he stops writing.
Frank Trentmann:He says, I'm not going to write any more intelligence reports for the regime and the flag is only going to go up when my son comes home, which doesn't happen. So in this period, this same man kind of repositions himself towards the regime and towards his own past. So when the war comes to an end, this man has already persuaded himself that he was never really supporting the war effort. He always had suspicions about Hitler and so forth. And so these kind of stories are very important if we want to understand how a society where the majority of Germans had supported Hitler and his regime in 1939, how that same society managed to undergo reconstruction.
Frank Trentmann:So we don't have and that's why we need to start in the middle of the war because there is no such thing as the so called 'hour zero'. So 1945 is not a clean break where suddenly all the Nazis have to be converted or reinvent themselves. You have already cracks appearing in the Nazi community before the end of the war. So this uncertainty and the ambivalence and the sort of people rewriting effectively their own biography and their own memories is very important.
Tim Benson:Mhmm. And I think you said in the book, was it something like was it half of the all the the the total German battlefield casualties in the war ended up taking place in the final ten months. Is that right?
Frank Trentmann:Absolutely. The final stages, I mean, the last year particularly is absolutely brutal and it has repercussions. So, know, for some people, some people fighting, it actually is a hardening experience. Been fighting so long, that's all they know. And they know that if Germany loses, they're probably gonna be they might be put on trial or be in difficulty.
Frank Trentmann:So they just toughen up and they keep going. Others start slipping away. So the number of deserters really shoots up in very final stages. Yeah. No.
Frank Trentmann:It's a it's a very brutal brutal time of history.
Tim Benson:Yeah. We could talk a lot more about the war itself, but I wanna but you can just get bogged down in all the World War two stuff. So I wanna move forward a bit. So there's this idea that the Germans, quote, unquote, retreated into silence after the war. Is that necessarily true?
Tim Benson:And, you write in the book that the the dominant language of moral renewal after the war was cast in individual and spiritual terms, not in political terms. And and it was mainly addressed to the Germans themselves and not their victims. Could you talk a little about that for a sec?
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. So the common so the widely held view of the immediate post war years is that Germans suppressed their responsibility and their guilt. So they shut up and they went into silence. And foreign visitors and observers like Hannah Arendt note that in nineteen forty eight-forty nine. They said they don't want to talk about it.
Frank Trentmann:But that's actually a misconception and the evidence is actually pointing more in the opposite direction. So the Germans, including prisoners of war and their families, they talk about the war. They don't see this as a problem. They don't work with assumptions of human rights. So they even mention what we would now consider war crimes when talking to each other.
Frank Trentmann:The difference is they don't talk much about the victims of Nazi violence. They talk about themselves and that takes a number of forms. So the initial form is actually you have lectures in autumnwinter nineteen forty five where famous authors and so forth talk about guilt and they leave no doubt that they think the German nation is guilty. What then happens is when they're trying to explain how could, you know, how could this land of poets and philosophers have ended up committing all these crimes? How do you explain that?
Frank Trentmann:They don't then revert to what we might call historical causes. So they don't look at political causes. That's when they revert to a sort of spiritual level, which is somehow in modern times people got alienated from their spiritual self and their minds and actions were taken over. They were seduced by people like Hitler, a kind of demonic forces winning them over and then like in witchcraft, they're sort of bound. So it's not that they pinpoint something particular in German history, it's more sort of the spiritual atmosphere of a world, a modern world gone mad where people have lost their mooring, they're just after money or power or military might.
Frank Trentmann:And the Germans were seduced by that and that's the explanation. But there is still talk of guilt. That then changes in 1946 and after during denazification, because denazification works on the premise that you have to fill in a form in which you openly state, you know, joined the Nazi party in this year, was active in this capacity and so forth. So the discussion of moral guilt is now really personal, because you can lose your job or your home or be fined or classified as a Nazi or complicit in crimes. So in denazification, people step back and they don't want to talk about guilt And what now takes over is the language of shame.
