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A review by aegagrus
A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany by Monica Black
3.5
A Demon-Haunted Land is exceptionally written, sitting somewhere in between the registers of academic and popular history. Black excels in capturing a moment in time, elegantly weaving together the different epistomologies which characterized the postwar German experience: scientific, folkloric, political, personal. She also shows herself to be very skilled in putting the events and personalities of the postwar moment in the context of their precursors during the Third Reich, sketching out a rich web of unsaid meaning which may not be intuitive to the modern reader. We are left with a captivating and compelling portrait of the many ways in which the guilt, shame, confusion, betrayal, and alienation weighing on the minds of postwar Germans found expression in the miraculous and the diabolic, in controversial healers and destructive rumors and in all manner of supernatural presences.
This project is somewhat inconsistently structured, moving between a broadly chronological structure and a more thematic one. While the narrative is always clear and easy to follow, the lack of a consistent structural pattern tends towards leaving a somewhat impressionistic, big-picture impact on the reader. More significantly, the greatest hindrance to this project is the degree to which it relies on reading meaning into lacunae and elisions; while rigorously-sourced, this is a book about what was not said as much as it is a book about what was said. Black is fully aware of this, instructing us to listen to the "ghosts" of the past. When direct discussion of past atrocities was socially proscribed, these ghosts find other ways to speak to us.
I'm inclined to agree that Black's approach here is a useful one (although she does, from time to time, overreach in presenting certain extrapolations as fact). Unfortunately, when the ghosts are speaking to us this indirectly, their words can only carry us so far. Black spends most of the book laying out the thesis that there exists a deeper historical meaning behind the occultist phenomena she describes, and relatively little time explicating what that deeper meaning is (and what its implications are). To some extent, this would be an impossible task -- postwar Germans responded to their collective emotional state in a vast array of ways. Still, it is somewhat dissatisfying to be thoroughly convinced (for example) that the hubbub around wunderdoktor Bruno Gröning thickly resonates with postwar Germans' preoccupations with guilt and judgement, but be told next to nothing about the specific ways in which the wunderdoktor played a role in their efforts to reconcile those preoccupations.
Though limited in this way, A Demon-Haunted Land remains a very important contribution for laying out so convincingly and luridly a moment in time, and the unspoken meanings on which it was built.
This project is somewhat inconsistently structured, moving between a broadly chronological structure and a more thematic one. While the narrative is always clear and easy to follow, the lack of a consistent structural pattern tends towards leaving a somewhat impressionistic, big-picture impact on the reader. More significantly, the greatest hindrance to this project is the degree to which it relies on reading meaning into lacunae and elisions; while rigorously-sourced, this is a book about what was not said as much as it is a book about what was said. Black is fully aware of this, instructing us to listen to the "ghosts" of the past. When direct discussion of past atrocities was socially proscribed, these ghosts find other ways to speak to us.
I'm inclined to agree that Black's approach here is a useful one (although she does, from time to time, overreach in presenting certain extrapolations as fact). Unfortunately, when the ghosts are speaking to us this indirectly, their words can only carry us so far. Black spends most of the book laying out the thesis that there exists a deeper historical meaning behind the occultist phenomena she describes, and relatively little time explicating what that deeper meaning is (and what its implications are). To some extent, this would be an impossible task -- postwar Germans responded to their collective emotional state in a vast array of ways. Still, it is somewhat dissatisfying to be thoroughly convinced (for example) that the hubbub around wunderdoktor Bruno Gröning thickly resonates with postwar Germans' preoccupations with guilt and judgement, but be told next to nothing about the specific ways in which the wunderdoktor played a role in their efforts to reconcile those preoccupations.
Though limited in this way, A Demon-Haunted Land remains a very important contribution for laying out so convincingly and luridly a moment in time, and the unspoken meanings on which it was built.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Child death, Death, Genocide, Sexual assault, Suicide, Xenophobia, Antisemitism, and Medical content