In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about ‘how you would feel in such a situation’. Even if, like me, your childhood was spent crying over lost games of Monopoly, nothing could quite prepare you for the cheerless experience of playing ‘Flight and Expulsion Across the World’. It’s unlikely an updated version has been commissioned for our home secretary, with players assigned counters representing the Bibby Stockholm, inflatable life rafts and Rwanda-bound jets, but you never know.

A group called German Youth Europa launched the game in order to close Germany’s empathy gap. West Germany, critics claimed, was Ubergfremdung (swamped by foreigners). What nonsense, retorted German Youth Europa: Germans made up 93 per cent of the Bundesrepublik’s population, despite having absorbed 12 million expellees after the second world war. Taking in an estimated 30,000 Vietnamese boat people should be no problem. In any case, had not Germans a particular responsibility to care for the world’s most unfortunate to atone for killing six million Jews?

‘When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions,’ Germany’s Green party leader declared in 2015

Across the Elbe at the same time the GDR was boosting its coffers by letting Africans and Asians land at East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport, then walk into the western sector where they would claim asylum. The socialist republic, with the blissful disregard for historical responsibility that Politburo-dwelling historical materialists often demonstrate, officially allowed no admissions of guilt or shame for the Holocaust and other evils of the Third Reich.

Frank Trentmann narrates these and other incidents to trouble the Pollyanna tendency whereby Germans have mutated from perpetrators of the greatest crime in history into a nation of Gutmenschen (do-gooders), whose new historical destiny is to teach the rest of us moral invertebrates what it is to be human.

Theodor Adorno’s 1965 essay On the Question ‘What is German?’ suggested that the answer involves ‘the transition to humanity’. The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, the author of a book on the influence of Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer, argued that Germany had done just that, becoming ‘the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes’, which seems unfair on South Africa. The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in Capitalism and the Death Drive: ‘To be German means to be committed to a form of humanity that radically breaks with capitalism.’ This seems strange to those for whom Germany is indelibly associated not just with Goethe and Hegel but with global capitalism’s most successful brands, from BMW to Miele. And similarly curious given Germany’s leading role in the Troika which meted out fiscal punishment beatings to the recalcitrant Greeks in line with neo-liberal economic theory. 

The Hamburg-born Trentmann, professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, is well situated to both puncture German ethical hubris and offer a corrective to Britain’s recent self-flagellating literary sub-genre which includes Philip Oltermann’s Keeping Up With the Germans and John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do it Better. A glimpse of Oktoberfest lederhosen, the rise of Alternative für Deutchsland and increasing anti-Semitism shows that Germans don’t always do it better. Trentmann tells us that responsibility for the Holocaust has become a civil religion, key to German national identity, exemplified by the 2,711 stelae of Peter Eisenman’s memorial to murdered Jews near the Brandenburg Gate. But that faith is not ubiquitous. In August last year police investigated attacks on two Berlin Holocaust memorials, one at Grünewald station, from which tens of thousands of the city’s Jews were sent to their deaths. A Bücherbox, or mini-library, containing books visitors might borrow to educate themselves about the Holocaust was set on fire. Some Germans still can’t resist burning books.

Consider, also, what happened to Mesut Özil. Trentmann describes the former Arsenal midfielder as a poster boy for diversity. Born in Germany to Turkish parents, he played in the 2010 German World Cup team which included players from eight different countries. Two years later he was photographed with President Erdogan. Twitter erupted, attacking Özil as a ‘false German’ who was endorsing a human rights abuser; but no one complained when Lothar Matthäus, another German international, was photographed with Putin after the annexation of Crimea. In 2018, Özil was blamed and subjected to racist abuse for Germany’s calamitous performance in that year’s World Cup. He drew the inference: ‘A German when we win, an immigrant when we lose.’ Germans, says Trentmann, thought that by working through the past and facing up to the Holocaust they had successfully confronted racism. The truth, as he shows, is much less flattering to Germans’ self-image: the Third Reich’s Volksgemeinschaft (people’s racial community) may not be dead.