Frank Trentmann:Now guilt is about something bad you do to another person, so it's still focused onto what you do to others. Shame is about yourself. You know, you feel ashamed how people look at you. So it's self directed. So shame becomes a very important way of addressing something bad has happened but ultimately becomes directed towards the German people themselves and that then gathers speed in the late 40s and 1950s because what we have to remember is you have in Germany, you have 12,000,000 ex police, those are the people
Tim Benson:Yeah, massive numbers.
Frank Trentmann:Ethnic Germans, ethnic Germans driven out of Central And Eastern Europe. So they've lost their homeland, their houses, their jobs. You have those. Then you have the millions who've been bombed of their homes. Then you have all the veterans and disabled people and so forth.
Frank Trentmann:So you have enormous numbers of people who didn't come out well out of the war and they are now the main voice talking about victims. Basically they're competing with each other. Who can shout loudest? We're the victims. We deserve help.
Frank Trentmann:And in that chorus of voices, most of them German, the real victims or the people we today consider as the real victims, you know, Jews in the first place, but also political prisoners, other victims of the Nazis, you know, for religious reasons or other orientations, they get marginalised. They get shouted out basically. So this focus on their own victimhood is quite important because it also ties in with reconstruction. You'd mentioned that we have in this story, we have moral reconstruction is entwined with material reconstruction. And so these people are partly asking, you know, look, been a victim.
Frank Trentmann:I deserve help with housing or a job if you're an exilee and so forth. So these two stories are very much entwined. One needs to perhaps add two points. One is in West Germany, Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, he takes a big step towards reconciliation with Israel and he signs, by the standards of this time, an unprecedented reparations agreement with Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference. This was hugely unpopular.
Frank Trentmann:So it was his government with the support I mean some members of his government boycotted this move, so he needed opposition party support to get it through parliament, the majority of the population think this is a really bad idea and excessive and not right. So one way West German society deals with the question of guilt and responsibility is you have a division of labour. The state takes over formally that responsibility, but by doing so, it also lets individual citizens off the hook. For most people with Ardenau's policy, this matter is now off the table, so you don't any longer need to worry about it and certainly you don't need to have introspection or ask yourself anymore about your own role. That's West Germany.
Frank Trentmann:The country is divided, you have a socialist East Germany and there the discussion of guilt and shame and rehabilitation takes a completely different route because East Germany is run by communists. Some of them had been in concentration camps themselves. They see themselves as victims they were victims of the Nazis and they see themselves as historical winners. So in their understanding, they, the communist resistance, together with the Red Army, overthrew this really bad fascist regime. So why should they be responsible for anything?
Frank Trentmann:They're not responsible. They were the victims themselves. They don't owe anyone anything except the Soviet Union with reparation payments. So Jews don't get any attention or for that matter any compensation from East Germany. So if you had been a German Jew who lived East Of The Elbe in what then became the German Democratic Republic, the Socialist East, you had to wait till 1990 to get some compensation back because East Germany just did not treat Jews as worthy victims.
Frank Trentmann:So in both societies, but for different reasons, you have a suppression or parceling out of the guilt question.
Tim Benson:Mhmm. So was denazification a failure by whatever metric you wanna apply to it, or did it actually, you know, achieve some of its goals?
Frank Trentmann:Well, denazification has a really bad record. So most people point or many people point out that you have in West Germany, you have some former Nazis in positions of high office who are tolerated. You have in the 50s particular, you have both in East And West Germany amnesties and hardly any trials anymore. So from that perspective, it really failed. But if you look at the early years, so 1946 to 'forty eight, when Germany was occupied, actually the numbers are pretty impressive.
