When dreams did come true with reunification, former East Germans were shocked to find them tarnished by unemployment, lack of respect and a civic culture developed on the other side of the gate that was more attuned to German misdeeds than German suffering. Many young East Germans felt they had become exiles in their own country. “No work, no love, no homeland, no happiness,” Katja Kramer, a once-optimistic 36-year-old computer engineer, wrote as the wall fell and she was laid off.
Given the mixed success of reunification, Trentmann refrains from writing a happy ending in which “a nation of sinners turned into saints.” He also recognizes the costs and complexities of the quest for moral security in the East and West: the amnesty granted to German war criminals in the 1950s after the initial wave of denazification trials, the postponed engagement with the Holocaust, the ostentatious (and sometimes insidiously self-absolving) performance of the “good German.”
Nonetheless, as Trentmann captures, the post-1945 transformation has been remarkable. The willingness of Germans to open their borders to refugees — mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — stands out. An astonishing 55 percent of the population, he observes, “helped refugees in one way or another.” One-quarter were “‘active helpers’ who accompanied refugees to doctors and the authorities, taught them German, helped with the shopping or took them along to the local sports club.” The arrival of so many new residents (in a country of 80 million) showed a clear way of being at home in the war-torn world by making new homes for others.
Of course, moral tensions still abound. Issues such as aid to Ukraine or open doors to immigrants divide Germans, especially in the East, where many see the “blossoming landscapes” they had been promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 as invaded by “outsiders.” This is ironic, Trentmann writes, because these are the same regions that most need “to attract newcomers to survive.”
And Jews continue to remain awkwardly set apart in German society, as the response to protests against the war in Gaza has made clear. Since October last year, government agencies have restricted demonstrations and cultural institutions have rescinded awards and canceled exhibitions in an effort to penalize antisemitism, muffling pro-Palestinian voices and equating disagreement with Israel, even by Jews, with racial prejudice.