Surely, one may counter, what Angela Merkel did in 2015 shows that Germany is indeed the world’s moral exemplar. ‘We have managed such a lot – we can do this,’ she said at a refugee camp near Dresden. By the end of 2017, Germany had become a safe haven for more than a million Syrian refugees. The country seemed to have completed its metamorphosis from ethical black hole to shining beacon. ‘When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions,’ the Green party leader Katrin Göring-Eckhardt declared in 2015. But virtue is rarely its own reward, and the phenomenon of virtue-signalling is Germany’s latest folly.

Trentmann argues that Merkel’s step was pragmatic: not the product of humanitarianism but simply the least bad option. Thousands were already marching on highways to Germany, so the chancellor’s choice was either to accommodate them or beat them back – which would, to put it mildly, have been bad PR. Equally, Germany needed skilled workers. In autumn 2015, Dieter Zetsche, the head of Daimler, dreamed of a new German economic miracle, staffed by ‘highly motivated’ immigrants, including the many Syrians arriving with academic qualifications. There may have been an economic rationale when Santander offered paid leave to staff who volunteered to help refugees. But let’s not be unduly cynical. Merkel could also count on many Germans to show something not part of Suella Braverman’s philosophy – namely Willkommens-kultur. Between 2015 and 2017, 55 per cent of the German people helped refugees in one way or another. These, says Trentmann, are ‘impressive figures historically’.

Counterintuitively, he begins his history in 1942. Like Eric Hobsbawm’s long 19th century, there is historiographical justification for this unusual time frame. The year was, morally speaking, Germany’s darkest. It began with the Wannsee Conference, which decided the Final Solution to the Jewish question. It ended on the Eastern Front, with the Sixth Army encircled and on the brink of defeat at Stalingrad. Trentmann is particularly strong on post-war German victimhood and the marginalisation of Jewish suffering. In Nuremberg, emblematically, a monument was erected in 1957 to the victims of the city’s bombing. Stones for the memorial were taken from the rubble of the synagogue on Hans-Sachs Square, destroyed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht. ‘The fate of the Jews was literally buried in a monument to German victims.’ The fixation of Germans on their own post-war suffering is the dismal thread running through this book.

Chancellor Adenauer’s policy of Wiedermachtung – making good again – allowed Nazi civil servants to return to office, resulting in many Jews not being able to get justice. A ‘Mrs B’, Trentmann reports, lived for the first four years of her life in forced labour camps before being deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Her father perished in Auschwitz. From the age of 13, understandably, she had panic attacks when she saw anyone in uniform, including a postman; yet in 1974 Hamburg officials turned down her request for trauma compensation on the grounds that ‘someone who cannot remember her childhood in a KZ [concentration camp] cannot possibly have suffered from it’.

Germany is also prone to a disease the British have long imagined themselves world champions of: hypocrisy. Long before Nordstream supplied ‘green’ Germany with fossil fuel from Putin, the country was trading with authoritarian regimes, including Pinochet’s Chile and Galtieri’s Argentina. As in Britain, economic priorities trump moral principles.  

On page 716 of the book, Trentmann asks: ‘What is Germany for?’ Instead of answering, he shows compellingly how Germans themselves struggle with the question. When last year Chancellor Olaf Schulz announced €100 billion to top up the defence budget after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the decision was presented as heralding a new era. Finally Germany was going to stand up to Putin rather than play footsie with him: it had overcome its military queasiness and was going to take an active role in Nato.

The truth, like so many told in Trentmann’s superb book, is more nuanced. Unlike Britain, Germany agonises over doing the right thing, but, like Britain, it is laughably inept at managing public projects. By the end of last year, German troops only had enough bullets for two weeks’ fighting – and the three dozen fighter jets bought from the US won’t be operational until 2028.