Frank Trentmann:So you have several hundred thousand people in both the American zone and also the Soviet zone who spent considerable time prison, who lose their right to work in their profession, who have to pay compensation payments and so forth. So for many people, immediately after the war, denazification is seen as a huge, huge threat and big dent in their biographies. And I think it's important also to sort of remember, I mean, and sometimes even historians forget that, you know, it's one thing to look back on this experience and know the outcome. But if you're caught up in 1946, 'forty seven, 'forty eight, you don't know. You don't know that denazification will come to an end.
Frank Trentmann:So you have two years of your life which are lost. You don't know when that's going to end. And when you come out of denazification, many sort of mid ranking Nazis don't find their footing back in society. So you have cases where Nazi bigwigs end up being salesmen for cheap liquor and their wife has to work as a waitress in the local bar. And so for many people, this is a real step down and humiliating.
Frank Trentmann:Some of them even lose civic rights, I think you say, so the right to vote and things like that. And they're being now ignored. So denazification wasn't perfect by all means. There were many oversights, omissions, and mistakes. But it also needs to be remembered that most people who'd been through that experience now want to be left alone and in peace.
Frank Trentmann:There are hardly any people who have any tastes left for fascist or extremist politics. So they've learned to calm down, if you want.
Tim Benson:Yeah. I mean, at the very least, you know, the FRG or or in and now Germany as a united country once again, you know, post 1990 has been a, you know, stable functioning democracy for, what is it now, almost eighty years. So at the very least, like that, it worked to some degree where, know, it's it's created a country that or helped create a country that is, you know, is a good neighbor and and stable and and all that sort of thing.
Frank Trentmann:Well, I mean, they could have done mean, I just said I just and what you say is right, but doesn't mean they couldn't have done more. So, I mean, Adenauer had this famous quote when people say, look, you know, you should just have former Nazi judges on your kind of on the payroll of your government and not to speak of the foreign office and the intelligence services, which are overwhelmingly old Nazis in the 1950s. His response to that was, I mean, he came from Cologne and so he sometimes liked to have these Cologne sayings. And he said, well, if the only water that you have is dirty water, you have to make do with dirty water. You don't throw out the only water that you have.
Frank Trentmann:That was sort of his line. If we look comparatively, you know, at other European societies, there are many societies that I think Norway and The Netherlands where collaborators were punished much more severely than in Germany. And they also became functioning democracies and
Tim Benson:strong
Frank Trentmann:So, know, Adenauer, that was sort of a self justifying aphorism put down there. If he had wanted to, you could have rebuilt the economy and and have put a few more Nazis in jail. That wouldn't have been a problem, I think.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Plenty of Nazis to throw in jail. I mean, I know, you know, punishment and in the immediate postwar, decade, you know, punishment and this the the quest for for justice for the victims of the third Reich wasn't as enthusiastic as probably anybody would like. You know, German courts paid very little attention to the murder of Jews after the war, but that did eventually change. So how and why did that confrontation with the past begin to occur?
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. No. Very important question. I mean, classic answer you still get is very short and simple and it's 1968. So many people say, well, it's in 1968 with the student movement and the new social movements that a new generation of Germans confronted their parents and grandparents.
Frank Trentmann:And that's then established much greater awareness and remembrance of what at that point of time became known as the Holocaust. That's a bit too simple really, and doesn't match the facts. And it's also very convenient because the people who maintain this story are mainly 68 themselves. So they see themselves as the people who got Germany moving on that front. If go back to the immediate post war years, I mean, I was amazed in the research just how hotly debated memory culture, as we call it now, was.
Frank Trentmann:So you have, on the one hand, you have all sorts of veteran groups who want to insist that only Hitler, Himmler and the SS were evil, but they in the regular army or even in the Waffen SS were really good soldiers. So you have vocal veteran defence of what they see as a good war. But at the same time, you have youth groups. So mid 1950s already, you have the first sort of trips to concentration camps such as Bergen Belsen. And these are jazz orchestras who organise trips to pay their respect to the victims of Nazi crimes.
