A counterhistory of postwar Germany, not as a reborn democracy but as a nation convulsed by apocalyptic visions, witchcraft trials, and supernatural obsessions.
... riveting ... All these cases were studied by doctors at the time they occurred, but Black perceptively points out that none of them ever publicly faced up to the heart of the matter.
A Demon-Haunted Land is absorbing, gripping, and utterly fascinating. It kept me enthralled right up to the end. Black certainly knows how to tell a good story. Beautifully written, without even a hint of jargon or pretension, it casts a significant and unexpected new light on the early phase of the Federal Republic of Germany’s history. Black’s analysis of the copious, largely unknown archival sources on which the book is based is unfailingly subtle and intelligent. Nevertheless, in the end, I found myself less than fully convinced by its arguments. In the first place, the very large conclusions she reaches are drawn from two—just two—cases, one of which was confined to parts of western and southern Germany, the other to a single village in the north ... The Gröning case alone takes up well over half the book. If you want to argue that Germans, as a whole, responded to the calamity of defeat and the collapse of their mental and moral world in 1945 by turning to the irrational, you surely need more than this ... Secondly, if the overall argument was to be sustained, the book surely needed a stronger comparative dimension ... How extraordinary her two main subjects were remains open to some doubt, therefore. And Black is tilting at windmills when she claims that her book overturns an orthodoxy that sees postwar Germany entirely in terms of rational reconstruction and hard work [.]
