Frank Trentmann's "Out of the Darkness"

Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things, is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. Previously, he taught at Princeton University. He has been awarded the Whitfield Prize and a Humboldt Research Award, and he was a Moore Scholar at Caltech. Empire of Things was named the science book of the year by the Austrian government. Trentmann grew up in Hamburg and lives in London.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022, and reported the following:

Page 99 in this book is an important page because it alerts readers to the extraordinary fact that there was so little revenge and violence inside Germany immediately after the Second World War. After all, that war had been a war of extermination and the Holocaust, and, alongside the millions of people murdered, left millions of displaced persons (DPs) and Jews stranded in the land of their tormentors. Why was there not a wave of revenge killings?

The page follows Earl G. Harrison, who had been sent by President Truman to inspect the camps for Nazi victims in the American zone of occupied Germany in the summer of 1945. When Harrison arrived, many of the victims were still wearing their striped concentration camp pajamas or bleached SS uniforms. German police entered the camps as they pleased. Harrison introduced better rations for the victims and made their camps self-governing. That the victims exercised restraint was just as important. The page ends by listening to Zahman Grinberg, a doctor who was the first chairman of the central committee of liberated Jews, and who said that to take revenge would mean to drop to the lowest level of morality to which the Germans had fallen. Most Jews and DPs hoped to leave Germany as soon as possible, to the United States or Israel.

Page 99, therefore, occupies a critical place in this book. How Germans related to victims, migrants and refugees is one thread that runs through the entire book – and it raises questions about guilt, shame and the limits of atonement and difficulty of tolerance and compassion.

Learn more about Out of the Darkness at the Knopf website.

--Marshal Zeringue