Frank Trentmann:You have anti Semitism, but at the same time you have local schools volunteering to rebuild desecrated local Jewish cemeteries. You have anti war films, you have the Anne Frank Diary becoming the bestseller in West Germany and being put on stage, you know, shows on over a thousand stages in the late 50s. So you have a lot going on. So it's not that the war and war crimes are sort of silenced and shut down and then suddenly in 1968 people wake up to it. And the complication is also on the other end of the story because after 1968 things die down again a little bit.
Frank Trentmann:So probably the biggest single event that raises awareness and causes discussion and emotional involvement the whole debate about what had happened exactly in the Second World War is the American TV series Holocaust, which is shown in 1979. Single TV program that attracted more telephone calls, readers or listeners, letters, public discussion than anything else. So it goes back and forth. So I think it's better to see it as a shift in the relative position of different voices than a kind of simple story of there was nothing and then there's finally is more. So there's much more going on in the 50s and 60s than many people recognize.
Tim Benson:Mhmm. Bear with me here. You're gonna have to hear my horrible pronunciation of German words. But so the the the economic miracle, what were the were there any value changes brought about by the? No.
Frank Trentmann:The economic miracle is not bad, your pronunciation. You're just missing you're just missing one s. It's.
Tim Benson:Sorry.
Frank Trentmann:Oh, yeah. No. It's alright.
Tim Benson:In German, I I just I I can never get a handle on it.
Frank Trentmann:No. Was I mean, it was quite good. It was quite good. Now, the economic miracle is really important both at the time, but also since that time. So at the time, the economic miracle allows you to integrate these 12,000,000 expellees I had previously mentioned.
Frank Trentmann:That's hugely important because in the late 40s and early 1950s, it's not clear how these millions will fit in to
Tim Benson:the new I'm sorry to interrupt, was just saying, but I mean, in the abstract, 12,000,000 people is a lot of people. So what is the actual population Germany it's trying to incorporate So
Frank Trentmann:we're talking about 20 of the population. So every fifth person is from an expellee family. So they arrive, you know, of them have a few possessions, but basically they arrive without assets, without capital, other than the few possessions they have and the skills they have. And they initially, they distributed mainly in the areas where they arrive and for simple geographic reasons, that is the rural North and the rural South. Now, in these rural areas, there isn't much work for them either.
Frank Trentmann:So it's a real from a material point of view, it's a very difficult situation. But it's also a difficult situation politically because there is considerable debate among these ex police what the future will or should look like. So some people talk about revenge. You know, they think, okay, the war was lost, but we're going to reclaim our homeland, which means challenging the new borders agreed by the Allies after 'forty five. So you have a very large potential group that's threatening to domestic stability and international stability.
Frank Trentmann:And the economic miracle is really vital for their integration, they're discriminated against. Like most refugees, I mean many people don't care that they're ethnic Germans. They think they're just as strange and alien as people from Poland or Czechs or other people. So they discriminate them and treat them very badly. The economic miracle gives them a leg up and is hugely important for their own identity and sort of pride in accomplishing something and restarting their life, but it's also important for their status in society.
Frank Trentmann:Suddenly, they're important because they provide important manpower in the economic miracle. And the importance of that you can see in the growing acceptance of the democratic Federal Republic. So in the early 50s, significant numbers thought the best year when they asked, what do you think are the best years you and Germany have had? Very few think the present. Many more think the so called peace years under Hitler, so 1933 to 'thirty nine, and others think under the Emperor before the First World War.
Frank Trentmann:By the late 50s, so once the economic miracle is going, sympathy with the Hitler years has completely gone down and most people have you know, made democracy their new home. So it's really, really important that growth period for absorbing potential social conflict. But the economic miracle is also quite important in the long run because even now most Germans in the back of their mind I mean, if you're from West Germany and as the German economy currently is in recession, now third year is sort of stagnating, the economic miracle is the kind of reference point which people have in the back of their head. This is how things should be. Of course, as we
Tim Benson:It's been here in The United States too. Mean, it's people sort of have rose colored glasses for the economy of the 1950s and early 1960s, which is never going to return. Just basically
Frank Trentmann:No, no, But it's interesting how this is relatively, I mean, historically speaking, this was a short period and a completely exceptional period in history, But it's become the sort of yardstick. So the economic miracle is also So I said economic miracle, it has these positive effects. But in the long term, actually, it has some negative effects because it means people are having expectations which are completely unrealistic now.
Tim Benson:You brought it up a little bit. Are there any Brevanschist feelings about the borders to the East, about east Prussia? Is there I mean, is there, you know, bubbling under the the surface of German society? Is there a a lot of I mean, is that just basically, at this point, you know, a fait accompli and that's, you know, not really something anyone really thinks about? Or is there still some sort of longing for the restoration of the, you know, the the pre 1939 you know, pre war pre World War two borders of Germany.
Frank Trentmann:Well, you had in the nineteen fifties, you had organized parties for the different ethnic, you know, Sudeten, the people from the Sudetenland and the Silesians and also the East Prussians. And in, you know, they for a brief period they were in parliament and they were one of the coalition partners, Adenaar. But with the economic miracle that then dies down and so these parties go downhill, the sort of cultural associations of the East Prussians and Silesians, they keep going. And when Willy Brandt commits to detente and signs the so called Eastern Treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union recognising the borders, there's an outcry. People think this is betrayal and fair enough, one should add, both Brandt and Christian Democrats had always addressed you know, these are hundreds of thousands of people coming to conferences and being addressed by politicians.
Frank Trentmann:The politicians has always told them, look, we'll never we'll never give up those territories. And then in 'sixty nine, 'seventy, you sign these treaties recognizing the borders. So there's some pushback and some irritation, but ultimately revanchism doesn't have a big political movement to support it. So there's some right wing extremist groups still dream of taking those lands back, but they're marginal groups. And the people, the majority of the people who had lost their homelands, they many of, I mean, there's sort of studies charting how they accommodate themselves with the situation.
Frank Trentmann:And it sort of breaks down really into three equal parts. So, by the 1980s, '1 third thinks of West Germany as their new homeland. That's their homeland. You have another third who thinks in terms of like a bit like a dual citizenship. Think, I belong to West Germany, but somehow deep down my old Eastern homeland still matters.
Frank Trentmann:And then you have one third who really just nostalgic, but they're not a political force. So this is an emotional attachment which they find difficult to let go, which is understandable. But there's no big political movement. And I don't think now I don't think any of the parties, the most extreme right, which a footnote the co chair of the populist alternative for Germany her father was one of the ex police and apparently never got over that. So, he talks about that but she doesn't she doesn't say, hey.
Frank Trentmann:Let's let's take back Poland or so.
Tim Benson:Right. Right. Right. Speaking of the the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland or the alternative for Germany, for Americans who might not you know, who probably don't follow German politics very closely, I'm sure, you know, most Americans don't. What to make of the AFD?
Tim Benson:I mean, because I'm you know, they're they're branded a far right party, you know, but that seems to be when it comes to be the European sort of center left consensus that sort of everybody gets it seems like it's labeled if they're slightly slightly right of center, they seem to be labeled a far right party. So what do we make of the AFD? Is it an actual far right party? Is it is it a is it a it a threat to German democracy? I mean, what I mean, it just came in I mean, the party itself just came in second rate in the the latest Yeah.
Tim Benson:Parliament significant the sec oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Frank Trentmann:Yeah. No, what you just said is interesting. I mean, you said, well, compared basically, you said, compared to what? Aren't there also similar developments in other European countries? So how special are they?
Tim Benson:I mean, just like in America, would say, they're almost kind of painted as like a crypto Nazi, you know, or like just
Frank Trentmann:They got 20% nationwide in the election on the February 23, so a few weeks ago. So 20% across the whole country, but in the eastern regions, they got 38%. And in some cities and some towns in the East, got 48%. And the first point to make is that they're now really established. It's not some small splinter group or so.
Frank Trentmann:They're there and I think they're there to stay. The other thing is what you said, well, let's put this a little bit in European context. How extreme are they? There was an Austrian the Austrians have their own populist party which is very big. And there was a joke in Austria saying, after the German election, the Austrians said, What you call a move to the far right in Germany, we call a move to left because 20% isn't that high.
Frank Trentmann:It's much worse in Austria. So the IFTA who are they and what do they represent? Well, the IFTA started not that long ago, I mean compared to other European populist parties, only started ten years ago or so, as a sort of professional middle class circle of professors and economists and journalists who were sceptical of Angela Merkel's policies in the Euro crisis and the financial crisis in the European Union. So it really had an economic focus and was making the demand that policies shouldn't be moved up to the European level, but monetary policy, the currency should be a national issue. So get rid of the Euro, reintroduce the Deutsche Mark and have the Bundesbank, the Central Bank in control and not Brussels.
Frank Trentmann:So it was an anti European Union move. And then in the next few years, these professors and some of them economic liberals, you may want to call them, got booted out and more right wing populist leaders took over and made the party a mass movement. And since then, it's moved further to the right. What does that mean, further to the right? You have some leaders in the East Eastern part of the country who've been officially defined by the intelligence services and constitutional court as having right wing extremists' leanings or beliefs.
Frank Trentmann:Why? Because some of them want to well, some of them in their proposals, particularly when dealing with migration, would break the constitutional rights as defined in the basic law. So, equality, respect for citizenship and human rights, some of the statements they made would be a breach of those, and so they've been labelled like that. So those are people in the East. In the West, I would say you have fewer of those right wing extremists.
Frank Trentmann:I mean, there I would more classify them as sort of populists comparable to populists in France or in Britain or in Italy. So you have a mix. You have a real mix of people and what unites them is that they are anti establishment. So, what they all believe in is that the parliament is controlled by political lobbies and the old parties, the established parties are using parliamentary democracy to enrich themselves or to help their constituencies. So they want more plebiscites, things like that.
Frank Trentmann:They're anti European Union, so they want out of the European Union, and they have a very strong stand on the migration issue. So some positions basically you have a spectrum. You have a spectrum of views that go from, let's call it, sort of hard conservatism. But on the other end of the spectrum, have some Nazi fringes there and constant legal conflicts over people who've also been members of neo Nazi parties or who are giving speeches which are in defiance of the constitution and things like that.
Tim Benson:Right.
Frank Trentmann:Now, what about the voters? So, I've talked about the people running the party, but ultimately they matter because they have voters. And there are two things which are interesting about the alternative for Germany. One is they've won over a lot of voters who used to vote Christian Democrats or conservative people who felt abandoned by Merkel. So Merkel moves the Christian Democrit to the centre of the political spectrum and leaves behind at the fringes these Conservative voters who don't agree with her migration policy in particular, who no longer have a political home.
Frank Trentmann:And the alternative for Germany sort of sucks them up. So that's one important group. The other important group is non voters. So it's absolutely staggering. I mean, I've looked at the data in the recent elections.
Frank Trentmann:The RFD, which used to be a small party, manages to attract more non voters. So in the last election, the federal election, they attracted as many non voters as all the other parties together. So that's a sign of how alienated a sizable pool of voters feel. And then the third group, which is important, is the East. So, RFD has made progress in the West, but there's a clear disproportionate relationship between West support in the West and support in the East.
Tim Benson:And when we say East, we mean like the old borders of the inside the old borders of the GDR.
Frank Trentmann:That's right. That's right. So Saxony, Saxony and Thuringia and Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, those areas, you know, where they on average get 38%, thirty nine %, which is extraordinary. I mean, far, far more than any other party. And the reason there is this polarization between the former East and the former West and how even now after, what, thirty five years after reunification, you have growing not lessening, but growing alienation.
Frank Trentmann:Many Easterners feel ignored, discriminated against, and the alternative for Germany is kind of their Eastern identity party and their slogan in the election was the East is rising. So it gives people the sense of you know you vote for us, we give you back your pride.
Tim Benson:Do you have some I know we've gone over an hour already, and that was about as long as I wanted to keep you, but do you have time to just answer a couple more questions?
Frank Trentmann:Yeah, just a few more.
Tim Benson:Sure, So you've been touching on the migrant issue. How much of the migrant issue is driving or how much of German politics is being driven by the migrant issue currently?
Frank Trentmann:Most of it. Most of it. Most of it. I mean, well, I mean, the election has happened. So there are coalition talks between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.
Frank Trentmann:And they seem to have come to certain agreement that suits both sides about how to deal with the migration issue. But, you know, in the run up to the election, sometimes you wouldn't know that there is an international security crisis. Sometimes you wouldn't even know that Germany is an economic crisis because the migration issue had completely taken over. Mean, quite in many ways disproportionate because actually migration of the numbers the numbers of migrants had actually been falling. So there had been a steady fall but it had been accompanied by some you know brutal terror attacks.
Frank Trentmann:So migration received a lot of attention. The alternative for Germany was pushing this issue, made it their own issue, and it was then really becoming center stage when Mertz, the person likely to be the next chancellor, Christian Democrat, made it sort of his issue. Basically saying I mean, his idea at that point was that you can't ignore the issue. If you want to contain the populists, you need to make migration your own issue. That didn't really work.
Frank Trentmann:I mean, he actually lost some votes. I mean, it didn't make a dent in the populists at all. And what it did, it sort of reinforced the sense of the populist, 'Look, we've been telling you this all this time. So we are right. You've been taking far too long to wake up to this.' So, the IFD in a way won the battle for public discourse and public attention because they actually did get to make the migration issue this central issue in politics.
Frank Trentmann:Mhmm.
Tim Benson:Now I know, like you said, this is the migrant issue being the central issue. But you write in the book that it's over the subject of war and peace more than any other subject where you can see the German the changing conscience of the of Germany or of the German people. So what has been the impact on Germany, on German politics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? And, you know, what what is the price, you know, the price of Germany's post international restraint, especially, you know, post end of the Cold War and post unification?
Frank Trentmann:Well, it's a very concrete price. And I'll just give you one example for that point is that the initial reaction of the Federal Republic to the Russian attack on Ukraine was for the Chancellor Scholz then to say, well, this is a new we're now in a new era. We need to completely turn things around. And he found a special fund for the army. But when it came to support for Ukraine itself, they dithered for a long time.
Frank Trentmann:So initially it was sort of helmets rather than tanks. It took a very long time for Germany to commit more serious weapons to it, and the reason for that was that Scholz was really walking a tightrope because public opinion was deeply divided. So you had on the one hand, half the population think, oh we must do anything in our power to support Ukraine and defend their sovereignty. But the other half was convinced, no, you should always look for reconciliation with Russia, and sending weapons would be the very opposite signal you should be sending, so no weapons. So he slowed things down, Scholz.
Frank Trentmann:In the end, they sent I think 12 battle tanks. One reason why the number was so small is that after 1990, they shrunk down the army very They
Tim Benson:don't have any tanks. That's the problem. Yeah.
Frank Trentmann:So Germany used to have. When the Berlin Wall came down
Tim Benson:Thousands of tanks.
Frank Trentmann:West Germany had something like 4,000 tanks and East Germany had another 2,000. Today, I think they have 300. So this is a very serious difference. And then they sent the 12 tanks to Ukraine. And of course, tanks like anything else, particularly in wartime, things fall off or they get hit and they need to be repaired.
Frank Trentmann:So, months, hardly any of these 12 tanks was still rolling because there were no repair parts. So the German army is in a very, very dire straits. But the population is divided and again there's also an interesting West East divide. So sending weapons to Ukraine has far more support in the Western part of the country than in the Eastern part of the country. In the Eastern part, even not just populists, but also Christian Democrats want to reopen relations with Russia.
Frank Trentmann:They want Russian gas to flow again across the Baltic. They want the war to end by whatever means. Whereas the West, people in the West are more inclined to give support to Ukraine. So the divisions, the internal divisions of the country also play themselves out on the international stage. So it needs to be seen.
Frank Trentmann:Mean, Mertz has been very outspoken and persuaded his party to boost defense by unprecedented amounts, but needs to be seen whether he can take the whole country with him because there's a great deal of suspicion.
Tim Benson:Yeah, okay. Alright. Well, there was a ton of other stuff I would have loved to talk to you about, but like I said, I've already kept you long, so my apologies. I'll just end it, you know, with the normal exit question everybody on the show gets, and that is, you know, what would you like the audience to get out of this book? Or, you know, what's the one thing you'd want a reader to take away from it having read it?
Frank Trentmann:Well, I think the main thing I would like readers to get out of it is that this longer historical perspective really helps you to understand why Germany is so conflicted and divided now. You can't understand it by just looking at the present situation. The divisions we've been talking about in the podcast, they have historical roots and so understanding how these roots got formed is really vital if you want to make sense of the way Germany is now and its place in the world.
Tim Benson:All right. Very good. Once again, the name of the book is Out of the Darkness, The Germans, nineteen forty two to 2022. Fantastic, fantastic book. I have a lot of Germans on here.
Tim Benson:I I don't know if that's my predilection or if it's just there just are more Germans writing books than other nations, but I've had quite a few Germans on the podcast and done quite a few books on Germany and German history. And I'd have to say this book is it's truly, truly fantastic. It's such a thorough look at this period and where Germany was and where Germany is going and how Germany got to this point. And as Doctor. Tremblant writes in the book, after decades of knowing what they are against, Germans need to figure out what they are for heading into the future.
Tim Benson:But it's highly, highly recommended. Just look at this last eighty years of German cultural history, political history, and you know, what it means to be German in the twenty first century, what it meant to be German after the fall of the Third Reich, all those sorts of things. And you must have spent you said you started the book in 2015. So and it was published in 2023, I think, in Europe, at least. It wasn't until 2024 over here.
Tim Benson:But eight years is a significant chunk of your life, and I'm sure a lot of that was spent in archives and taking through letters and newspapers and manuscripts and all sorts of things. A ton of work went into this. Once again, just can't recommend it enough, name of the book, Out of the Darkness, The Germans, nineteen forty two to 2022, the author, Doctor. Trentman. Doctor.
Tim Benson:Trentman, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to discuss the book with us. Like I said earlier, thank you so much for taking the massive amount of time out of your life to get the book put together and get the sucker published so we could all enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Frank Trentmann:Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the good questions. Good to talk to you.
Tim Benson:Oh, no problem. And again, if you like this podcast, please consider leaving us a five star review and sharing with your friends. And if, you have any questions or comments or any suggestions for books you'd like to see discussed on the podcast, you can always reach out to me. It's, tbenson@heartland.org. That's tbens0n@heartland.org.
Tim Benson:And for more information about the Heartland Institute, you can just go to heartland.org. And, well, we do have our, Twitter account, whatever you wanna call it, for the podcast. You can reach out to us there too. It's under at or the@illbooksatillbooks. So, yeah, make sure you check that out.
Tim Benson:And, yeah, that's pretty much it. So thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you guys next time. Take care. Love you, Robbie.
Tim Benson:Love you, mom. Bye bye.
